 CHAPTER XXVIII My father's collection was not great, but to make amends it was curious, and consequently he was some time in making it. He had the great good fortune, however, to set off well in getting Bruce Cambe's prologue upon great noses almost for nothing, for he gave no more for Bruce Cambe than three-half crowns, owing indeed to the strong fancy which the stall-man saw my father had for the book the moment he laid his hands upon it. There are not three Bruce Cambe's in Christendom, said the stall-man, except what are chained up in the libraries of the curious. My father flung down the money as quick as lightning, took Bruce Cambe into his bosom, hide home from Piccadilly to Coleman Street with it as he would have hide home with the treasure, without taking his hand once off from Bruce Cambe all the way. To those who do not yet know of which gender Bruce Cambe is in as much as a prologue upon long noses might easily be done by either, it will be no objection against the simile to say that when my father got home he solaced himself with Bruce Cambe after the manner in which, tis ten to one, your worship solaced yourself with your first mistress, that is, from morning even unto night, which, by the by, how delightful so ever it may prove to the inamorato, is of little or no entertainment at all to bystanders. Take notice I go no farther with the simile. My father's eye was greater than his appetite, his zeal greater than his knowledge. He cooled, his affections became divided, he got hold of Pregnates, purchased Scroderus, Andrei Piraeus, Boucher's Evening Conferences, and above all, the great and learned Hafen Slakenbergius, of which, as I shall have much to say by and by, I will say nothing now. CHAPTER XXIX Of all the tracts my father was at the pains to procure and study in support of his hypothesis. There was not any one wherein he felt a more cruel disappointment at first than in the celebrated dialogue between Panthegas and Cochleys, written by the chaste pen of the great and venerable Erasmus, upon the various uses and seasonable applications of long noses. Now don't let Satan, my dear girl, in this chapter take advantage of any one spot of rising ground to get astride of your imagination, if you can any ways help it. Or if he is so nimble as to slip on, let me beg of you, like an unbacked Philly, to frisk it, to squirt it, to jump it, to rear it, to bound it, and to kick it with long kicks and short kicks, till, like Tickletobee's mare, you break a strap or a cropper and throw his worship into the dirt. You need not kill him. And pray, who was Tickletobee's mare? Tis just as discreditable and unscaller like a question, sir, as to have asked what year, Ab-Urbacandita, the Second Punic War, broke out. Who was Tickletobee's mare? Read, read, read, read, my unlearned reader, read, or by the knowledge of the great saint Parallel Pomenon, I tell you beforehand you had better throw down the book at once. For without much reading, by which your reverence knows, I mean, much knowledge, you will no more be able to penetrate the moral of the next marbled page motley emblem of my work. And the world with all its sagacity has been able to unravel the many opinions, transactions, and truths which still lie mystically hid under the dark veil of the black one. There follow two marble plates. CHAPTER XXX Nihilmi Penetet, who just nasi, quoth Pamphagus, that is, my nose has been the making of me. Mac Estker Poenitiat, replies Coakley's, that is, how the deuce should such a nose fail. The doctrine you see was laid down by Erasmus as my father wished it, with the utmost plainness, but my father's disappointment was in finding nothing more from so able a pen but the bare fact itself. Without any of that speculative subtlety or ambidexterity of argumentation upon it, which heaven had bestowed upon man on purpose to investigate truth and fight for her on all sides. My father pitched and pewed at first most terribly, to his worth something to have a good name, as the dialogue was of Erasmus. My father soon came to himself, and read it over and over again with great application, studying every word and every syllable of it through and through in its most strict and literal interpretation. He could still make nothing of it that way. May hap there is more meant than is said in it, quoth my father. Learned men, brother Toby, don't write dialogues upon long noses for nothing. I'll study the mystic and the allegoric sense. Here is some room to turn a man's self in, brother. My father read on. Now I find it needful to inform your references and worships that, besides the many nautical uses of long noses enumerated by Erasmus, the dialogist affirmeth that a long nose is not without its domestic conveniences also, for that in a case of distress, and for want of a pair of bellows, it will do excellently well, add exotandum focum, to stir up the fire. Here had been prodigal in her gifts to my father beyond measure, and had sown the seeds of verbal criticism as deep within him as she had done the seeds of all other knowledge, so that he had got out his penknife and was trying experiments