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

(repeating my uncle Toby’s words) “to let a man come so near her!”⁠⸺⁠By Heaven, brother Toby! you would try the patience of Job;⁠—and I think I have the plagues of one already without it.⁠⸺⁠Why?⁠⸺⁠Where?⁠⸺⁠Wherein?⁠⸺⁠Wherefore?⁠⸺⁠Upon what account? replied my uncle Toby, in the utmost astonishment.⁠—To think, said my father, of a man living to your age, brother, and knowing so little about women!⁠⸺⁠I know nothing at all about them,⁠—replied my uncle Toby: And I think, continued he, that the shock I received the year after the demolition of Dunkirk, in my affair with widow Wadman;⁠—which shock you know I should not have received, but from my total ignorance of the sex,⁠—has given me just cause to say, That I neither know nor do pretend to know anything about ’em or their concerns either.⁠—Methinks, brother, replied my father, you might, at least, know so much as the right end of a woman from the wrong.

It is said in Aristotle’s Masterpiece, “That when a man doth think of anything which is past,⁠⸺⁠he looketh down upon the ground;⁠⸺⁠but that when he thinketh of something that is to come, he looketh up towards the heavens.”

My uncle Toby, I suppose, thought of neither, for he look’d horizontally.⁠—Right end! quoth my uncle Toby, muttering the two words low to himself, and fixing his two eyes insensibly as he muttered them, upon a small crevice, formed by a bad joint in the chimneypiece⁠⸺⁠Right end of a woman!⁠⸺⁠I declare, quoth my uncle, I know no more which it is than the man in the moon;⁠⸺⁠and if I was to think, continued my uncle Toby (keeping his eye still fixed upon the bad joint) this month together, I am sure I should not be able to find it out.

Then, brother Toby, replied my father, I will tell you.

Everything in this world, continued my father (filling a fresh pipe)⁠—everything in this world, my dear brother Toby, has two handles.⁠⸺⁠Not always, quoth my uncle Toby.⁠⸺⁠At least, replied my father, everyone has two hands,⁠⸺⁠which comes to the same thing.⁠⸺⁠Now, if a man was to sit down coolly, and consider within himself the make, the shape, the construction, come-at-ability, and convenience of all the parts which constitute the whole of that animal, called Woman, and compare them analogically⁠⸺⁠I never understood rightly the meaning of that word,⁠—quoth my uncle Toby.⁠—

Analogy, replied my father, is the certain relation and agreement which different⁠⸺⁠Here a devil of a rap at the door snapped my father’s definition (like his tobacco-pipe) in two,⁠—and, at the same time, crushed the head of as notable and curious a dissertation as ever was engendered in the womb of speculation;⁠—it was some months before my father could get an opportunity to be safely delivered of it:⁠—And, at this hour, it is a thing full as problematical as the subject of the dissertation itself,⁠—(considering the confusion and distresses of our domestick misadventures, which are now coming thick one upon the back of another) whether I shall be able to find a place for it in the third volume or not.

VIII

It is about an hour and a half’s tolerable good reading since my uncle Toby rung the bell, when Obadiah was ordered to saddle a horse, and go for Dr. Slop, the man-midwife;⁠—so that no one can say, with reason, that I have not allowed Obadiah time enough, poetically speaking, and considering the emergency too, both to go and come;⁠⸺⁠though, morally and truly speaking, the man perhaps has scarce had time to get on his boots.

If the hypercritick will go upon this; and is resolved after all to take a pendulum, and measure the true distance betwixt the ringing of the bell, and the rap at the door;⁠—and, after finding it to be no more than two minutes, thirteen seconds, and three fifths,⁠—should take upon him to insult over me for such a breach in the unity, or rather probability of time;⁠—I would remind him, that the idea of duration, and of its simple modes, is got merely from the train and succession of our ideas,⁠⸺⁠and is the true scholastic pendulum,⁠⸺⁠and by which, as a scholar, I will be tried in this matter,⁠—abjuring and detesting the jurisdiction of all other pendulums whatever.

I would therefore desire him to consider that it is but poor eight miles from Shandy-Hall to Dr. Slop, the man-midwife’s house;⁠—and that whilst Obadiah has been going those said miles and back, I have brought my uncle Toby from Namur, quite across all Flanders, into England:⁠—That I have had him ill upon my hands near four years;⁠—and have since travelled him and Corporal Trim in a chariot-and-four, a journey of near two hundred miles down into Yorkshire,⁠⸺⁠all which put together, must have prepared the reader’s imagination for the entrance of Dr. Slop upon the stage,⁠—as much, at least (I hope) as a dance, a song, or a concerto between the acts.

If my hypercritick is intractable, alledging, that two minutes and thirteen seconds are no more than two minutes and thirteen seconds,⁠—when I have said all I can about them; and that this plea, though it might save me dramatically, will damn me biographically, rendering my book from this very moment, a professed Romance, which, before, was a book apocryphal:⁠⸺⁠If I am thus pressed⁠—I then put an end to the whole objection and controversy about it all at once,⁠⸺⁠by acquainting him, that Obadiah had not got above threescore yards from the stable-yard before he met with Dr. Slop;⁠—and indeed he gave a dirty proof that he had met with him, and was within an ace of giving a tragical one too.

Imagine to yourself;⁠—but this had better begin a new chapter.

IX

Imagine to yourself a little squat, uncourtly figure of a Doctor Slop, of about four feet and a half perpendicular height, with a breadth of back, and a sesquipedality of belly, which might have done honour to a serjeant in the horse-guards.

Such were the outlines of Dr. Slop’s figure, which,⁠—if you have read Hogarth’s analysis of beauty, and if you have not, I wish you would;⁠⸺⁠you must know, may as certainly be caricatured, and conveyed to