The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman - Laurence Sterne [169]
—Yorick could not forbear smiling.—Your reverence does not consider, said the corporal, shouldering his stick like a musket, and marching into the middle of the room, to illustrate his position,—that ’tis exactly the same thing, as doing one’s exercise in the field.—
“Join your right hand to your firelock,” cried the corporal, giving the word of command, and performing the motion.—
“Poise your firelock,” cried the corporal, doing the duty still of both adjutant and private man.—
“Rest your firelock;”—one motion, an’ please your reverence, you see leads into another.—If his honour will begin but with the first—
THE FIRST—cried my uncle Toby, setting his hand upon his side—* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *.
THE SECOND—cried my uncle Toby, waving his tobacco-pipe, as he would have done his sword at the head of a regiment.—The corporal went through his manual with exactness; and having honoured his father and mother, made a low bow, and fell back to the side of the room.
Every thing in this world, said my father, is big with jest,—and has wit in it,3 and instruction too,—if we can but find it out.
—Here is the scaffold work of INSTRUCTION, its true point of folly, without the BUILDING behind it.—
—Here is the glass for pedagogues, preceptors, tutors, governours, gerund-grinders and bear-leaders4 to view themselves in, in their true dimensions.—
Oh! there is a husk and shell, Yorick, which grows up with learning, which their unskilfulness knows not how to fling away!
—SCIENCES MAY BE LEARNED BY ROTE, BUT WISDOM NOT.5
Yorick thought my father inspired.—I will enter into obligations this moment, said my father, to lay out all my aunt Dinah’s legacy, in charitable uses (of which, by the bye, my father had no high opinion) if the corporal has any one determinate idea6 annexed to any one word he has repeated.—Prythee, Trim, quoth my father, turning round to him,—What do’st thou mean, by “honouring thy father and mother?”
Allowing them, an’ please your honour, three halfpence a day out of my pay, when they grew old.—And didst thou do that, Trim? said Yorick.—He did indeed, replied my uncle Toby.—Then, Trim, said Yorick, springing out of his chair, and taking the corporal by the hand, thou art the best commentator upon that part of the Decalogue;7 and I honour thee more for it, corporal Trim, than if thou hadst had a hand in the Talmud8 itself.
CHAP. XXXIII
O Blessed health! cried my father, making an exclamation, as he turned over the leaves to the next chapter,—thou art above all gold and treasure;1 ’tis thou who enlargest the soul,—and openest all it’s powers to receive instruction and to relish virtue.—He that has thee, has little more to wish for;—and he that is so wretched as to want thee,—wants every thing with thee.
I have concentrated all that can be said upon this important head, said my father, into a very little room, therefore we’ll read the chapter quite thro’.
My father read as follows.
“The whole secret of health depending upon the due contention for mastery betwixt the radical heat and the radical moisture”2—You have proved that matter of fact, I suppose, above, said Yorick. Sufficiently, replied my father.
In saying this, my father shut the book,—not as if he resolved to read no more of it, for he kept his forefinger in the chapter:——nor pettishly,—for he shut the book slowly; his thumb resting, when he had done it, upon the upper-side of the cover, as his three fingers supported the lower-side of it, without the least compressive violence.——
I have demonstrated the truth of that point, quoth my father, nodding to Yorick, most sufficiently in the preceding chapter.
Now could the man in the moon be told, that a man in the earth had wrote a chapter, sufficiently demonstrating, That the secret of all health depended upon the due contention for mastery betwixt the radical heat and the radical moisture,—and that he had managed the point so