The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman

  For this cause it is, that I forbear to speak of so many (otherwise) valuable books and treatises of my father’s collecting, wrote either, plump upon noses,—or collaterally touching them;——such for instance as Prignitz, now lying upon the table before me, who with infinite learning, and from the most candid and scholar-like examination of above four thousand different skulls, in upwards of twenty charnel houses in Silesia,5which he had rummaged,—has informed us, that the mensuration and configuration of the osseous or boney parts of human noses, in any given tract of country, except Crim Tartary,6 where they are all crush’d down by the thumb, so that no judgment can be formed upon them,——are much nearer alike, than the world imagines;——the difference amongst them, being, he says, a mere trifle, not worth taking notice of,——but that the size and jollity of every individual nose, and by which one nose ranks above another, and bears a higher price, is owing to the cartilagenous and muscular parts of it, into whose ducts and sinuses the blood and animal spirits being impell’d, and driven by the warmth and force of the imagination, which is but a step from it, (bating the case of ideots, whom Prignitz, who had lived many years in Turky, supposes under the more immediate tutelage of heaven)7——it so happens, and ever must, says Prignitz, that the excellency of the nose is in a direct arithmetical proportion to the excellency of the wearer’s fancy.

  It is for the same reason, that is, because ’tis all comprehended in Slawkenbergius, that I say nothing likewise of Scroderus (Andrea) who all the world knows, set himself to oppugn Prignitz with great violence,——proving it in his own way, first logically, and then by a series of stubborn facts, “That so far was Prignitz from the truth, in affirming that the fancy begat the nose, that on the contrary,—the nose begat the fancy.”

  —The learned suspected Scroderus, of an indecent sophism in this,—–and Prignitz cried out aloud in the dispute, that Scroderus had shifted the idea upon him,—but Scroderus went on, maintaining his thesis.——

  My father was just balancing within himself, which of the two sides he should take in this affair; when Ambrose Paræus8decided it in a moment, and by overthrowing the systems, both of Prignitz and Scroderus, drove my father out of both sides of the controversy at once.

  Be witness——

  I don’t acquaint the learned reader,—in saying it, I mention it only to shew the learned, I know the fact myself.——

  That this Ambrose Paræus was chief surgeon and nosemender to Francis the ninth of France, and in high credit with him and the two preceding, or succeeding kings (I know not which)—and that except in the slip he made in his story of Taliacotius’s noses, and his manner of setting them on,——was esteemed by the whole college of physicians at that time, as more knowing in matters of noses, than any one who had ever taken them in hand.

  Now Ambrose Paræus convinced my father, that the true and efficient cause9 of what had engaged so much the attention of the world, and upon which Prignitz and Scroderus had wasted so much learning and fine parts,—was neither this nor that, ——but that the length and goodness of the nose was owing simply to the softness and flaccidity in the nurse’s breast,—— as the flatness and shortness of puisne10 noses was, to the firmness and elastic repulsion of the same organ of nutrition in the hale and lively,—which, tho’ happy for the woman, was the undoing of the child, inasmuch as his nose was so snubb’d, so rebuff’d, so rebated, and so refrigerated thereby, as never to arrive ad mensuram suam legitimam;11——but that in case of the flaccidity and softness of the nurse or mother’s breast,—by sinking into it, quoth Paræus, as into so much butter, the nose was comforted, nourish’d, plump’d up, refresh’d, refocillated,12 and set a growing for ever.

  I have but two things to observe of Paræus; first, that he proves and explains all this with the utmost chastity and decorum of expression:—for which may his soul for ever rest in peace!

  And, secondly, that besides the systems of Prignitz and Scroderus, which Ambrose Paræus his hypothesis effectually overthrew,—–it overthrew at the same time the system of peace and harmony of our family; and for three days together, not only embroiled matters between my father and my mother, but turn’d likewise the whole house and every thing in it, except my uncle Toby, quite upside down.

  Such a ridiculous tale of a dispute between a man and his wife, never surely in any age or country got vent through the key-hole of a street-door.

