The life and opinions of Tristram Shandy, gentleman

it has received.—Call down _Dolly_ your chamber-maid, and I will give you my cap and bell along with it, if I make not this matter so plain that _Dolly_ herself should understand it as well as _Malbranch._——When _Dolly_ has indited her epistle to _Robin_, and has thrust her arm into the bottom of her pocket hanging by her right side;—take that opportunity to recollect that the organs and faculties of perception can, by nothing in this world, be so aptly typified and explained as by that one thing which _Dolly_’s hand is in search of.—Your organs are not so dull that I should inform you—’tis an inch, Sir, of red seal-wax. When this is melted and dropped upon the letter, if _Dolly_ fumbles too long for her thimble, till the wax is over hardened, it will not receive the mark of her thimble from the usual impulse which was wont to imprint it. Very well. If _Dolly_’s wax, for want of better, is bees-wax, or of a temper too soft,—tho’ it may receive,—it will not hold the impression, how hard soever _Dolly_ thrusts against it; and last of all, supposing the wax good, and eke the thimble, but applied thereto in careless haste, as her Mistress rings the bell;——in any one of these three cases the print left by the thimble will be as unlike the prototype as a brass-jack. Now you must understand that not one of these was the true cause of the confusion in my uncle _Toby_’s discourse; and it is for that very reason I enlarge upon them so long, after the manner of great physiologists—to shew the world, what it did _not_ arise from. What it did arise from, I have hinted above, and a fertile source of obscurity it is,—and ever will be,—and that is the unsteady uses of words, which have perplexed the clearest and most exalted understandings. It is ten to one (at _Arthur_’s) whether you have ever read the literary histories of past ages;—if you have, what terrible battles, ’yclept logomachies, have they occasioned and perpetuated with so much gall and ink-shed,—that a good-natured man cannot read the accounts of them without tears in his eyes. Gentle critick! when thou hast weighed all this, and considered within thyself how much of thy own knowledge, discourse, and conversation has been pestered and disordered, at one time or other, by this, and this only:—What a pudder and racket in COUNCILS about χδια and υωοςασις; and in the SCHOOLS of the learned about power and about spirit;—about essences, and about quintessences;——about substances, and about space.——What confusion in greater THEATRES from words of little meaning, and as indeterminate a sense! when thou considerest this, thou wilt not wonder at my uncle _Toby_’s perplexities,—thou wilt drop a tear of pity upon his scarp and his counterscarp;—his glacis and his covered way;—his ravelin and his half- moon: ’Twas not by ideas,—by Heaven; his life was put in jeopardy by words. C H A P. XXVIII WHEN my uncle _Toby_ got his map of _Namur_ to his mind, he began immediately to apply himself, and with the utmost diligence, to the study of it; for nothing being of more importance to him than his recovery, and his recovery depending, as you have read, upon the passions and affections of his mind, it behoved him to take the nicest care to make himself so far master of his subject, as to be able to talk upon it without emotion. In a fortnight’s close and painful application, which, by the bye, did my uncle _Toby_’s wound, upon his groin, no good,—he was enabled, by the help of some marginal documents at the feet of the elephant, together with _Gobesius_’s military architecture and pyroballogy, translated from the _Flemish_, to form his discourse with passable perspicuity; and before he was two full months gone,—he was right eloquent upon it, and could make not only the attack of the advanced counterscarp with great order;—but having, by that time, gone much deeper into the art, than what his first motive made necessary, my uncle _Toby_ was able to cross the _Maes_ and _Sambre_; make diversions as far as _Vauban_’s line, the abbey of _Salsines_, &c. and give his visitors as distinct a history of each of their attacks, as of that of the gate of _St. Nicolas_, where he had the honour to receive his wound. But desire of knowledge, like the thirst of riches, increases ever with the acquisition of it. The more my uncle _Toby_ pored over his map, the more he took a liking to it!—by the same process and electrical assimilation, as I told you, through which I ween the souls of connoisseurs themselves, by long friction and incumbition, have the happiness, at length, to get all be-virtu’d—be-pictured,—be-butterflied, and be-fiddled. The more my uncle _Toby_ drank of this sweet fountain of science, the greater was the heat and impatience of his thirst, so that before the first year of his confinement had well gone round, there was scarce a fortified town in _Italy_ or _Flanders_, of which, by one means or other, he had not procured a plan, reading over as he got them, and carefully collating therewith the histories of their sieges, their demolitions, their improvements, and new works, all which he would read with that intense application and delight, that he would forget himself, his wound, his confinement, his dinner. In the second year my uncle _Toby_ purchased _Ramelli_ and _Cataneo_, translated from the _Italian_;—likewise _Stevinus, Moralis_, the Chevalier _de Ville, Lorini, Cochorn, Sheeter_, the Count _de Pagan_, the Marshal _Vauban_, Mons. _Blondel_, with almost as many more books of military architecture, as Don _Quixote_ was found to have of chivalry, when the curate and barber invaded his library. Towards the beginning of the third year, which was in _August_, ninety-nine, my uncle _Toby_ found it necessary to understand a little of projectiles:—and having judged it best to draw his knowledge from the fountain-head, he began with _N. Tartaglia_, who it seems was the first man who detected the imposition of a cannon-ball’s doing all that mischief under the notion of a right line—This _N. Tartaglia_ proved to my uncle _Toby_ to be an impossible thing. ——Endless is the search of Truth. No sooner was my uncle _Toby_ satisfied which road the cannon-ball did not go, but he was insensibly led on, and resolved in his mind to enquire and find out which road the ball did go: For which purpose he was obliged to set off afresh with old _Maltus_, and studied him devoutly.