his looks and carriage, he took a chair, | than half settled in her mind before Tom and without much apology, but with great mentioned it. civility at the same time, placed it close to her at the table, and sat down. There is nothing so awkward as courting a woman, an' please your Honor, whilst she is making sausages. So Tom began a discourse upon them: First, gravely-"As how they were made; with what meats, herbs and spices"; then, a little gaily, as- "With what skins-and if they never burst? Whether the largest were not the best?" and so on-taking care only as he went along, to season what he had to say upon sausages, rather under than over, that he might have room to act in. It was owing to the neglect of that very precaution, said my uncle Toby, laying his hand upon Trim's shoulder, that Count de la Motte lost the battle of Wynnendale: he pressed too speedily into the wood; which if he had not done, Lisle had not fallen into our hands, nor Ghent and Bruges, which both followed her example. It was so late in the year, continued my uncle Toby, and so terrible a season came on, that if things had not fallen out as they did, our troops must have perished in the open field. Why, therefore, may not battles, an' please your Honor, as well as marriages, be made in Heaven? My uncle Toby mused. Religion inclined him to say one thing, and his high ideas of military skill tempted him to say another; so, not being able to frame a reply exactly to his mind, my uncle Toby said nothing at all, and the corporal finished his story. As Tom perceived, an' please your Honor, that he gained ground, and that all he had said upon the subject of sausages, was kindly taken, he went on to help her a little in making them. First, by taking hold of the ring of the sausage, whilst she stroked the forced meat down with her hand; then by cutting the strings into proper lengths, and holding them in his hand, whilst she took them out, one by one-then by putting them across her mouth, that she might take them out as she wanted them, and so on, from little to more, till at last he adventured to tie the sausage himself, whilst she held the snout. Now a widow, an' please your Honor, always chooses a second husband as unlike the first as she can; so the affair was more She made a feint, however, of defending herself by snatching up a sausage. * * * She signed the capitulation, and Tom sealed it; and there was an end of the matter. CHAPTER XLIII. ALL womankind, continued Trim (commenting upon his story) from the highest to the lowest, an' please your Honor, love jokes; the difficulty is to know how they choose to have them cut; and there is no knowing that but by trying, as we do with our artillery in the field, by raising or letting down till we hit the mark. I like the comparison, said my uncle Toby, better than the thing itself. Because, your Honor, quoth the corporal, loves glory more than pleasure. I hope, Trim, answered my uncle Toby, I love mankind more than either; and as the knowledge of arms tends so apparently to the good and quiet of the world, and particularly that branch of it which we have practised together, in our own bowling-green, has no object but to shorten the strides of Ambition, and entrench the lives and fortunes of the few from the plunderings of the many; whenever that drum beats in our ears, I trust, corporal, we shall neither of us want so much humanity and fellow-feeling as to face about and march. In pronouncing this, my uncle Toby faced about and marched firmly as at the head of the company; and the faithful corporal, shouldering his stick, and striking his hand upon his coat-skirt, as he took his first step, marched close behind him down the avenue. Now what can their two noddles be about? cried my father to my mother. By all that's strange, they are besieging Mrs. Wadman, in form, and are marching round her house to mark out the lines of circumvallation! I dare say, quoth my mother-But stop, dear Sir; for what my mother dared to say upon the occasion, and what my father did say upon it, with her replies and his rejoinders, shall be read, perused, paraphrased, commented, or descanted upon-or to say it all in a word, shall be thumbed over by posterity, in a chapter apart; I say by posterity, and care not if I repeat the word again; for what has this book done more than the Legation of Moses, or the Tale of a Tub, that it may not swim down the gutter of Time along with them? I will not argue the matter. Time wastes too fast: every letter I trace tells me with what rapidity Life follows my pen; the days and hours of it, more precious my dear Jenny, than the rubies about thy neck, are flying over our heads like light clouds of a windy day, never to return more; everything presses on; whilst thou art twisting that lock, see! it grows grey; and every time I kiss thy hand to bid