  My mother, you must know,——but I have fifty things more necessary to let you know first,—I have a hundred difficulties which I have promised to clear up, and a thousand distresses and domestic misadventures crouding in upon me thick and three-fold, one upon the neck of another,——a cow broke in (to-morrow morning) to my uncle Toby’s fortifications, and eat up two ratios13 and half of dried grass, tearing up the sods with it, which faced his horn-work and covered way.— Trim insists upon being tried by a court-martial,—the cow to be shot,— Slop to be crucifix’d,14—myself to be tristram’d, and at my very baptism made a martyr of;——poor unhappy devils that we all are!—I want swaddling,——but there is no time to be lost in exclamations.——I have left my father lying across his bed, and my uncle Toby in his old fringed chair, sitting beside him, and promised I would go back to them in half an hour, and five and thirty minutes are laps’d already.——Of all the perplexities a mortal author was ever seen in,—–this certainly is the greatest, for I have Hafen Slawkenbergius’s folio, Sir, to finish——a dialogue between my father and my uncle Toby, upon the solution of Prignitz, Scroderus, Ambrose Paræus, Ponocrates and Grangousier15 to relate,—a tale out of Slawkenbergius to translate, and all this in five minutes less, than no time at all; —such a head!—would to heaven! my enemies only saw the inside of it.

  CHAP. XXXIX.

  THERE was not any one scene more entertaining in our family,—–and to do it justice in this point;——and I here put off my cap and lay it upon the table close beside my ink-horn, on purpose to make my declaration to the world concerning this one article, the more solemn,——that I believe in my soul, (unless my love and partiality to my understanding blinds me) the hand of the supreme Maker and first Designer of all things, never made or put a family together, (in that period at least of it, which I have sat down to write the story of)——where the characters of it were cast or contrasted with so dramatic a felicity as ours was, for this end; or in which the capacities of affording such exquisite scenes, and the powers of shifting them perpetually from morning to night, were lodged and intrusted with so unlimited a confidence, as in the SHANDY-FAMILY.

  Not any one of these was more diverting, I say, in this whimsical theatre of ours,—than what frequently arose out of this self-same chapter of long noses,——especially when my father’s imagination was heated with the enquiry, and nothing would serve him but to heat my uncle Toby’s too.

  My uncle Toby would give my father all possible fair play in this attempt; and with infinite patience would sit smoaking his pipe for whole hours together, whilst my father was practising upon his head, and trying every accessible avenue to drive Prignitz and Scroderus’s solutions into it.

  Whether they were above my uncle Toby’s reason,——or contrary to it,——or that his brain was like damp tinder, and no spark could possibly take hold,—–or that it was so full of saps, mines, blinds, curtins, and such military disqualifications to his seeing clearly into Prignitz and Scroderus’s doctrines,—I say not,—let school-men—scullions, anatomists, and engineers, fight for it amongst themselves.——

  ’Twas some misfortune, I make no doubt, in this affair, that my father had every word of it to translate for the benefit of my uncle Toby, and render out of Slawkenbergius’s Latin, of which, as he was no great master, his translation was not always of the purest,—and generally least so where ’twas most wanted,—– this naturally open’d a door to a second misfortune;—–that in the warmer paroxisms of his zeal to open my uncle Toby’s eyes——my father’s ideas run on, as much faster than the translation, as the tra
nslation out moved my uncle Toby’s;—— neither the one or the other added much to the perspicuity of my father’s lecture.

  CHAP. XL.

