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By Root 1733 0

in the progress of this work: ’tis enough to say here, as he could not have the honour of it, in the literal sense of the doctrine—he took up with the allegory of it;—and would often say, especially when his pen was a little retrograde, there was as much good meaning, truth, and knowledge, couched under the veil of John de la Casse’s parabolical representation,—as was to be found in any one poetic fiction, or mystick record of antiquity.—Prejudice of education, he would say, is the devil,—and the multitudes of them which we suck in with our mother’s milk—are the devil and all.——We are haunted with them, brother Toby, in all our lucubrations and researches; and was a man fool enough to submit tamely to what they obtruded upon him,—what would his book be? Nothing,—he would add, throwing his pen away with a vengeance,—nothing but a farrago of the clack of nurses, and of the nonsense of the old women13 (of both sexes) throughout the kingdom.

This is the best account I am determined to give of the slow progress my father made in his Tristra-pædia; at which (as I said) he was three years and something more, indefatigably at work, and at last, had scarce compleated, by his own reckoning, one half of his undertaking: the misfortune was, that I was all that time totally neglected and abandoned to my mother; and what was almost as bad, by the very delay, the first part of the work, upon which my father had spent the most of his pains, was rendered entirely useless,——every day a page or two became of no consequence.——

——Certainly it was ordained as a scourge upon the pride of human wisdom, That the wisest of us all, should thus outwit ourselves, and eternally forego our purposes in the intemperate act of pursuing them.

In short, my father was so long in all his acts of resistance,—or in other words,—he advanced so very slow with his work, and I began to live and get forwards at such a rate, that if an event had not happened,——which, when we get to it, if it can be told with decency, shall not be concealed a moment from the reader——I verily believe, I had put by my father, and left him drawing a sun-dial,14 for no better purpose than to be buried under ground.

CHAP. XVII

——’twas nothing,—I did not lose two drops of blood by it——’twas not worth calling in a surgeon, had he lived next door to us——thousands suffer by choice, what I did by accident.——Doctor Slop made ten times more of it, than there was occasion:——some men rise, by the art of hanging great weights upon small wires,1—and I am this day (August the 10th, 1761)2 paying part of the price of this man’s reputation.——O ’twould provoke a stone, to see how things are carried on in this world!——The chamber-maid had left no ******* ***3 under the bed:——Cannot you contrive, master, quoth Susannah, lifting up the sash with one hand, as she spoke, and helping me up into the window seat with the other,—cannot you manage, my dear, for a single time to **** *** ** *** ******?4

I was five years old.——Susannah did not consider that nothing was well hung5 in our family,——so slap came the sash down like lightening upon us;—Nothing is left,—cried Susannah,—nothing is left—for me, but to run my country.——

My uncle Toby’s house was a much kinder sanctuary; and so Susannah fled to it.

CHAP. XVIII

When Susannah told the corporal the misadventure of the sash, with all the circumstances which attended the murder of me,—(as she called it)—the blood forsook his cheeks;—all accessaries in murder, being principals,1—Trim’s conscience told him he was as much to blame as Susannah,—and if the doctrine had been true, my uncle Toby had as much of the blood-shed to answer for to heaven, as either of ’em;—so that neither reason or instinct, separate or together, could possibly have guided Susannah’s steps to so proper an asylum. It is in vain to leave this to the Reader’s imagination:——to form any kind of hypothesis that will render these propositions feasible, he must cudgel his brains sore,—and to do it without,—he must have such brains as no reader ever had before him.——Why should I put them