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

my uncle Toby, my brother was speaking of, they are a very considerable part of an outwork;⁠⸺⁠they are called by the French engineers, Ouvrage à corne, and we generally make them to cover such places as we suspect to be weaker than the rest;⁠—’tis formed by two epaulments or demi-bastions⁠—they are very pretty,⁠—and if you will take a walk, I’ll engage to show you one well worth your trouble.⁠—I own, continued my uncle Toby, when we crown them,⁠—they are much stronger, but then they are very expensive, and take up a great deal of ground, so that, in my opinion, they are most of use to cover or defend the head of a camp; otherwise the double tenaille⁠—By the mother who bore us!⁠⸺⁠brother Toby, quoth my father, not able to hold out any longer,⁠⸺⁠you would provoke a saint;⁠⸺⁠here have you got us, I know not how, not only souse into the middle of the old subject again:⁠—But so full is your head of these confounded works, that though my wife is this moment in the pains of labour, and you hear her cry out, yet nothing will serve you but to carry off the man-midwife.⁠⸺⁠Accoucheur,⁠—if you please, quoth Dr. Slop.⁠⸺⁠With all my heart, replied my father, I don’t care what they call you,⁠—but I wish the whole science of fortification, with all its inventors, at the devil;⁠—it has been the death of thousands,⁠—and it will be mine in the end,⁠—I would not, I would not, brother Toby, have my brains so full of saps, mines, blinds, gabions, pallisadoes, ravelins, half-moons, and such trumpery, to be proprietor of Namur, and of all the towns in Flanders with it.

My uncle Toby was a man patient of injuries;⁠—not from want of courage,⁠—I have told you in a former chapter, “that he was a man of courage:”⁠—And will add here, that where just occasions presented, or called it forth,⁠—I know no man under whose arm I would have sooner taken shelter;⁠⸺⁠nor did this arise from any insensibility or obtuseness of his intellectual parts;⁠—for he felt this insult of my father’s as feelingly as a man could do;⁠—but he was of a peaceful, placid nature,⁠—no jarring element in it,⁠—all was mixed up so kindly within him; my uncle Toby had scarce a heart to retaliate upon a fly.

—Go⁠—says he, one day at dinner, to an overgrown one which had buzzed about his nose, and tormented him cruelly all dinnertime,⁠—and which after infinite attempts, he had caught at last, as it flew by him;⁠—I’ll not hurt thee, says my uncle Toby, rising from his chair, and going across the room, with the fly in his hand,⁠⸺⁠I’ll not hurt a hair of thy head:⁠—Go, says he, lifting up the sash, and opening his hand as he spoke, to let it escape;⁠—go, poor devil, get thee gone, why should I hurt thee?⁠⸺⁠This world surely is wide enough to hold both thee and me.

I was but ten years old when this happened: but whether it was, that the action itself was more in unison to my nerves at that age of pity, which instantly set my whole frame into one vibration of most pleasurable sensation;⁠—or how far the manner and expression of it might go towards it;⁠—or in what degree, or by what secret magick,⁠—a tone of voice and harmony of movement, attuned by mercy, might find a passage to my heart, I know not;⁠—this I know, that the lesson of universal goodwill then taught and imprinted by my uncle Toby, has never since been worn out of my mind: And tho’ I would not depreciate what the study of the Literæ humaniores, at the university, have done for me in that respect, or discredit the other helps of an expensive education bestowed upon me, both at home and abroad since;⁠—yet I often think that I owe one half of my philanthropy to that one accidental impression.

☞ This is to serve for parents and governors instead of a whole volume upon the subject.

I could not give the reader this stroke in my uncle Toby’s picture, by the instrument with which I drew the other parts of it,⁠—that taking in no more than the mere Hobbyhorsical likeness:⁠⸺⁠this is a part of his moral character. My father, in this patient endurance of wrongs, which I mention, was very different, as the reader must long ago have noted; he had a much more acute and quick sensibility of nature, attended with a little soreness of temper; tho’ this never transported him to anything which looked like malignancy:⁠—yet in the little rubs and vexations of life, ’twas apt to show itself in a drollish and witty kind of peevishness:⁠⸺⁠He was, however, frank and generous in his nature;⁠⸺⁠at all times open to conviction; and in the little ebullitions of this subacid humour towards others, but particularly towards my uncle Toby, whom he truly loved:⁠⸺⁠he would feel more pain, ten times told (except in the affair of my aunt Dinah, or where an hypothesis was concerned) than what he ever gave.

The characters of the two brothers, in this view of them, reflected light upon each other, and appeared with great advantage in this affair which arose about Stevinus.

I need not tell the reader, if he keeps a Hobbyhorse,⁠⸺⁠that a man’s Hobbyhorse is as tender a part as he has about him; and that these unprovoked strokes at my uncle Toby’s could not be unfelt by him.⁠⸺⁠No:⁠⸻as I said above, my uncle Toby did feel them, and very sensibly too.

Pray, Sir, what said he?⁠—How did he behave?⁠—O, Sir!⁠—it was great: For as soon as my father had done insulting his Hobbyhorse,⁠⸻he turned his head without the least emotion, from Dr. Slop, to whom he was addressing his discourse, and looking up into my father’s face, with a countenance spread over with so much good-nature;⁠⸺⁠so placid;⁠⸺⁠so fraternal;⁠⸺⁠so inexpressibly tender towards him:⁠—it penetrated my father to his heart: He rose up hastily from his chair, and seizing hold of both my uncle Toby’s hands as he spoke:⁠—Brother Toby, said he,⁠—I beg thy pardon;⁠⸺⁠forgive, I pray thee, this