  THE gift of ratiocination and making syllogisms,—I mean in man,—for in superior classes of beings, such as angels and spirits,—’tis all done, may it please your worships, as they tell me, by INTUITION;—and beings inferior, as your worships all know,——syllogize by their noses:1 though there is an island swiming in the sea, though not altogether at its ease, whose inhabitants, if my intelligence deceives me not, are so wonderfully gifted, as to syllogize after the same fashion, and oft-times to make very well out too:——but that’s neither here nor there ——

  The gift of doing it as it should be, amongst us,—or the great and principal act of ratiocination in man, as logicians tell us, is the finding out the agreement or disagreement of two ideas one with another, by the intervention of a third; (called the medius terminus) just as a man, as Locke well observes, by a yard, finds two mens nine-pin-alleys to be of the same length, which could not be brought together, to measure their equality, by juxtaposition.2

  Had the same great reasoner looked on, as my father illustrated his systems of noses, and observed my uncle Toby’s deportment,—what great attention he gave to every word,— and as oft as he took his pipe from his mouth, with what wonderful seriousness he contemplated the length of it,—surveying it transversely as he held it betwixt his finger and his thumb,—then fore right,—then this way, and then that, in all its possible directions and foreshortenings,——he would have concluded my uncle Toby had got hold of the medius terminus; and was syllogizing and measuring with it the truth of each hypothesis of long noses, in order as my father laid them before him. This by the bye, was more than my father wanted,—his aim in all the pains he was at in these philosophic lectures,— was to enable my uncle Toby not to discuss,——but comprehend——to hold the grains and scruples of learning,—not to weigh them.—My uncle Toby, as you will read in the next chapter, did neither the one or the other.

  CHAP. XLI.

  ’TIS a pity, cried my father one winter’s night, after a three hours painful translation of Slawkenbergius,—’tis a pity, cried my father, putting my mother’s thread-paper into the book for a mark, as he spoke——that truth, brother Toby, should shut herself up in such impregnable fastnesses, and be so obstinate as not to surrender herself sometimes up upon the closest siege.——

  Now it happened then, as indeed it had often done before, that my uncle Toby’s fancy, during the time of my father’s explanation of Prignitz to him,——having nothing to stay it there, had taken a short flight to the bowling-green;——his body might as well have taken a turn there too,——so that with all the semblance of a deep school-man intent upon the medius terminus,——my uncle Toby was in fact as ignorant of the whole lecture, and all its pro’s and con’s, as if my father had been translating Hafen Slawkenbergius from the Latin tongue into the Cherokeè. But the word siege, like a talismanic power, in my father’s metaphor, wafting back my uncle Toby’s fancy, quick as a note could follow the touch,—he open’d his ears,— and my father observing that he took his pipe out of his mouth, and shuffled his chair nearer the table, as with a desire to profit,—my father with great pleasure began his sentence again, ——changing only the plan, and dropping the metaphor of the siege of it, to keep clear of some dangers my father apprehended from it.

  ’Tis a pity, said my father, that truth can only be on one side, brother Toby,—considering what ingenuity these learned men have all shewn in their solutions of noses.——Can noses be dissolved? replied my uncle Toby.

  —–My father thrust back his chair,——rose up,—–put on his hat,——took four long strides to the door,—jerked it open,—thrust his head half way out,—shut the door again,— took no notice of the bad hinge,—returned to the table, —pluck’d my mother’s thread-paper out of Slawkenbergius’s book,—went hastily to his bureau,—walk’d slowly back, twisting my mother’s thread-paper about his thumb,—un-button’d his waistcoat,——threw my mother’s thread-paper into the fire,—bit her sattin pin-cushion in two, fill’d his mouth with bran,—confounded it;—but mark!—the oath of confusion was levell’d at my uncle Toby’s brain,——which was e’en confused enough already,——the curse came charged only with the bran,—the bran, may it please your honours,—was no more than powder to the ball.

  ’Twas well my father’s passions lasted not long; for so long as they did last, they led him a busy life on’t, and it is one of the most unaccountable problems that ever I met with in my observations of human nature, that nothing should prove my father’s mettle so much, or make his passions go off so like gun-powder, as the unexpected strokes his science met with from the quaint simplicity of my uncle Toby’s questions.—– Had ten dozen of hornets stung him behind in so many different places all atone time,—he could not have exerted more mechanical functions in fewer seconds,—or started half so much, as with one single quære1 of three words unseasonably popping in full upon him in his hobby horsical career.

