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

had better stop:⁠⸺⁠She has a little of the devote: but that, sir, is a terce to a nine in your favour⁠⸻

—L⁠—help me! I could not count a single point: so had been piqued and repiqued, and capotted to the devil.

X

All which being considered, and that Death moreover might be much nearer me than I imagined⁠⸺⁠I wish I was at Abbeville, quoth I, were it only to see how they card and spin⁠⸺⁠so off we set.

de Montreuil à Nampont29 poste et demi de Nampont à Bernay poste de Bernay à Nouvion poste de Nouvion à Abbeville poste

⸺⁠but the carders and spinners were all gone to bed.

XI

What a vast advantage is travelling! only it heats one; but there is a remedy for that, which you may pick out of the next chapter.

XII

Was I in a condition to stipulate with Death, as I am this moment with my apothecary, how and where I will take his clyster⁠⸺⁠I should certainly declare against submitting to it before my friends; and therefore I never seriously think upon the mode and manner of this great catastrophe, which generally takes up and torments my thoughts as much as the catastrophe itself; but I constantly draw the curtain across it with this wish, that the Disposer of all things may so order it, that it happen not to me in my own house⁠⸺⁠but rather in some decent inn⁠⸺⁠at home, I know it,⁠⸺⁠the concern of my friends, and the last services of wiping my brows, and smoothing my pillow, which the quivering hand of pale affection shall pay me, will so crucify my soul; that I shall die of a distemper which my physician is not aware of: but in an inn, the few cold offices I wanted, would be purchased with a few guineas, and paid me with an undisturbed, but punctual attention⁠⸺⁠but mark. This inn should not be the inn at Abbeville⁠⸺⁠if there was not another inn in the universe, I would strike that inn out of the capitulation: so

Let the horses be in the chaise exactly by four in the morning⁠⸺⁠Yes, by four, Sir,⁠⸺⁠or by Genevieve! I’ll raise a clatter in the house shall wake the dead.

XIII

“Make them like unto a wheel,” is a bitter sarcasm, as all the learned know, against the grand tour, and that restless spirit for making it, which David prophetically foresaw would haunt the children of men in the latter days; and therefore, as thinketh the great bishop Hall, ’tis one of the severest imprecations which David ever utter’d against the enemies of the Lord⁠—and, as if he had said, “I wish them no worse luck than always to be rolling about”⁠—So much motion, continues he (for he was very corpulent)⁠—is so much unquietness; and so much of rest, by the same analogy, is so much of heaven.

Now, I (being very thin) think differently; and that so much of motion, is so much of life, and so much of joy⁠⸺⁠and that to stand still, or get on but slowly, is death and the devil⁠⸺⁠

Hollo! Ho!⁠⸺⁠the whole world’s asleep!⁠⸺⁠bring out the horses⁠⸺⁠grease the wheels⁠—tie on the mail⁠⸺⁠and drive a nail into that moulding⁠⸺⁠I’ll not lose a moment⁠⸺⁠

Now the wheel we are talking of, and whereinto (but not whereunto, for that would make an Ixion’s wheel of it) he curseth his enemies, according to the bishop’s habit of body, should certainly be a post-chaise wheel, whether they were set up in Palestine at that time or not⁠⸺⁠and my wheel, for the contrary reasons, must as certainly be a cartwheel groaning round its revolution once in an age; and of which sort, were I to turn commentator, I should make no scruple to affirm, they had great store in that hilly country.

I love the Pythagoreans (much more than ever I dare tell my dear Jenny) for their “χωρισμὸν ἀπὸ τοῦ Σώματος, εἰς τὸ καλῶς φιλοσοφεῖν”⁠⸺[their] “getting out of the body, in order to think well.” No man thinks right, whilst he is in it; blinded as he must be, with his congenial humours, and drawn differently aside, as the bishop and myself have been, with too lax or too tense a fibre⁠⸺⁠Reason is, half of it, Sense; and the measure of heaven itself is but the measure of our present appetites and concoctions⁠⸺⁠

⸺⁠But which of the two, in the present case, do you think to be mostly in the wrong?

You, certainly: quoth she, to disturb a whole family so early.

XIV

⸺⁠But she did not know I was under a vow not to shave my beard till I got to Paris;⁠⸺⁠yet I hate to make mysteries of nothing;⁠⸺’tis the cold cautiousness of one of those little souls from which Lessius (lib. 13, de moribus divinis, cap. 24) hath made his estimate, wherein he setteth forth, That one Dutch mile, cubically multiplied, will allow room enough, and to spare, for eight hundred thousand millions, which he supposes to be as great a number of souls (counting from the fall of Adam) as can possibly be damn’d to the end of the world.

From what he has made this second estimate⁠⸺⁠unless from the parental goodness of God⁠—I don’t know⁠—I am much more at a loss what could be in Franciscus Ribbera’s head, who pretends that no less a space than one of two hundred Italian miles multiplied into itself, will be sufficient to hold the like number⁠⸺⁠he certainly must have gone upon some of the old Roman souls, of which he had read, without reflecting how much, by a gradual and most tabid decline, in the course of eighteen hundred years, they must unavoidably have shrunk so as to have come, when he wrote, almost to nothing.

In Lessius’s time, who seems the cooler man, they were as little as can be imagined⁠⸺⁠

⸺⁠We find them less now⁠⸺⁠

And next winter we shall find them less again; so that if we go on from little to less, and from less to nothing, I hesitate not one moment to affirm,