—He proceeded next to _Galileo_ and _Torricellius_, wherein, by certain Geometrical rules, infallibly laid down, he found the precise path to be a PARABOLA—or else an HYPERBOLA,—and that the parameter, or _latus rectum_, of the conic section of the said path, was to the quantity and amplitude in a direct _ratio_, as the whole line to the sine of double the angle of incidence, formed by the breech upon an horizontal plane;—and that the semiparameter,——stop! my dear uncle _Toby_——stop!—go not one foot farther into this thorny and bewildered track,—intricate are the steps! intricate are the mazes of this labyrinth! intricate are the troubles which the pursuit of this bewitching phantom KNOWLEDGE will bring upon thee.—O my uncle;—fly—fly,—fly from it as from a serpent.——Is it fit——goodnatured man! thou should’st sit up, with the wound upon thy groin, whole nights baking thy blood with hectic watchings?——Alas! ’twill exasperate thy symptoms,—check thy perspirations—evaporate thy spirits—waste thy animal strength, dry up thy radical moisture, bring thee into a costive habit of body,——impair thy health,——and hasten all the infirmities of thy old age.—O my uncle! my uncle _Toby._ C H A P. XXIX I WOULD not give a groat for that man’s knowledge in pen-craft, who does not understand this,——That the best plain narrative in the world, tacked very close to the last spirited apostrophe to my uncle _Toby_——would have felt both cold and vapid upon the reader’s palate;—therefore I forthwith put an end to the chapter, though I was in the middle of my story. ——Writers of my stamp have one principle in common with painters. Where an exact copying makes our pictures less striking, we choose the less evil; deeming it even more pardonable to trespass against truth, than beauty. This is to be understood _cum grano salis_; but be it as it will,—as the parallel is made more for the sake of letting the apostrophe cool, than any thing else,—’tis not very material whether upon any other score the reader approves of it or not. In the latter end of the third year, my uncle _Toby_ perceiving that the parameter and semi-parameter of the conic section angered his wound, he left off the study of projectiles in a kind of a huff, and betook himself to the practical part of fortification only; the pleasure of which, like a spring held back, returned upon him with redoubled force. It was in this year that my uncle began to break in upon the daily regularity of a clean shirt,——to dismiss his barber unshaven,——and to allow his surgeon scarce time sufficient to dress his wound, concerning himself so little about it, as not to ask him once in seven times dressing, how it went on: when, lo!—all of a sudden, for the change was quick as lightning, he began to sigh heavily for his recovery,——complained to my father, grew impatient with the surgeon:——and one morning, as he heard his foot coming up stairs, he shut up his books, and thrust aside his instruments, in order to expostulate with him upon the protraction of the cure, which, he told him, might surely have been accomplished at least by that time:—He dwelt long upon the miseries he had undergone, and the sorrows of his four years melancholy imprisonment;——adding, that had it not been for the kind looks and fraternal chearings of the best of brothers,—he had long since sunk under his misfortunes.——My father was by. My uncle _Toby_’s eloquence brought tears into his eyes;——’twas unexpected:——My uncle _Toby_, by nature was not eloquent;—it had the greater effect:——The surgeon was confounded;——not that there wanted grounds for such, or greater marks of impatience,—but ’twas unexpected too; in the four years he had attended him, he had never seen any thing like it in my uncle _Toby_’s carriage; he had never once dropped one fretful or discontented word;——he had been all patience,—all submission. —We lose the right of complaining sometimes by forbearing it;—but we often treble the force:—The surgeon was astonished; but much more so, when he heard my uncle Toby go on, and peremptorily insist upon his healing up the wound directly,—or sending for Monsieur _Ronjat_, the king’s serjeant-surgeon, to do it for him. The desire of life and health is implanted in man’s nature;——the love of liberty and enlargement is a sister-passion to it: These my uncle _Toby_ had in common with his species—and either of them had been sufficient to account for his earnest desire to get well and out of doors;——but I have told you before, that nothing wrought with our family after the common way;——and from the time and manner in which this eager desire shewed itself in the present case, the penetrating reader will suspect there was some other cause or crotchet for it in my uncle _Toby_’s head:——There was so, and ’tis the subject of the next chapter to set forth what that cause and crotchet was. I own, when that’s done, ’twill be time to return back to the parlour fire-side, where we left my uncle _Toby_ in the middle of his sentence. C H A P. XXX WHEN a man gives himself up to the government of a ruling passion,—or, in other words, when his HOBBY-HORSE grows headstrong,——farewell cool reason and fair discretion! My uncle _Toby_’s wound was near well, and as soon as the surgeon recovered his surprize, and could get leave to say as much——he told