The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman - Laurence Sterne [108]
And to do justice to Slawkenbergius, he has entered the list with a stronger lance, and taken a much larger career in it, than any one man who had ever entered it before him,——and indeed, in many respects, deserves to be en-nich’d4 as a prototype for all writers, of voluminous works at least, to model their books by,——for he has taken in, Sir, the whole subject,—examined every part of it, dialectically,—then brought it into full day; dilucidating5 it with all the light which either the collision of his own natural parts could strike,—or the profoundest knowledge of the sciences had impowered him to cast upon it,——collating, collecting and compiling,—begging, borrowing, and stealing, as he went along, all that had been wrote or wrangled thereupon in the schools and porticos of the learned: so that Slawkenbergius his book may properly be considered, not only as a model,—but as a thorough-stitch’d DIGEST and regular institute of noses; comprehending in it, all that is, or can be needful to be known about them.
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,6 which 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,7 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)——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 Paræus decided 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