upon the sentence to see if he could not scratch some better sense into it. I've got within a single letter, brother Toby, cried my father, of Erasmus his mystic meaning. You are near enough, brother, replied my uncle in all conscience. Shaw cried my father scratching on. I might as well be seven miles off. I've done it, said my father snapping his fingers. See, my dear brother Toby, how I have mended the sense. But you have marred a word, replied my uncle Toby. My father put on his spectacles, bit his lip, and tore out the leaf in a passion. End of CHAPTER XXVIII by Laurence Stearn. CHAPTER XXXI CHAPTER XXXI CHAPTER XXXI CHAPTER XXXI CHAPTER XXXI CHAPTER XXXI CHAPTER XXXI CHAPTER XXXI CHAPTER XXXI CHAPTER XXXI CHAPTER XXXI CHAPTER XXXI CHAPTER XXXI CHAPTER XXXI CHAPTER XXXI CHAPTER XXXI CHAPTER XXXI CHAPTER XXXI CHAPTER XXXI CHAPTER XXXI CHAPTER XXXI CHAPTER XXXI CHAPTER XXXI CHAPTER XXXI CHAPTER XXXI CHAPTER XXXI CHAPTER XXXI CHAPTER XXXI CHAPTER XXXI CHAPTER XXXI CHAPTER XXXI CHAPTER XXXI CHAPTER XXXI CHAPTER XXXI CHAPTER XXXI CHAPTER XXXI CHAPTER XXXI CHAPTER 32 There was not any one scene more entertaining in our family, and to do justice at this point, and here I put off my cap, and laid upon the table close beside my ink-horn, on purpose to make my declaration to the world, concerning this one article the more solemn, that I believe in my soul, and as my love and partiality to my understanding blinds me, the hand of the supreme maker and first designer of all things, never made or put a family together, in that period at least, of it which I have sat down to write a story of, where the characters of it were cast, or contrasted with so dramatic a felicity as ours was, was his end, or in which the capacities of affording such exquisite scenes and the powers of shifting them perpetually from morning to night were lodged and entrusted with so unlimited a confidence, as in the Shandy family. Not any one of these was more diverting, I say, in this whimsical theatre of ours, than what frequently arose out of this self-same chapter of long noses, especially when my father's imagination was heated with the inquiry, and nothing would serve him but to heat my Uncle Toby's too. My Uncle Toby would give my father all possible fair play in this attempt, and with infinite patience would sit smoking his pipe for whole hours together whilst my father was practising upon his head, and trying every accessible avenue to drive Brignitz and Scrogerus's solutions into it. Whether they were above my Uncle Toby's reason, or contrary to it, or that his brain was like damned timber, and no spa could possibly take hold, or that it was so full of saps, mines, blinds, curtains, and such military disqualifications to his scene clearly into Brignitz and Scrogerus's doctrines, I say not. Let schoolmen, scullions, anatomists, and engineers, fight for it among themselves. To some misfortune, I make no doubt, in this affair, that my father had every word of it to translate for the benefit of my Uncle Toby, and render out of Slocum Burgiasus Latin, of which he was no great master, his translation was not always of the purist, and generally least so where it was most wanted. This naturally opened a door to a second misfortune, that in the warmer paroxysms of a zeal to open my Uncle Toby's eyes, my father's ideas ran on as much faster than the translation as the translation outmoved my Uncle Toby's. Neither one or the other added much to the perspicuity of my father's lecture. Chapter 33 The gift of reticulation and making syllogisms, I mean, and man, for in superior classes of beings, such as angels and spirits, it is all done, may it please your worships, as they tell me, by intuition, and beings inferior, as your worships all know, syllogised by their noses. Though there is an island swimming in the sea, though not altogether at a tease, whose inhabitants, if my intelligence deceives me not, are so wonderfully gifted as to syllogise after the same fashion, and of times to make very well out too. But that's neither here nor there. The gift of doing it, as it should be, amongst us, or the greater principal act of ratiocination and man, as logicians tell us, is a finding of the agreement or disagreement of two ideas one with another, by the intervention of a third, called the medius terminus. Just as a man, as logwell observers, by a yard, finds two men's nine-pin alleys to be of the same length, which could not be brought together to measure their equality by juxtaposition. Had the same great reasoner looked on, as my father illustrated his systems of noses, and observed Michael Tobias' deportment, what great attention he gave to every word, and as often as he took his pipe from his mouth, with what wonderful seriousness he contemplated the lengths of it, surveying it transversely as he held it betwixt his finger and his thumb, then for right, then in this way, and then that, in all its possible directions and foreshortenings, he would have concluded, Michael Tobias had got hold of the medius terminus, and was syllogising and measuring with it the druth of each hypothesis of long noses, an order as my