The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman Laurence Sterne (short novels to read .txt) 📖

out of her for his own riding: he was sanguine in all his projects; so talked about his pad every day with as absolute a security, as if it had been reared, broke,⁠—and bridled and saddled at his door ready for mounting. By some neglect or other in Obadiah, it so fell out, that my father’s expectations were answered with nothing better than a mule, and as ugly a beast of the kind as ever was produced.

My mother and my uncle Toby expected my father would be the death of Obadiah⁠—and that there never would be an end of the disaster.⁠⸺⁠See here! you rascal, cried my father, pointing to the mule, what you have done!⁠⸺⁠It was not me, said Obadiah.⁠⸺⁠How do I know that? replied my father.

Triumph swam in my father’s eyes, at the repartee⁠—the Attic salt brought water into them⁠—and so Obadiah heard no more about it.

Now let us go back to my brother’s death.

Philosophy has a fine saying for everything.⁠—For Death it has an entire set; the misery was, they all at once rushed into my father’s head, that ’twas difficult to string them together, so as to make anything of a consistent show out of them.⁠—He took them as they came.

“ ’Tis an inevitable chance⁠—the first statute in Magna Charta⁠—it is an everlasting act of parliament, my dear brother,⁠⸺⁠All must die.

“If my son could not have died, it had been matter of wonder,⁠—not that he is dead.

“Monarchs and princes dance in the same ring with us.

“⁠—To die, is the great debt and tribute due unto nature: tombs and monuments, which should perpetuate our memories, pay it themselves; and the proudest pyramid of them all, which wealth and science have erected, has lost its apex, and stands obtruncated in the traveller’s horizon.” (My father found he got great ease, and went on)⁠—“Kingdoms and provinces, and towns and cities, have they not their periods? and when those principles and powers, which at first cemented and put them together, have performed their several evolutions, they fall back.”⁠—Brother Shandy, said my uncle Toby, laying down his pipe at the word evolutions⁠—Revolutions, I meant, quoth my father,⁠—by heaven! I meant revolutions, brother Toby⁠—evolutions is nonsense.⁠⸺’Tis not nonsense,⁠—said my uncle Toby.⁠⸺⁠But is it not nonsense to break the thread of such a discourse upon such an occasion? cried my father⁠—do not⁠—dear Toby, continued he, taking him by the hand, do not⁠—do not, I beseech thee, interrupt me at this crisis.⁠⸺⁠My uncle Toby put his pipe into his mouth.

“Where is Troy and Mycenæ, and Thebes and Delos, and Persepolis and Agrigentum?”⁠—continued my father, taking up his book of postcards, which he had laid down.⁠—“What is become, brother Toby, of Nineveh and Babylon, of Cizicum and Mitylenæ? The fairest towns that ever the sun rose upon, are now no more; the names only are left, and those (for many of them are wrong spelt) are falling themselves by piece-meals to decay, and in length of time will be forgotten, and involved with everything in a perpetual night: the world itself, brother Toby, must⁠—must come to an end.

“Returning out of Asia, when I sailed from Ægina towards Megara,” (when can this have been? thought my uncle Toby) “I began to view the country round about. Ægina was behind me, Megara was before, Pyræus on the right hand, Corinth on the left.⁠—What flourishing towns now prostrate upon the earth! Alas! alas! said I to myself, that man should disturb his soul for the loss of a child, when so much as this lies awfully buried in his presence⁠⸺⁠Remember, said I to myself again⁠—remember thou art a man.”⁠—

Now my uncle Toby knew not that this last paragraph was an extract of Servius Sulpicius’s consolatory letter to Tully.⁠—He had as little skill, honest man, in the fragments, as he had in the whole pieces of antiquity.⁠—And as my father, whilst he was concerned in the Turkey trade, had been three or four different times in the Levant, in one of which he had stayed a whole year and an half at Zant, my uncle Toby naturally concluded, that, in some one of these periods, he had taken a trip across the Archipelago into Asia; and that all this sailing affair with Ægina behind, and Megara before, and Pyræus on the right hand, etc., etc., was nothing more than the true course of my father’s voyage and reflections.⁠—’Twas certainly in his manner, and many an undertaking critic would have built two stories higher upon worse foundations.⁠—And pray, brother, quoth my uncle Toby, laying the end of his pipe upon my father’s hand in a kindly way of interruption⁠—but waiting till he finished the account⁠—what year of our Lord was this?⁠—’Twas no year of our Lord, replied my father.⁠—That’s impossible, cried my uncle Toby.⁠—Simpleton! said my father,⁠—’twas forty years before Christ was born.

My uncle Toby had but two things for it; either to suppose his brother to be the wandering Jew, or that his misfortunes had disordered his brain.⁠—“May the Lord God of heaven and earth protect him and restore him,” said my uncle Toby, praying silently for my father, and with tears in his eyes.

—My father placed the tears to a proper account, and went on with his harangue with great spirit.

“There is not such great odds, brother Toby, betwixt good and evil, as the world imagines”⁠⸺(this way of setting off, by the by, was not likely to cure my uncle Toby’s suspicions.)⁠⸺“Labour, sorrow, grief, sickness, want, and woe, are the sauces of life.”⁠—Much good may it do them⁠—said my uncle Toby to himself.⁠⸻

“My son is dead!⁠—so much the better;⁠—’tis a shame in such a tempest to have but one anchor.”

“But he is gone forever from us!⁠—be it so. He is got from under the hands of his barber before he was bald⁠—he is but risen from a feast before he was surfeited⁠—from a banquet before he had got drunken.”

“The Thracians wept when a child was born”⁠—(and we were very near it, quoth my uncle Toby)⁠—“and feasted and made merry when a man went out of the world;