adieu, and every absence which follows it, are preludes to that eternal separation which we are shortly to make. Heaven have mercy upon us both! CHAPTER XLIV. Now for what the world thinks of that ejaculation, I would not give a groat. CHAPTER XLV. My mother had gone with her left arm twisted in my father's right, till they had got to the fatal angle of the old gardenwall, where Doctor Slop was overthrown by Obadiah on the coach-horse. As this was directly opposite to the front of Mrs. Wadman's house, when my father came to it, he gave a look across; and seeing my uncle Toby and the corporal within ten paces of the door, he turned about. "Let us just stop a moment," quoth my father, "and see with what ceremonies my brother Toby and his man Trim make their first entry; it will not detain us," added my father, a single minute." No matter if it be ten minutes, quoth my mother. It will not detain us half a one, said my father. The corporal was just then setting in with the story of his brother Tom and the Jew's widow: the story went on, and on; it had episodes in it; it came back and went on, and went on again, there was no end of it: the reader found it very long. G-help my father! he pshawed fifty times at every new attitude, and gave the corporal's stick, with all its flourishings and danglings, to as many devils as chose to accept of them. When issues of events like these my father is waiting for, are hanging in the scales of fate, the mind has the advantage of changing the principle of expectation three times, without which it would not have power to see it out. Curiosity governs the first moment; and the second moment is all economy to justify the expense of the first; and for the third, fourth, fifth, and six moments, and so on to the day of judgment, 'tis a point of Honor. I need not be told that the ethic writers have assigned this all to Patience; but that virtue, methinks, has extent of dominion sufficient of her own, and enough to do in it, without invading the few dismantled castles which Honor has left him upon the earth. My father stood it out as well as he could with these three auxiliaries, to the end of Trim's story; and from thence to the end of my uncle Toby's panegyric upon arms, in the chapter following it; when seeing that, instead of marching up to Mrs. Wadman's door, they both faced about and marched down the avenue diametrically opposite to his expectation, he broke out at once with that little subacid sourness of humor, which, in certain situations, distinguished his character from that of all other men. look. CHAPTER XLVII. would imitate, and that was, never to re- returned home with a more embarrassed fuse her assent and consent to any proposition my father laid before her, merely because she did not understand it, or had no ideas of the principal word or term of art upon which the tenet or proposition rolled. She contented herself with doing all that her godfathers and godmothers promised for her, but no more; and so would go on using a hard word for twenty years together, and replying to it too, if it was a verb, in all its moods and tenses, without giving herself any trouble to inquire about it. This was an eternal source of misery to my father, and broke the neck, at the first setting out, of more good dialogues between them, than could have done the most petulant contradiction; the few that survived were the better for the cuvettes. "They are foolish things," said mother. my Particularly the cuvettes, replied my father. It was enough; he tasted the sweet of triumph, and went on. Not that they are, properly speaking, Mrs. Wadman's premises, said my father, partly correcting himself, because she is but a tenant for life. That makes a great difference, said my mother. In a fool's head, replied my father. Unless she should happen to have a child, said my mother. But she must persuade my brother Toby first to get her one. To be sure, Mr. Shandy, quoth my mother. Though if it comes to persuasion, said my father, Lord have mercy upon them! Amen, said my mother, piano. Amen, cried my father, fortissimo. Amen, said my mother again, but with such a sighing cadence of personal pity at the end of it, as discomfited every fibre about my father; he instantly took out his almanac; but before he could untie it, Yorick's congregation coming out of church, became a full answer to one half of his business with it, and my mother telling him it was a sacrament day, left him as little in doubt, as to the other part. He put his almanac into his pocket. The First Lord of the Treasury, thinking of ways and means, could not have UPON looking back from the end of the last chapter, and surveying the texture of what has been wrote, it is necessary, that upon this page and the five following, a good quantity of heterogeneous matter be inserted, to keep that just balance