father laid them before him. This by-and-by was more than my father wanted. His aim in all the pains he was at, in these philosophic lectures, was to enable Michael Tobias not to discuss, but to comprehend, to hold the grains and scruples of learning, not to weigh them. Michael Tobias, as you will read in the next chapter, denies as the one or the other. CHAPTER 34 TIS PITTY, cried my father one winter's night, after three hours' painful translation of Sluukenberg's, TIS PITTY, cried my father, putting my mother's thread-paper into the book for a mark, as he spoke, that truth, brother Toby, should shut herself up in such impregnable fastnesses, and be so obstinate as not to surrender herself sometimes up upon the closest siege. Now it happened then, as indeed it had often done before, that my Uncle Toby's fancy, during the time of my father's explanation of brignettes to him, having nothing to stay at there, had taken a short flight to the bowling-green. His body might as well have taken a term there, too, so that with all the semblance of a deep school-man intent upon the media's terminus, my Uncle Toby was in fact as ignorant of the whole lecture, and all its frozen cons, as if my father had been translating half Sluukenbergius from the Latin tongue into the Cherokee. But the word siege, like a talismanic power in my father's metaphor, wafting back my Uncle Toby's fancy, quick as a note could follow the touch, he opened his ears, and my father, observing that he took his pipe out of his mouth, and shuffled his chair nearer the table, as was a desired profit, my father, with great pleasure, began his sentence again, chaining only the plan and robbing the metaphor of the siege of it, to keep clear of some dangers my father apprehended from it. "'Tis a pity,' said my father, that droves can only be on one side, Brother Toby, considering what ingenuity these learned men have all shown in their solutions of noses. "'Can noses be dissolved?' replied my Uncle Toby. My father thrust back his chair, rose up, put on his hat, took full-long strides to the door, jerked it open, thrust his hat half-way out, shut the door again, took no notice of the bad hinge, returned to his table, plucked my mother's thread-paper out of Slukenbergius' book, went hastily to his bureau, walked slowly back, twisted my mother's thread-paper about his thumb, unbuttoned his waistcoat, threw my mother's thread-paper into the fire, bit her subtle pin-cushion and two, filled his mouth with bran, confounded it, but mark! The oath of confusion was left us at my Uncle Toby's brain, which was even confused enough already. The curse came charged only with the bran. The bran, made please your honours, was no more than powered it to the ball. It was well my father's passion lasted not long, for so long as if they did last, they let him a busy live-ond, and it is one of the most unaccountable problems that ever I met with in my observations of human nature, that nothing should prove my father's matters so much, or make his passions go off so like gunpowder, as the unexpected strokes his signs met with from the quaint simplicity of my Uncle Toby's questions. A ten dozen of hornets stung him behind in so many different places all at one time, he could not have exerted more mechanical functions in fewer seconds, or started half so much as with one single query of three words unseasonably popping and full upon him in his hobby-hortical career. Does all want to my Uncle Toby? He smoked his pie-bomb with unverited composure, his heart never intended offence to his brother, and as his head could seldom find out where the sting of it lay, he always gave my father the credit of cooling by himself. He was five minutes and thirty-five seconds about it in the present case. By all that's good, said my father, swearing as he came to himself and taking the oath out of an office as digest of curses, though to do my father justice it was a fraud, as he told Dr. Slopp in the affair of an office, which he seldom committed as any man upon earth. By all that's good and great, Brother Toby, said my father, if it was not for the aids of philosophy, which befriended one so much as they do, you would put a man beside all temper. Why, by the solutions of noses of which I was telling you, I meant, as you might have known, had you favoured me with one grain of attention, the various accounts which learn at men of different kinds of knowledge have given the world of the causes of short-along noses. There is no cause but one, replied my Uncle Toby. Why one man's nose is longer than another's, but because of that God pleases to have it so. That is Grand Luciaire's solution, said my father. It is he, continued my Uncle Toby, looking up and not regarding my father's interruption, who makes us all and frames and puts us together in such forms and proportions, and for such ends as is agreeable to his infinite wisdom. "'Tis a pious account,' cried my father, but not philosophical. There is more religion in it than sound science.' It was no inconsistent part of my Uncle Toby's character that a feared God and reverenced religion. So, at the moment