The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman - Laurence Sterne [226]
Now this being a little bald about the chin, by frequently putting off and on, before she was got with child by the coachman—not one of our family would wear it after. To cover the MASK afresh, was more than the mask was worth——and to wear a mask which was bald, or which could be half seen through, was as bad as having no mask at all——
This is the reason, may it please your reverences, that in all our numerous family, for these four generations, we count no more than one archbishop,3 a Welch judge, some three or four aldermen, and a single mountebank———
In the sixteenth century, we boast of no less than a dozen alchymists.
CHAP. IV
“It is with Love as with Cuckoldom”1——the suffering party is at least the third, but generally the last in the house who knows any thing about the matter: this comes, as all the world knows, from having half a dozen words for one thing; and so long, as what in this vessel of the human frame, is Love—may be Hatred, in that——Sentiment half a yard higher——and Nonsense———no Madam,—not there——I mean at the part I am now pointing to with my forefinger——how can we help ourselves?
Of all mortal, and immortal men too, if you please, who ever soliloquized upon this mystic subject, my uncle Toby was the worst fitted, to have push’d his researches, thro’ such a contention of feelings; and he had infallibly let them all run on, as we do worse matters, to see what they would turn out——had not Bridget’s pre-notification of them to Susannah, and Susannah’s repeated manifesto’s thereupon to all the world, made it necessary for my uncle Toby to look into the affair.
CHAP. V
Why weavers, gardeners, and gladiators—or a man with a pined1 leg (proceeding from some ailment in the foot)—should ever have had some tender nymph breaking her heart in secret for them, are points well and duely settled and accounted for, by ancient and modern physiologists.
A water-drinker, provided he is a profess’d one, and does it without fraud or covin, is precisely in the same predicament: not that, at first sight, there is any consequence, or shew of logic in it, “That a rill of cold water dribbling through my inward parts, should light up a torch in my Jenny’s”—
——The proposition does not strike one; on the contrary it seems to run opposite to the natural workings of causes and effects——
But it shews the weakness and imbecility of human reason.
——“And in perfect good health with it?”
—The most perfect—Madam, that friendship herself could wish me——
—“And drink nothing!—nothing but water?”
—Impetuous fluid! the moment thou presses against the flood-gates of the brain——see how they give way!——
In swims CURIOSITY, beckoning to her damsels to follow—they dive into the centre of the current——
FANCY sits musing upon the bank, and with her eyes following the stream, turns straws and bulrushes into masts and bowsprits——And DESIRE, with vest held up to the knee in one hand, snatches at them, as they swim by her, with the other——
O ye water-drinkers! is it then by this delusive fountain, that ye have so often governed and turn’d this world about like a mill-wheel—grinding the faces2 of the impotent—be-powdering their ribs—be-peppering their noses, and changing sometimes even the very frame and face of nature——
—If I was you, quoth Yorick, I would drink more water, Eugenius.—And, if I was you, Yorick, replied Eugenius, so would I.
Which shews they had both read Longinus3——
For my own part, I am resolved never to read any book but my own, as long as I live.
CHAP. VI
I wish my uncle Toby had been a water-drinker; for then the thing had been accounted for, That the first moment Widow Wadman saw him, she felt something stirring within her in his favour—Something!