The life and opinions of Tristram Shandy, gentleman
_Zeno, Cleanthes, Diogenes Babylonius, Dionysius, Heracleotes,
Antipater, Panætius_, and _Possidonius_ amongst the _Greeks_;——_Cato_
and _Varro_ and _Seneca_ amongst the _Romans_;——_Pantenus_ and _Clemens
Alexandrinus_ and _Montaigne_ amongst the Christians; and a score and a
half of good, honest, unthinking _Shandean_ people as ever lived, whose
names I can’t recollect,—all pretended that their jerkins were made
after this fashion,—you might have rumpled and crumpled, and doubled
and creased, and fretted and fridged the outside of them all to
pieces;——in short, you might have played the very devil with them, and
at the same time, not one of the insides of them would have been one
button the worse, for all you had done to them.
I believe in my conscience that mine is made up somewhat after this
sort:——for never poor jerkin has been tickled off at such a rate as it
has been these last nine months together,——and yet I declare, the
lining to it,——as far as I am a judge of the matter,——is not a
three-penny piece the worse;—pell-mell, helter-skelter, ding-dong, cut
and thrust, back stroke and fore stroke, side way and long-way, have
they been trimming it for me:—had there been the least gumminess in my
lining,—by heaven! it had all of it long ago been frayed and fretted to
a thread.
——You Messrs. the Monthly Reviewers!——how could you cut and slash my
jerkin as you did?——how did you know but you would cut my lining too?
Heartily and from my soul, to the protection of that Being who will
injure none of us, do I recommend you and your affairs,—so God bless
you;—only next month, if any one of you should gnash his teeth, and
storm and rage at me, as some of you did last MAY (in which I remember
the weather was very hot)—don’t be exasperated, if I pass it by again
with good temper,—being determined as long as I live or write) which in
my case means the same thing) never to give the honest gentleman a
worse word or a worse wish than my uncle _Toby_ gave the fly which
buzz’d about his nose all _dinner-time_,——“Go,—go, poor devil,” quoth
he,—“get thee gone,—why should I hurt thee! This world is surely wide
enough to hold both thee and me.”
C H A P. XLIX
ANY man, Madam, reasoning upwards, and observing the prodigious
suffusion of blood in my father’s countenance,—by means of which (as
all the blood in his body seemed to rush into his face, as I told you)
he must have reddened, pictorically and scientifically speaking, six
whole tints and a half, if not a full octave above his natural
colour:—any man, Madam, but my uncle _Toby_, who had observed this,
together with the violent knitting of my father’s brows, and the
extravagant contortion of his body during the whole affair,—would have
concluded my father in a rage; and taking that for granted,—had he been
a lover of such kind of concord as arises from two such instruments
being put in exact tune,—he would instantly have skrew’d up his, to the
same pitch;—and then the devil and all had broke loose—the whole piece,
Madam, must have been played off like the sixth of Avison
Scarlatti—_con furia_,—like mad.—Grant me patience!——What has _con
furia_,——_con strepito_,——or any other hurly burly whatever to do with
harmony?
Any man, I say, Madam, but my uncle _Toby_, the benignity of whose
heart interpreted every motion of the body in the kindest sense the
motion would admit of, would have concluded my father angry, and blamed
him too. My uncle _Toby_ blamed nothing but the taylor who cut the
pocket-hole;——so sitting still till my father had got his handkerchief
out of it, and looking all the time up in his face with inexpressible
good-will——my father, at length, went on as follows.
C H A P. L
“WHAT prodigious armies you had in _Flanders!_”
——Brother _Toby_, quoth my father, I do believe thee to be as honest a
man, and with as good and as upright a heart as ever God created;—nor
is it thy fault, if all the children which have been, may, can, shall,
will, or ought to be begotten, come with their heads foremost into the
world:——but believe me, dear _Toby_, the accidents which unavoidably
way-lay them, not only in the article of our begetting ’em——though
these, in my opinion, are well worth considering,——but the dangers and
difficulties our children are beset with, after they are got forth into
the world, are enow—little need is there to expose them to unnecessary
ones in their passage to it.——Are these dangers, quoth my uncle _Toby_,
laying his hand upon my father’s knee, and looking up seriously in his
face for an answer,——are these dangers greater now o’days, brother,
than in times past? Brother _Toby_, answered my father, if a child was
but fairly begot, and born alive, and healthy, and the mother did well
after it,—our forefathers never looked farther.——My uncle _Toby_
instantly withdrew his hand from off my father’s knee, reclined his
body gently back in his chair, raised his head till he could just see
the cornice of the room, and then directing the buccinatory muscles
along his cheeks, and the orbicular muscles around his lips to do their
duty—he whistled _Lillabullero._
C H A P. LI
WHILST my uncle _Toby_ was whistling _Lillabullero_ to my father,—Dr.
_Slop_ was stamping, and cursing and damning at _Obadiah_ at a most
dreadful rate,——it would have done your heart good, and cured you, Sir,
for ever of the vile sin of swearing, to have heard him, I am
determined therefore to relate the whole affair to you.