my father finished his remark, my Uncle Toby fell, a whistling Lilia Bulliero, with more zeal, though more out of tune than usual. What has become of my wife's a threat-paper?' CHAPTER XXXIV THE LIFE AND OPINIONS OF TRISTRUM SHANDY GENTLEMAN Volume II by Lawrence Stern CHAPTER XXXV No matter. As an appendage to seamstressy, the thread-paper might be of some consequence to my mother, of none to my father as a mark in Slorkenbergius. Slorkenbergius, in every page of him, was a rich treasure of inexhaustible knowledge to my father. He could not open him amiss. And he would often say, in closing the book, that if all the arts and sciences in the world, with the books which treated of them were lost, should the wisdom and policies of governments, he would say, through disuse ever happen to be forgot, and all that statesmen had wrote or caused to be written upon the strong or the weak sides of courts and kingdoms, and they be forgot also, and Slorkenbergius only left. There would be enough in him in all conscience, he would say, to set the world a-going again. A treasure, therefore, was he indeed, an institute of all that was necessary to be known of noses, and everything else, at matine, noon, and vespers was half and Slorkenbergius his recreation and delight, towards forever in his hands. You would have sworn, sir, it had been a cannon's prayer-book, so worn, so glazed, so contrite it, and a-treated was it, with fingers and with thumbs in all its parts, from one end even unto the other. I am not such a bigot to Slorkenbergius as my father. There is a fund in him, no doubt, but in my opinion, the best, I don't say the most profitable, but the most amusing part of half and Slorkenbergius is his tales, and considering he was a German, many of them are told not without fancy. These take up his second book, containing nearly one half of his folio, and are comprehended in ten decades, each decade containing ten tales. Philosophy is not built upon tales, and therefore, it was certainly wrong in Slorkenbergius to send them into the world by that name. There are a few of them in his eighth, ninth and ten decades, which I own seem rather playful and sportive than speculative, but in general they are to be looked upon by the learned as a detail of so many independent facts, all of them turning round, somehow or other, upon the main hinges of his subject, and added to his work as so many illustrations upon the doctrines of Moses. As we have leisure enough upon our hands, if you give me leave, madam, I'll tell you the ninth tale of his tenth decade. Slorkenbergie Fabella Slorkenbergius's Tale As half and Slorkenbergius Donazis is extremely scarce, it may not be unacceptable to the learned reader to see the specimen of a few pages of his original. I will make no reflection upon it, but that his storytelling Latin is much more concise than his philosophic, and, I think, has more of Latinity in it. Vespera Quadam Frigidae It was one cool refreshing evening at the close of a very sultry day in the latter end of the month of August, when a stranger mounted upon a dark mule with a small cloak bag behind him, containing a few shirts, a pair of shoes, and a crimson satin pair of britches entered the town of Strasbourg. He told the sentinel, who questioned him as he entered the gates, that he had been at the promontory of noses, was going on to Frankfurt and should be back again at Strasbourg that day month, in his way to the borders of crim tartary. The sentinel looked up into the stranger's face. He never saw such a nose in his life. I have made a very good venture of it, quote the stranger, so slipping his wrist out of the loop of a black ribbon to which a short scimitar was hung. He put his hand into his pocket, and with great courtesy, touching the fore part of his cap with his left hand, as he extended his right, he put a florid into the sentinel's hand and passed on. It grieves me, said the sentinel, speaking to a little dwarfish, bandylegged drummer, that so courteous a soul should have lost his scabbard, he cannot travel without one to his scimitar, and will not be able to get a scabbard to fit in all Strasbourg. I never had one, replied the stranger, looking back to the sentinel, and putting his hand up to his cap as he spoke. I carry it, continued he, thus, holding up his naked scimitar, his mule moving on slowly all the time, on purpose to defend my nose. It is well worth it, gentle stranger, replied the sentinel. It is not worth a single stiver, said the bandylegged drummer, it is a nose of parchment. As I am a true Catholic, except that it is six times as big, it is a nose, said the sentinel, like my own. I heard it crackle, said the drummer. By Dunder, said the sentinel, I saw it bleed. What a pity, cried the bandylegged drummer, we did not both touch it. At the very time that this dispute was maintaining by the sentinel and the drummer, was the same point debating betwixt a trumpeter and a trumpeter's wife, who were just then coming up, and had stopped to see the stranger pass by. Bennett, dicity, what a nose, tis as long, said the trumpeter's wife, as a trumpeter. And of the