betwixt wisdom and folly, without which, a book would not hold together a single year; nor is it a poor creeping digression (which, but for the name of, a man might continue as well going on in the King's highway) which will do the business. No, if it is to be a digression, it must be a good frisky one, and upon a frisky subject too, where neither the horse nor his rider are to be caught but by rebound. The only difficulty is, raising powers suitable to the nature of the service: Fancy is capricious; Wit must not be searched for, and Pleasantry (good-natured slut as she is) will not come in at a call, was an empire to be laid at her feet. The best way for a man is, to say his prayers. Only, if it puts him in mind of his infirmities and defects, as well ghostly as bodily, for that purpose, he will find himself rather worse after he has said them than before; for other purposes better. For my own part, there is not a way, either moral or mechanical, under heaven, that I could think of, which I have not taken with myself in this case; sometimes by addressing myself directly to the soul herself, and arguing the point over and over again with her, upon the extent of her own faculties. I never could make them an inch the wider. Then by changing my system, and trying what could be made of it upon the body, by temperance, soberness, and chastity. These are good, quoth I, in themselves; they are good, absolutely; they are good, relatively; they are good for health; they are good for happiness in this world; they are good for happiness in the next. In short, they are good for every thing but the thing wanted; and there they are good for nothing, but to leave the soul just as Heaven made it. As for the theo logical virtues of Faith and Hope, they | the situation, like all others, had notions give it courage; but then, that snivelling of her own to put into the brain. virtue of Meekness (as my father would always call it) takes it quite away again, so you are exactly where you started. Now, in all common and ordinary cases, there is nothing which I have found to answer so well as this. Certainly, if there is any dependence upon Logic, and that I am not blinded by self-love, there must be something of true genius about me, merely upon this symptom of it, That I do not know what Envy is for never do I hit upon any invention or device which tendeth to the furtherance of good writing, but I instantly make it public; willing that all mankind should write as well as myself: Which they certainly will, when they think as little. CHAPTER XLVIII. Now, in ordinary cases, that is, when I am only stupid, and the thoughts rise heavily and pass gummous through my pen Or that I am got, I know not how, into a cold unmetaphorical vein of infamous writing, and cannot take a plumb-lift out of it for my soul; so must be obliged to go on writing like a Dutch commentator to the end of the chapter, unless something be done I never stand conferring with pen and ink one moment, for if a pinch of snuff, or a stride or two across the room, will not do the business for me, I take a razor at once; and having tried the edge of it upon the palm of my hand, without further ceremony, except that of first lathering my beard, I shave it off; taking care only, if I do leave a hair, that it be not a grey one; this done, I change my shirt, put on a better coat, send for my last wig, put my topaz-ring upon my finger; and, in a word, dress myself from one end to the other of me, after my best fashion. I maintain it, the conceits of a roughbearded man are seven years more terse and juvenile for one single operation, and if they did not run a risk of being quite shaved away, might be carried up, by continual shavings, to the highest pitch of sublimity. How Homer could write with so long a beard, I don't know; and as it makes against my hypothesis, I as little care: but let us return to the Toilet. Ludovicus Sorbonensis makes this entirely an affair of the body (wrεpin #paşıç) as he calls it, but he is deceived: the soul and body are joint-sharers in every thing they get: a man cannot dress, but his ideas get clothed at the same time: and if he dresses like a gentleman, every one of them stands presented to his imagination, genteelized along with him; so that he has nothing to do but take his pen and write like himself. For this cause, when your Honors and Reverences would know whether I write clean, and fit to be read, you will be able to judge full as well by looking into my laundress's bill, as my book: there was one single month, in which I can make it appear, that I dirtied one-and-thirty shirts with clean writing; and after all, was more abused, cursed, criticised, and confounded, and had more mystic heads shaken at me, for what I had wrote in that one month, than in all the other months of that year put together. But