The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman - Laurence Sterne [80]
As my father’s India handkerchief was in his right coat pocket, he should by no means have suffered his right hand to have got engaged: on the contrary, instead of taking off his wig with it, as he did, he ought to have committed that entirely to the left; and then, when the natural exigency my father was under of rubbing his head, call’d out for his handkerchief, he would have had nothing in the world to have done, but to have put his right hand into his right coat pocket and taken it out;—which he might have done without any violence, or the least ungraceful twist in any one tendon or muscle of his whole body.
In this case, (unless indeed, my father had been resolved to make a fool of himself by holding the wig stiff in his left hand—or by making some nonsensical angle or other at his elbow joint, or arm-pit)—his whole attitude had been easy—natural—unforced: Reynolds1 himself, as great and gracefully as he paints, might have painted him as he sat.
Now, as my father managed this matter,——consider what a devil of a figure my father made of himself.
—In the latter end of Queen Anne’s reign, and in the beginning of the reign of King George the first—“Coat pockets were cut very low down in the skirt.”——I need say no more——the father of mischief, had he been hammering at it a month, could not have contrived a worse fashion for one in my father’s situation.
CHAP. III
It was not an easy matter in any king’s reign, (unless you were as lean a subject as myself) to have forced your hand diagonally, quite across your whole body, so as to gain the bottom of your opposite coat-pocket.—In the year, one thousand seven hundred and eighteen, when this happened, it was extremely difficult; so that when my uncle Toby discovered the transverse zig-zaggery of my father’s approaches towards it, it instantly brought into his mind those he had done duty in,1 before the gate of St. Nicholas;——the idea of which drew off his attention so entirely from the subject in debate, that he had got his right hand to the bell to ring up Trim, to go and fetch his map of Namur, and his compasses and sector along with it, to measure the returning angles of the traverses of that attack,—but particularly of that one, where he received his wound upon his groin.
My father knit his brows, and as he knit them, all the blood in his body seemed to rush up into his face——my uncle Toby dismounted immediately.
—I did not apprehend your uncle Toby was o’ horseback.———
CHAP. IV
A man’s body and his mind, with the utmost reverence to both I speak it, are exactly like a jerkin, and a jerkin’s lining;—rumple the one—you rumple the other.1 There is one certain exception however in this case, and that is, when you are so fortunate a fellow, as to have had your jerkin made of a gum-taffeta, and the body-lining to it, of a sarcenet2 or thin persian.
Zeno, Cleanthes, Diogenes Babylonius, Dyonisius Heracleotes, Antipater, Panætius and Possidonius amongst the Greeks;—Cato and Varro and Seneca amongst the Romans;—Pantenus and Clemens Alexandrinus and Montaigne amongst the Christians;3 and a score and a half of good honest, unthinking, Shandean people as ever lived, whose names I can’t recollect,—all pretended that their jerkins were made after this fashion,——you might have rumpled and crumpled, and doubled and creased, and fretted and fridged the outsides of them all to pieces;—in short, you might have played the very devil with them, and at the same time, not one of the insides of ’em would have been one button the worse, for all you had done to them.
I believe in my conscience that mine is made up somewhat after this sort:—for never poor