same metal, said the trumpeter, as you hear by its sneezing, tis as soft as a flute, said she, tis brass, said the trumpeter, tis a pudding's end, said his wife. I tell thee again, said the trumpeter, tis a brazen nose. I'll know the bottom of it, said the trumpeter's wife, for I will touch it with my finger before I sleep. The stranger's mule moved on at so slow a rate that he heard every word of the dispute, not only betwixt the sentinel and the drummer, but betwixt the trumpeter and trumpeter's wife. No, said he, dropping his reins upon the mule's neck and laying both his hands upon his breast, the one over the other in a saint-like position, his mule going on easily all the time. No, said he, looking up. I am not such a debtor to the world, slandered and disappointed as I have been, as to give it that conviction. No, said he, my nose shall never be touched while heaven gives me strength. To do what, said a burgamaster's wife. The stranger took no notice of the burgamaster's wife. He was making a vow to St Nicholas, which, done, having uncrossed his arms with the same solemnity with which he had crossed them, he took up the reins of his bridle with his left hand, and putting his right hand into his bosom, with the scimitar hanging loosely to the wrist of it, he rode on, as slowly as one foot of the mule could follow another, through the principal streets of Strasbourg, till chance brought him to the great inn in the market place over against the church. The moment the stranger alighted, he ordered his mule to be led into the stable, and his cloak bag to be brought in, then opening and taking out of it his crimson satin britches, with a silver-fringed appendage to them, which I dare not translate. He put his britches with his fringed codpiece on, and forthwith, with his short scimitar in his hand, walked out to the grand parade. The stranger had just taken three turns upon the parade, when he perceived the trumpeter's wife at the opposite side of it, so turning short, in pain lest his nose should be attempted, he instantly went back to his inn, undressed himself, packed up his crimson satin britches, etc., in his cloak bag, and called for his mule. I am going forwards, said the stranger, for Frankfurt, and shall be back at Strasbourg this day month. I hope, continued the stranger, stroking down the face of his mule with his left hand, as he was going to mount it, that you have been kind to this faithful slave of mine. It has carried me and my cloak bag, continued he, tapping the mules back, above six hundred leagues. It is a long journey, sir, replied the master of the inn, unless a man has a great business. Tut, tut, said the stranger, I have been at the promontory of noses, and have got me one of the goodliest, thank heaven, that ever fell to a single man's lot. Whilst the stranger was giving this odd account of himself, the master of the inn and his wife kept both their eyes fixed full upon the stranger's nose. By Saint Radagunda, said the innkeeper's wife to herself, there is more of it than in any dozen of the largest noses put together in all Strasbourg. Is it not, said she, whispering her husband in his ear, is it not a noble nose? It is an imposture, my dear, said the master of an inn. It is a false nose. It is a true nose, said his wife. It is made of fir tree, said he. I smell the turpentine. There's a pimple on it, said she. It is a dead nose, replied the innkeeper. It is a live nose, and if I am alive myself, said the innkeeper's wife, I will touch it. I have made a vow to Saint Nicholas this day, said the stranger, that my nose shall not be touched till here the stranger suspending his voice looked up. Till when, said she hastily, it shall never be touched, said he, clasping his hands and bringing them close to his breast, till that hour, what hour, cried the innkeeper's wife. Never, never, said the stranger, never till I am got. For heaven's sake, into what place, said she. The stranger rode away without saying a word. The stranger had not got half a league on his way towards Frankfurt, before all the city of Strasbourg was in an uproar about his nose. The complin bells were just ringing to call the Strasburgers to their devotions, and shut up the duties of the day in prayer. No soul in all Strasbourg heard him. The city was like a swarm of bees, men, women and children, the complin bells tinkling all the time, flying here and there, in at one door, out at another, this way and that way, long ways and crossways, up one street, down another, in at this alley, out of that. Did you see it? Did you see it? Did you see it? Oh, did you see it? Who saw it? Who did see it? For mercy's sake, who saw it? A lackaday. I was at Vespers. I was washing. I was starching. I was scouring. I was quilting. God help me. I never saw it. I never touched it. Would I had been a sentinel, a bandy-legged drummer, a trumpeter, a trumpeter's wife? Was the general cry and lamentation in every street and corner of Strasbourg? Whilst all this confusion and disorder triumphed throughout the great city of Strasbourg, was the courteous stranger going on as gently upon his mule in his way to