their Honors and Reverences had not seen my bills. CHAPTER XLIX. As I never had any intention of beginning the Digression I am making all this preparation for, till I came to the 50th chapter, I have this chapter to put to whatever use I think proper. I have twenty this moment ready for it. I could write my chapter of Button-holes in it. Or my chapter of Pishes, which should follow them Now the Devil must be in it, if this does not do: for, consider, Sir, as every Or my chapter of Knots, in case their man chooses to be present at the shaving Reverences have done with them: they of his own beard (though there is no rule might lead me into mischief. The safest without an exception), and unavoidably way is, to follow the track of the learned, sits over-against himself the whole time and raise objections against what I have it is doing, in case he has a hand in it, I been writing, though I declare beforehand, I know no more than my heels how to answer them. And first, it may be said, there is a pelting kind of Thersitical satire, as black as the very ink 't is wrote with (and by the bye, whoever says so, is indebted to the Muster-master General of the Grecian army, for suffering the name of so ugly and foul-mouthed a man as Thersites to continue upon his roll, for it has furnished him with an epithet) in these productions, he will urge all the personal washings and scrubbings upon earth do a sinking genius no sort of good, but just the contrary, inasmuch as the dirtier the fellow is, the better generally he succeeds in it. To this I have no other answer, at least ready, but that the Archbishop of Benevento wrote his nasty romance of the Galatea, as all the world knows, in a purple coat, waist-coat, and purple pair of breeches; and that the penance set him of writing a commentary upon the book of the Revelations, as severe as it was looked upon by one part of the world, was far from being deemed so by the other, upon the single account of that Investment. Another objection to all this remedy, is its want of universality; forasmuch as the shaving part of it, upon which so much stress is laid, by an unalterable law of nature excludes one half of the species entirely from its use, all I can say, is, that female writers, whether of England, or of France, must e'en go without it. As for the Spanish ladies, I am in no sort of distress. CHAPTER L. THE fiftieth chapter has come at last and brings nothing with it but a sad signature of "How our pleasures slip from under us in this world!" For in talking of my Digression, I declare before Heaven, I have made it! What a strange creature is mortal man! said she. 'Tis very true, said I; but 't were better to get all these things out of our heads, and return to my uncle Toby. | ral had marched down to the bottom of the avenue, they recollected their business lay the other way; so they faced about, and marched straight up to Mrs. Wadman's door. I warrant your Honor, said the corporal, touching his Montero-cap with his hand as he passed him, in order to give a knock at the door. My uncle Toby, contrary to his invariable way of treating his faithful servant, said nothing good or bad: the truth was, he had not altogether marshalled his ideas: he wished for another conference, and, as the corporal was mounting up the three steps before the door, he hemmed twice; a portion of my uncle Toby's most modest spirits fled, at each expulsion, towards the corporal; he stood with the rapper of the door suspended for a full minute in his hand, he scarce knew why. Bridget stood perdue within, with her finger and her thumb upon the latch, benumbed with expectation; and Mrs. Wadman, with an eye ready to be deflowered again, sat breathless behind the window-curtain of her bed-chamber, watching their approach. Trim! said my uncle Toby; but, as he articulated the word, the minute expired, and Trim let fall the rapper. My uncle Toby, perceiving that all hopes of a conference were knocked on the head by it, whistled Lillibullero. CHAPTER LII. As Mrs. Bridget's finger and thumb were upon the latch, the captain did not knock as often as perchance your Honor's tailor. I might have taken my example something nearer home; for I owe mine some five-and-twenty pounds at least, and wonder at the man's patience. But this is nothing at all to the world: only 't is a cursed thing to be in debt; and there seems to be a fatality in the exchequers of some poor princes, particularly those of our house, which no economy can bind down in irons. For my own part, I'm persuaded there is not any one prince, prelate, pope, or potentate, great or small, upon earth, more desirous in his heart of keeping straight with the world. than I am, or who takes more likely means for it. I never give above half a WHEN my uncle Toby and the corpo-guinea nor walk with boots, nor cheapen CHAPTER LI. |