  ’Twas all one to my uncle Toby,—he smoaked his pipe on, with unvaried composure,—his heart never intended offence to his brother,—and as his head could seldom find out where the sting of it lay,——he always gave my father the credit of cooling by himself.——He was five minutes and thirty-five seconds about it in the present case.

  By all that’s good! said my father, swearing, as he came to himself, and taking the oath out of Ernulphus’s digest of curses,—(though to do my father justice it was a fault (as he told Dr. Slop in the affair of Ernulphus) which he as seldom committed as any man upon earth.)——By all that’s good and great! brother Toby, said my father, if it was not for the aids of philosophy, which befriend one so much as they do,—you would put a man beside all temper.—Why, by the solutions of noses, of which I was telling you, I meant as you might have known, had you favoured me with one grain of attention, the various accounts which learned men of different kinds of knowledge have given the world, of the causes of short and long noses.—There is no cause but one, replied my uncle Toby,— why one man’s nose is longer than another’s, but because that God pleases to have it so.—That is Grangousier’s solution,2 said my father.—’Tis he, continued my uncle Toby, looking up, and not regarding my father’s interruption, who makes us all, and frames and puts us together in such forms and proportions, and for such ends, as is agreeable to his infinite wisdom.——’Tis a pious account, cried my father, but not philosophical,—there is more religion in it than sound science. ’Twas no inconsistent part of my uncle Toby’s character,——that he feared God, and reverenced religion.——So the moment my father finished his remark,—my uncle Toby fell a whistling Lillabullero, with more zeal (though more out of tune) than usual.——

  What is become of my wife’s thread-paper?

  CHAP. XLII.

  NO matter,——as an appendage to seam stressy, the thread-paper might be of some consequence to my mother,—of none to my father, as a mark in Slawkenbergius. Slawkenbergius in every page of him was a rich treasury of inexhaustible knowledge to my father,—he could not open him amiss; and he would often say in closing the book, that if all the arts and sciences in the world, with the books which treated of them, were lost, ——should the wisdom and policies of governments, he would say, through disuse, ever happen to be forgot, and all that statesmen had wrote, or caused to be written, upon the strong or the weak sides of courts and kingdoms, should they be forgot also,—and Slawkenbergius only left,—there would be enough in him in all conscience, he would say, to set the world a-going again. A treasure therefore was he indeed! an institute of all that was necessary to be known of noses, and every thing else,—— at matin, noon, and vespers was Hafen Slawkenbergius his recreation and delight: ’twas for ever in his hands,—you would have sworn, Sir, it had been a canon’s prayer-book,—so worn, so glazed, so contrited and attrited1 was it with fingers and with thumbs in all its parts, from one end ev
en unto the other.

  I am not such a bigot to Slawkenbergius, as my father;—there is a fund in him, no doubt; but in my opinion, the best, I don’t say the most profitable, but the most amusing part of Hafen Slawkenbergius, is his tales,—–and, considering he was a German, many of them told not without fancy:——these take up his second book, containing nearly one half of his folio, and are comprehended in ten decads, each decad containing ten tales. ——Philosophy is not built upon tales; and therefore ’twas certainly wrong in Slawkenbergius to send them into the world by that name;—there are a few of them in his eighth, ninth, and tenth decads, which I own seem rather playful and sportive, than speculative,—but in general they are to be looked upon by the learned as a detail of so many independent facts, all of them turning round somehow or other upon the main hinges of his subject, and collected by him with great fidelity, and added to his work as so many illustrations upon the doctrines of noses.

  As we have leisure enough upon our hands,—if you give me leave, madam, I’ll tell you the ninth tale of his tenth decad.

  THE END OF THE THIRD VOLUME.

  THE

  LIFE

  AND

  OPINIONS

  OF

  TRISTRAM SHANDY,

  GENTLEMAN.

  Multitudins imperitæ non formido judica; meis tamen, rogo, parcant opufculis——in quibus fuit propofiti femper, a jocis ad feria, a feriis viciffim ad jocos tranfire.