Frankfurt, as if he had no concern at all in the affair, talking all the way he rode in broken sentences, sometimes to his mule, sometimes to himself, sometimes to his Julia. Oh, Julia, my lovely Julia! Nay, I cannot stop to let thee bite that thistle. That ever the suspected tongue of a rival should have roped me of enjoyment when I was upon the point of tasting it. Pah! It is nothing but a thistle. Never mind it. Thou shalt have a better supper at night. Banished from my country, my friends, from thee. Poor devil, thou art suddenly tired with thy journey. Come, get on a little faster. There's nothing in my cloak-bag but two shirts, a crimson satin pair of britches, and a fringed—dear Julia! But why to Frankfurt? Is it that there is a hand unfelt which secretly is conducting me through these meanders and unsuspected tracts? Stumbling! I said, Nicholas, every step, why at this rate we shall be all night in getting in! To happiness! Or am I to be the sport of fortune and slander, destined to be driven forth, unconvicted, unheard, untouched? If so, why did I not stay at Strasbourg, where justice, but I had sworn? Come, thou shalt drink, to St. Nicholas, oh, Julia, what does thou pick up thy ears at? It is nothing but a man, et cetera. The stranger rode on, communing in this manner with his mule and Julia, till he arrived at his inn, where, as soon as he arrived, he alighted, saw his mule as he had promised it taken good care of, took off his cloak-bag, with his crimson satin britches, et cetera, in it, called for an omelette to his supper, went to bed about twelve o'clock, and in five minutes fell fast asleep. It was about the same hour when the tumult in Strasbourg, being abated for that night, the Strasburgers had all got quietly into their beds, but not like the stranger, for the rest either of their minds or bodies. Queen Mab, like an elf as she was, had taken the stranger's nose, and without reduction of its bulk, had that night been at the pains of slitting and dividing it into as many noses of different cuts and fashions, as there were heads in Strasbourg to hold them. The abes of Quedlingburg, who, with the four great dignitaries of her chapter, the prioresse, the dinesse, the subchantress, and senior canonesse, had that week come to Strasbourg to consult the university upon a case of conscience relating to their placket-holes, was ill all the night. The courteous stranger's nose had got perched upon the top of the pineal gland of her brain, and made such rousing work in the fancies of the four great dignitaries of her chapter, they could not get a wink of sleep the whole night through for it. There was no keeping a limb still amongst them. In short, they got up like so many ghosts. The penitentiaries of the Third Order of St. Francis, the nuns of Mount Calvary, the primonstratenses, the clunienses, half and Sloganbergius means the Benedictine nuns of Cluny, founded in the year 940 by Otto Abbe de Cluny. The Carthusians, and all the severer orders of nuns, who lay that night in blankets of hair-cloth, were still in a worse condition than the abes of Quedlingburg, by tumbling and tossing, and tossing and tumbling from one side of their beds to the other the whole night long. The several sisterhoods had scratched and mauled themselves all to death. They got out of their beds almost flayed alive. Everybody thought St. Anthony had visited them for probation with his fire. They never had once, in short, shut their eyes the whole night long, from Vespers to Mattens. The nuns of St. Ursula acted the wisest. They never attempted to go to bed at all. The Dean of Strasburg, the Prebendries, the Capitulars and Domiciliars, capitulally assembled in the morning to consider the case of buttered buns, all wished they had followed the nuns of St. Ursula's example. In the hurry and confusion everything had been in the night before, the bakers had all forgot to lay their leaven. There were no buttered buns to be had for breakfast in all Strasburg. The whole close of the cathedral was in one eternal commotion, such a cause of restlessness and disquietude, and such a zealous inquiry into that cause of restlessness had never happened in Strasburg since Martin Luther, with his doctrines, had turned the city upside down. If the stranger's nose took this liberty of thrusting himself thus into the dishes of religious orders, etc., what a carnival did his nose make of it in those of the laity. Footnote. Mr. Shandy's compliments to Orators is very sensible that Slokinbergius has here changed his metaphor, which he is very guilty of, that as a translator Mr. Shandy has all along done what he could to make him stick to it, but that here it was impossible. End of footnote. It is more than my pen, worn to the stump as it is, has power to describe, though I acknowledge, Christ Slokinbergius, with more gaiety of thought than I could have expected from him, that there is many a good simile now subsisting in the world which might give my countrymen some idea of it, but at the close of such a folio as this, wrote for their sakes, and in which I have spent the greatest part of my life, though I own