The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy [95]
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 domestick misadventures crowding in upon me thick and threefold, one upon the neck of another. A cow broke in (tomorrow morning) to my uncle Toby's fortifications, and eat up two rations and a 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--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 Paraeus, Panocrates, and Grangousier 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!
Chapter 2.XXXII.
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 dramatick 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 instrusted 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 smoking 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 timber, 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 schoolmen--scullions, anatomists, and engineers, fight for it among 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 paroxysms of his zeal to open my uncle Toby's eyes--my father's ideas ran on as much faster than the translation, as the translation outmoved my uncle Toby's--neither the one or the other added much to the perspicuity of my father's lecture.
Chapter 2.XXXIII.
The gift of ratiocination and making syllogisms--I mean in man--for in superior classes
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 domestick misadventures crowding in upon me thick and threefold, one upon the neck of another. A cow broke in (tomorrow morning) to my uncle Toby's fortifications, and eat up two rations and a 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--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 Paraeus, Panocrates, and Grangousier 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!
Chapter 2.XXXII.
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 dramatick 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 instrusted 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 smoking 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 timber, 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 schoolmen--scullions, anatomists, and engineers, fight for it among 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 paroxysms of his zeal to open my uncle Toby's eyes--my father's ideas ran on as much faster than the translation, as the translation outmoved my uncle Toby's--neither the one or the other added much to the perspicuity of my father's lecture.
Chapter 2.XXXIII.
The gift of ratiocination and making syllogisms--I mean in man--for in superior classes