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

the one,⁠—you rumple the other. There is one certain exception however in this case, and that is, when you are so fortunate a fellow, as to have had your jerkin made of gum-taffeta, and the body-lining to it of a sarcenet, or thin persian.

Zeno, Cleanthes, Diogenes Babylonius, Dionysius, Heracleotes, Antipater, Panætius, and Posidonius amongst the Greeks;⁠⸺⁠Cato and Varro and Seneca amongst the Romans;⁠⸺⁠Pantæonus and Clemens Alexandrinus and Montaigne amongst the Christians; and a score and a half of good, honest, unthinking Shandean people as ever lived, whose names I can’t recollect,⁠—all pretended that their jerkins were made after this fashion,⁠—you might have rumpled and crumpled, and doubled and creased, and fretted and fridged the outside of them all to pieces;⁠⸺⁠in short, you might have played the very devil with them, and at the same time, not one of the insides of them would have been one button the worse, for all you had done to them.

I believe in my conscience that mine is made up somewhat after this sort:⁠⸺⁠for never poor jerkin has been tickled off at such a rate as it has been these last nine months together,⁠⸺⁠and yet I declare, the lining to it,⁠⸻as far as I am a judge of the matter,⁠⸺⁠is not a threepenny piece the worse;⁠—pell-mell, helter-skelter, dingdong, cut and thrust, back stroke and fore stroke, side way and long way, have they been trimming it for me:⁠—had there been the least gumminess in my lining,⁠—by heaven! it had all of it long ago been frayed and fretted to a thread.

⸻You Messrs. the Monthly reviewers!⁠⸻how could you cut and slash my jerkin as you did?⁠⸺⁠how did you know but you would cut my lining too?

Heartily and from my soul, to the protection of that Being who will injure none of us, do I recommend you and your affairs,⁠—so God bless you;⁠—only next month, if any one of you should gnash his teeth, and storm and rage at me, as some of you did last May (in which I remember the weather was very hot)⁠—don’t be exasperated, if I pass it by again with good temper,⁠—being determined as long as I live or write (which in my case means the same thing) never to give the honest gentleman a worse word or a worse wish than my uncle Toby gave the fly which buzz’d about his nose all dinnertime,⁠⸻“Go,⁠—go, poor devil,” quoth he,⁠—“get thee gone,⁠—why should I hurt thee? This world is surely wide enough to hold both thee and me.”

V

Any man, Madam, reasoning upwards, and observing the prodigious suffusion of blood in my father’s countenance,⁠—by means of which (as all the blood in his body seemed to rush into his face, as I told you) he must have reddened, pictorically and scientifically speaking, six whole tints and a half, if not a full octave above his natural colour:⁠—any man, Madam, but my uncle Toby, who had observed this, together with the violent knitting of my father’s brows, and the extravagant contortion of his body during the whole affair,⁠—would have concluded my father in a rage; and taking that for granted,⁠—had he been a lover of such kind of concord as arises from two such instruments being put in exact tune,⁠—he would instantly have skrew’d up his, to the same pitch;⁠—and then the devil and all had broke loose⁠—the whole piece, Madam, must have been played off like the sixth of Avison Scarlatti⁠—con furia,⁠—like mad.⁠—Grant me patience!⁠⸺⁠What has con furia,⁠⸺⁠con strepito,⁠⸺⁠or any other hurly burly whatever to do with harmony?

Any man, I say, Madam, but my uncle Toby, the benignity of whose heart interpreted every motion of the body in the kindest sense the motion would admit of, would have concluded my father angry, and blamed him too. My uncle Toby blamed nothing but the tailor who cut the pocket-hole;⁠⸺⁠so sitting still till my father had got his handkerchief out of it, and looking all the time up in his face with inexpressible goodwill⁠⸺⁠my father, at length, went on as follows.

VI

“What prodigious armies you had in Flanders!”⁠⸺⁠Brother Toby, quoth my father, I do believe thee to be as honest a man, and with as good and as upright a heart as ever God created;⁠—nor is it thy fault, if all the children which have been, may, can, shall, will, or ought to be begotten, come with their heads foremost into the world:⁠⸺⁠but believe me, dear Toby, the accidents which unavoidably waylay them, not only in the article of our begetting ’em⁠⸺⁠though these, in my opinion, are well worth considering,⁠⸺⁠but the dangers and difficulties our children are beset with, after they are got forth into the world, are enow⁠—little need is there to expose them to unnecessary ones in their passage to it.⁠⸺⁠Are these dangers, quoth my uncle Toby, laying his hand upon my father’s knee, and looking up seriously in his face for an answer,⁠⸺⁠are these dangers greater now o’ days, brother, than in times past? Brother Toby, answered my father, if a child was but fairly begot, and born alive, and healthy, and the mother did well after it,⁠—our forefathers never looked farther.⁠⸺⁠My uncle Toby instantly withdrew his hand from off my father’s knee, reclined his body gently back in his chair, raised his head till he could just see the cornice of the room, and then directing the buccinatory muscles along his cheeks, and the orbicular muscles around his lips to do their duty⁠—he whistled Lillabullero.

VII

Whilst my uncle Toby was whistling Lillabullero to my father,⁠—Dr. Slop was stamping, and cursing and damning at Obadiah at a most dreadful rate,⁠⸻it would have done your heart good, and cured you, Sir, forever of the vile sin of swearing, to have heard him; I am determined therefore to relate the whole affair to you.

When Dr. Slop’s maid delivered the green bays bag with her master’s instruments in it, to Obadiah, she very sensibly exhorted him to put his head and one arm through the strings, and