to them the simile is in being, yet would it not be unreasonable in them to expect that I should have either time or inclination to search for it? Let it suffice to say that the riot and disorder it occasioned in the Strasburgers fantasies was so general, such an overpowering mastership had it got of all the faculties of the Strasburgers' minds. So many strange things, with equal confidence on all sides, and with equal eloquence in all places, were spoken and sworn to concerning it, that turned the whole stream of all discourse and wonder towards it. Every soul, good and bad, rich and poor, learned and unlearned, doctor and student, mistress and maid, gentle and simple, nun's flesh and woman's flesh, in Strasburg spent their time in hearing tidings about it. Every eye in Strasburg languished to see it. Every finger, every thumb in Strasburg, burned to touch it. Now what might add, if anything may be thought necessary to add, to so vehement a desire, was this, that the sentinel, the bandy-legged drummer, the trumpeter, the trumpeter's wife, the burgamaster's widow, the master of the inn, and the master of the inn's wife, how widely so ever they all differed every one from another in their testimonies and description of the stranger's nose, they all agreed together in two points, namely that he was gone to Frankfurt, and would not return to Strasburg till that day month. And secondly, whether his nose was true or false, that the stranger himself was one of the most perfect paragons of beauty, the finest-made man, the most genteel, the most generous of his purse, the most courteous in his carriage that had ever entered the gates of Strasburg, that, as he rode, with scimita, slung loosely to his wrist through the streets, and walked with his crimson satin britches across the parade, towards with so sweet an air of careless modesty, and so manly with all, as would have put the heart in jeopardy, had his nose not stood in the way, of every virgin who had cast her eyes upon him. I call not upon that heart which is a stranger to the throbs and yearnings of curiosity, so excited to justify the abyss of Quedlingburg, the Prioresse, the Dnesse, and the subchantress, forcending at noonday for the trumpet's wife. She went through the streets of Strasburg with her husband's trumpet in her hand, for best apparatus the straightness of the time would allow her, for the illustration of her theory, she stayed no longer than three days. The sentinel and bandy-legged drummer, nothing on this side of old Athens could equal them, they read their lectures under the city gates to comers and goers, with all the pomp of a chrysipus and a crantoor in their porticoes. The master of the inn, with his osler on his left hand, read his also in the same style, under the portico, or gateway of his stable-yard. His wife, hers more privately in a back room, all flocked to their lectures, not promiscuously, but to this or that, as is ever the way, as faith and credulity marshaled them. In a word, each Strasburger came crowding for intelligence, and every Strasburger had the intelligence he wanted. It is worth remarking, for the benefit of all demonstrators in natural philosophy, etc., that as soon as the trumpet's wife had finished the abyss of Quedlingburg's private lecture, and had begun to read in public, which she did upon a stool in the middle of the Great Parade, she incommodied the other demonstrators mainly by gaining incontinentally the most fashionable part of the city of Strasburg for her auditory. But when a demonstrator in philosophy, Christ Slocke in Burgias, has a trumpet for an apparatus, pray what rival in science can pretend to be heard besides him. Most the unlearned, through these conduits of intelligence, were all busied in getting down to the bottom of the well, where truth keeps her little court, were the learned in their way as busy as pumping her up through the conduits of dialect induction. They concerned themselves not with facts, they reasoned. Not one profession had thrown more light upon this subject than the faculty, had not all their disputes about it run into the affair of wends and edomatous swellings, they could not keep clear of them for their bloods and souls. The stranger's nose had nothing to do either with wends or edomatous swellings. It was demonstrated, however, very satisfactorily, that such a preponderous mass of heterogeneous matter could not be congested and conglomerated to the nose whilst the inference was in utera, without destroying the statical balance of the fetus and throwing it plump upon its head nine months before the time. The opponents granted the theory, they denied the consequences. And if a suitable provision of veins, arteries, etc., said they, was not laid in for the due nourishment of such a nose in the very first stamina and rudiments of its formation before it came into the world, baiting the case of wends, it could not regularly grow and be sustained afterwards. This was all answered by a dissertation upon nutriment and the effect which nutriment had in extending the vessels and in the increase and prolongation of the muscular parts to the