The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman - Laurence Sterne [81]
—You Messrs. the monthly Reviewers!6——how could you cut and slash my jerkin as you did?——how did you know, but you would cut my lining too?
Heartily and from my soul, to the protection of that Being who will injure none of us, do I recommend you and your affairs,—so God bless you;—only next month, if any one of you should gnash his teeth, and storm and rage at me, as some of you did last MAY, (in which I remember the weather was very hot)—don’t be exasperated, if I pass it by again with good temper,——being determined as long as I live or write (which in my case means the same thing) never to give the honest gentleman a worse word or a worse wish, than my uncle Toby gave the fly which buzz’d about his nose all dinner time,——“Go,——go poor devil,” quoth he, “——get thee gone,——why should I hurt thee? This world is surely wide enough to hold both thee and me.”
CHAP. V
Any man, madam, reasoning upwards, and observing the prodigious suffusion of blood in my father’s countenance,—by means of which, (as all the blood in his body seemed to rush up into his face, as I told you) he must have redden’d, pictorically and scientintically speaking, six whole tints and a half, if not a full octave above his natural colour:1——any man, madam, but my uncle Toby, who had observed this, together with the violent knitting of my father’s brows, and the extravagant contortion of his body during the whole affair,—would have concluded my father in a rage; and taking that for granted,——had he been a lover of such kind of concord as arises from two such instruments being put into exact tune,—he would instantly have skrew’d up his, to the same pitch;——and then the devil and all had broke loose—the whole piece, madam, must have been played off like the sixth of Avison’s Scarlatti2—con furia,—like mad.——Grant me patience!——What has con furia,—con strepito,3——or any other hurly-burly word whatever to do with harmony?
Any man, I say, madam, but my uncle Toby, the benignity of whose heart interpreted every motion of the body in the kindest sense the motion would admit of, would have concluded my father angry and blamed him too. My uncle Toby blamed nothing but the taylor who cut the pocket-hole;——so sitting still, till my father had got his handkerchief out of it, and looking all the time up in his face with inexpressible good will—my father at length went on as follows.
CHAP. VI
——“What prodigious armies you had in Flanders!”
——Brother Toby, quoth my father, I do believe thee to be as honest a man, and with as good and as upright a heart as ever God created;——nor is it thy fault, if all the children which have been, may, can, shall, will or ought to be begotten, come with their heads foremost into the world:—but believe me, dear Toby, the accidents which unavoidably way-lay them, not only in the article of our begetting ’em,–though these in my opinion, are well worth considering,——but the dangers and difficulties our children are beset with, after they are got forth into the world, are enow,—little need is there to expose them to unnecessary ones in their passage to it.——Are these dangers, quoth my uncle Toby, laying his hand upon my father’s knee, and looking up seriously in his face for an answer,——are these dangers greater now o’ days, brother, than in times past? Brother Toby, answered my father, if a child was but fairly begot, and born alive, and healthy, and the mother did well after it,——our forefathers never looked further.——My uncle Toby instantly withdrew his hand from off my father’s knee, reclined his body gently back in his chair, raised his head till he could