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

a platoon.⁠—There never was a better officer in the king’s army,⁠—or a better man in God’s world; for he would march up to the mouth of a cannon, though he saw the lighted match at the very touch-hole,⁠—and yet, for all that, he has a heart as soft as a child for other people.⁠⸺⁠He would not hurt a chicken.⁠⸺⁠I would sooner, quoth Jonathan, drive such a gentleman for seven pounds a year⁠—than some for eight.⁠—Thank thee, Jonathan! for thy twenty shillings,⁠—as much, Jonathan, said the corporal, shaking him by the hand, as if thou hadst put the money into my own pocket.⁠⸺⁠I would serve him to the day of my death out of love. He is a friend and a brother to me,⁠—and could I be sure my poor brother Tom was dead,⁠—continued the corporal, taking out his handkerchief,⁠—was I worth ten thousand pounds, I would leave every shilling of it to the captain.⁠⸺⁠Trim could not refrain from tears at this testamentary proof he gave of his affection to his master.⁠⸺⁠The whole kitchen was affected.⁠—Do tell us the story of the poor lieutenant, said Susannah.⁠⸺⁠With all my heart, answered the corporal.

Susannah, the cook, Jonathan, Obadiah, and corporal Trim, formed a circle about the fire; and as soon as the scullion had shut the kitchen door,⁠—the corporal begun.

XI

I am a Turk if I had not as much forgot my mother, as if Nature had plaistered me up, and set me down naked upon the banks of the river Nile, without one.⁠⸺⁠Your most obedient servant, Madam⁠—I’ve cost you a great deal of trouble,⁠—I wish it may answer;⁠—but you have left a crack in my back,⁠—and here’s a great piece fallen off here before,⁠—and what must I do with this foot?⁠⸺⁠I shall never reach England with it.

For my own part, I never wonder at anything;⁠—and so often has my judgment deceived me in my life, that I always suspect it, right or wrong,⁠—at least I am seldom hot upon cold subjects. For all this, I reverence truth as much as anybody; and when it has slipped us, if a man will but take me by the hand, and go quietly and search for it, as for a thing we have both lost, and can neither of us do well without,⁠—I’ll go to the world’s end with him:⁠⸺⁠But I hate disputes,⁠—and therefore (bating religious points, or such as touch society) I would almost subscribe to anything which does not choak me in the first passage, rather than be drawn into one.⁠⸺⁠But I cannot bear suffocation,⁠⸺⁠and bad smells worst of all.⁠⸺⁠For which reasons, I resolved from the beginning, That if ever the army of martyrs was to be augmented,⁠—or a new one raised,⁠—I would have no hand in it, one way or t’other.

XII

⸺⁠But to return to my mother.

My uncle Toby’s opinion, Madam, “that there could be no harm in Cornelius Gallus, the Roman prætor’s lying with his wife;”⁠⸺⁠or rather the last word of that opinion,⁠—(for it was all my mother heard of it) caught hold of her by the weak part of the whole sex:⁠⸺⁠You shall not mistake me,⁠—I mean her curiosity,⁠—she instantly concluded herself the subject of the conversation, and with that prepossession upon her fancy, you will readily conceive every word my father said, was accommodated either to herself, or her family concerns.

⸺⁠Pray, Madam, in what street does the lady live, who would not have done the same?

From the strange mode of Cornelius’s death, my father had made a transition to that of Socrates, and was giving my uncle Toby an abstract of his pleading before his judges;⁠⸺’twas irresistible:⁠⸺⁠not the oration of Socrates,⁠—but my father’s temptation to it.⁠⸺⁠He had wrote the Life of Socrates21 himself the year before he left off trade, which, I fear, was the means of hastening him out of it;⁠⸺⁠so that no one was able to set out with so full a sail, and in so swelling a tide of heroic loftiness upon the occasion, as my father was. Not a period in Socrates’s oration, which closed with a shorter word than transmigration, or annihilation,⁠—or a worse thought in the middle of it than to be⁠—or not to be,⁠—the entering upon a new and untried state of things,⁠—or, upon a long, a profound and peaceful sleep, without dreams, without disturbance?⁠⸺⁠That we and our children were born to die,⁠—but neither of us born to be slaves.⁠⸺⁠No⁠—there I mistake; that was part of Eleazer’s oration, as recorded by Josephus (de Bell. Judaic.)⁠⸺⁠Eleazer owns he had it from the philosophers of India; in all likelihood Alexander the Great, in his irruption into India, after he had overrun Persia, amongst the many things he stole,⁠—stole that sentiment also; by which means it was carried, if not all the way by himself (for we all know he died at Babylon), at least by some of his maroders, into Greece,⁠—from Greece it got to Rome,⁠—from Rome to France,⁠—and from France to England:⁠⸺⁠So things come round.⁠⸺⁠

By land carriage, I can conceive no other way.⁠⸺⁠

By water the sentiment might easily have come down the Ganges into the Sinus Gangeticus, or Bay of Bengal, and so into the Indian Sea; and following the course of trade (the way from India by the Cape of Good Hope being then unknown), might be carried with other drugs and spices up the Red Sea to Joddah, the port of Mekka, or else to Tor or Sues, towns at the bottom of the gulf; and from thence by karrawans to Coptos, but three days’ journey distant, so down the Nile directly to Alexandria, where the sentiment would be landed at the very foot of the great staircase of the Alexandrian library,⁠⸺⁠and from that storehouse it would be fetched.⁠⸻Bless me! what a trade was driven by the learned in those days!

XIII

⸺⁠Now my father had a way, a little like that of Job’s (in case there ever was such a man⁠⸺⁠if not, there’s an end of the matter.⁠⸺⁠

Though, by the by, because your learned men find some difficulty in fixing the precise æra