When Dr. _Slop_’s maid delivered the green baize bag with her master’s
instruments in it, to _Obadiah_, she very sensibly exhorted him to put
his head and one arm through the strings, and ride with it slung across
his body: so undoing the bow-knot, to lengthen the strings for him,
without any more ado, she helped him on with it. However, as this, in
some measure, unguarded the mouth of the bag, lest any thing should
bolt out in galloping back, at the speed _Obadiah_ threatened, they
consulted to take it off again: and in the great care and caution of
their hearts, they had taken the two strings and tied them close
(pursing up the mouth of the bag first) with half a dozen hard knots,
each of which _Obadiah_, to make all safe, had twitched and drawn
together with all the strength of his body.
This answered all that _Obadiah_ and the maid intended; but was no
remedy against some evils which neither he or she foresaw. The
instruments, it seems, as tight as the bag was tied above, had so much
room to play in it, towards the bottom (the shape of the bag being
conical) that _Obadiah_ could not make a trot of it, but with such a
terrible jingle, what with the _tire téte, forceps_, and _squirt_, as
would have been enough, had _Hymen_ been taking a jaunt that way, to
have frightened him out of the country; but when _Obadiah_ accelerated
his motion, and from a plain trot assayed to prick his coach-horse into
a full gallop——by Heaven! Sir, the jingle was incredible.
As _Obadiah_ had a wife and three children——the turpitude of
fornication, and the many other political ill consequences of this
jingling, never once entered his brain,——he had however his objection,
which came home to himself, and weighed with him, as it has oft-times
done with the greatest patriots.——“_The poor fellow, Sir, was not able
to hear himself whistle._”
C H A P. LII
AS _Obadiah_ loved wind-music preferably to all the instrumental music
he carried with him,—he very considerately set his imagination to work,
to contrive and to invent by what means he should put himself in a
condition of enjoying it.
In all distresses (except musical) where small cords are wanted,
nothing is so apt to enter a man’s head as his hat-band:——the
philosophy of this is so near the surface——I scorn to enter into it.
As _Obadiah_’s was a mixed case——mark, Sirs,——I say, a mixed case; for
it was obstetrical,——_scrip_-tical, squirtical, papistical——and as far
as the coach-horse was concerned in it,——caballistical——and only partly
musical;—_Obadiah_ made no scruple of availing himself of the first
expedient which offered; so taking hold of the bag and instruments, and
griping them hard together with one hand, and with the finger and thumb
of the other putting the end of the hat-band betwixt his teeth, and
then slipping his hand down to the middle of it,—he tied and cross-tied
them all fast together from one end to the other (as you would cord a
trunk) with such a multiplicity of round-abouts and intricate cross
turns, with a hard knot at every intersection or point where the
strings met,—that Dr. _Slop_ must have had three fifths of _Job_’s
patience at least to have unloosed them.—I think in my conscience, that
had NATURE been in one of her nimble moods, and in humour for such a
contest——and she and Dr. _Slop_ both fairly started together——there is
no man living which had seen the bag with all that _Obadiah_ had done
to it,——and known likewise the great speed the Goddess can make when
she thinks proper, who would have had the least doubt remaining in his
mind—which of the two would have carried off the prize. My mother,
Madam, had been delivered sooner than the green bag infallibly——at
least by twenty _knots._——Sport of small accidents, _Tristram Shandy!_
that thou art, and ever will be! had that trial been for thee, and it
was fifty to one but it had,——thy affairs had not been so depress’d—(at
least by the depression of thy nose) as they have been; nor had the
fortunes of thy house and the occasions of making them, which have so
often presented themselves in the course of thy life, to thee, been so
often, so vexatiously, so tamely, so irrecoverably abandoned—as thou
hast been forced to leave them;——but ’tis over,——all but the account of
’em, which cannot be given to the curious till I am got out into the
world.
END OF THE FIRST VOLUME
Tristram Shandy
_Tristram Shandy_
THE
LIFE AND OPINIONS
OF
TRISTRAM SHANDY,
GENTLEMAN
Volume the Second
Multitudinis imperitæ non formido judicia, meis tamen, rogo, parcant
opusculis——in quibus fuit propositi semper, a jocis ad seria, in seriis
vicissim ad jocos transire.
JOAN. SARESBERIENSIS,
_Episcopus Lugdun._
C H A P. I
GREAT wits jump: for the moment Dr. _Slop_ cast his eyes upon his bag
(which he had not done till the dispute with my uncle _Toby_ about
mid-wifery put him in mind of it)—the very same thought occurred.—’Tis
God’s mercy, quoth he (to himself) that Mrs. _Shandy_ has had so bad a
time of it,——else she might have been brought to bed seven times told,
before one half of these knots could have got untied.——But here you
must distinguish—the thought floated only in Dr. _Slop_’s mind, without
sail or ballast to it, as a simple proposition; millions of which, as
your worship knows, are every day swimming quietly in the middle of the
thin juice of a man’s understanding, without being carried backwards or
forwards, till some little gusts of passion or interest drive them to
one side.
A sudden trampling in the room above, near my mother’s bed, did the
proposition the very service I am speaking of. By all that’s
unfortunate, quoth Dr. _Slop_, unless I make haste, the thing will
actually befall me as it is.
C H A P. II
IN the case of _knots_,—by which, in the first place, I would not be
understood to mean slip-knots—because in the course of my life and
opinions—my opinions concerning them will come in more properly when I
mention the catastrophe of my great uncle Mr. _Hammond Shandy_,—a
little man,—but of high fancy:—he rushed into the duke of _Monmouth_’s
affair:——nor, secondly, in this place, do I mean that particular
species of knots called bow-knots;—there is so little address, or
skill, or patience required in the unloosing them, that they are below