greatest growth and expansion imaginable. In the triumph of which theory they went so far as to affirm that there was no cause in nature where a nose might not grow to the size of the man himself. The respondents satisfied the world this event could never happen to them so long as a man had but one stomach and one pair of lungs. For the stomach, said they, being the only organ destined for the reception of food and turning it into child, and the lungs the only engine of sanctification, it could possibly work off no more than what the appetite brought it, or admitting the possibility of a man's overloading his stomach, nature had set bounds, however, to his lungs. The engine was of a determined size and strength and could elaborate but a certain quantity in a given time. That is, it could produce just as much blood as was sufficient for one single man, and no more. So that, if there was as much nose as man, they proved a mortification must necessarily ensue, and for as much as there could not be a support for both, that the nose must either fall off from the man, or the man inevitably fall off from his nose. Nature accommodates herself to these emergencies, cried the opponents. What else do you say to the case of a whole stomach, a whole pair of lungs, and but half a man, when both his legs have been unfortunately shot off? He dies of a plethora, said they, or must spit blood, and in a fortnight or three weeks go off in a consumption. It happens otherwise, replied the opponents. It ought not, said they. The more curious and intimate inquirers after nature and her doings, though they went hand in hand a good way together, yet they all divided about the nose at last, almost as much as the faculty itself. They amicably laid it down that there was a just and geometrical arrangement and proportion of the several parts of the human frame to its several destinations, offices, and functions, which could not be transgressed but within certain limits, that nature, though she sported, she sported within a certain circle, and they could not agree about the diameter of it. The logicians stuck much closer to the point before them than any of the classes of the literati. They began and ended with the word nose, and had it not been for a Petitia prankippy, which one of the ablest of them ran his head against in the beginning of the combat, and the whole controversy had been settled at once. A nose, argued the logician, cannot bleed without blood, and not only blood, but blood circulating in it to supply the phenomenon with the succession of drops, a stream being but a quicker succession of drops that is included, said he. Now death, continued the logician, being nothing but a stagnation of the blood. I deny the definition. Death is a separation of the soul from the body, said his antagonist. Then we don't agree about our weapons, said the logician. Then there is an end of the dispute, replied the antagonist. The civilians were still more concise, what they offered being more in the nature of a decree than a dispute. Such a monstrous nose, said they, had it been a true nose could not possibly have been suffered in civil society, and if false, to impose upon society with such false signs and tokens, was a still greater violation of its rights, and must have had still less mercy shown it. The only objection to this was that if it proved anything, it proved the stranger's nose was neither true nor false. End of Chapter 35 Part 1 Chapter 35 Part 2 of Tristram Shandy, Volume 2 This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by I. C. Jumbo The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentlemen. Volume 2 by Lawrence Stern. Chapter 35 Part 2 This left room for the controversy to go on. It was maintained by the Advocates of the Ecclesiastic Court that there was nothing to inhibit a decree, since the stranger ex-Mero Motu had confessed he had been at the Prometary of Noses, and had got one of the goodliest, etc., etc. To this it was answered it was impossible there should be such a place as the Prometary of Noses, and the learned be ignorant where it lay. The Commissary of the Bishop of Strasbourg undertook the courts, explained this matter in a treatise upon proverbial phrases, showing them that the Prometary of Noses was a mere allegoric expression, importing no more than that nature had given him a long nose, in proof of which, with great learning, he cited the underwritten authorities which had decided the point incontestably. Not only ex-Nostratibus e'adem loquendi formula utun, quinimo et logistae et canonistae, vide parc e'baneas indi el provincial constitut de congec, vide vol lib for titul e'en seven qua etiam in re-conspir, om de promontorio nas titchmak, ff d tit three fol one eight nine pasim, vide glos de contra-hand empt et cetera, nec known j scrudre in cap para refut per totum, cum hees cons revre j tubal, sentent et prov cap nine ff eleven twelve obitair, vi et librum cuitit de terris et fras belg ad finem, cum coment en bar di belg, vide scrip argento ratens de antique e'c in epesc archiv, fid col per for niacobum coins hovent folio argent 1583, praikip ad finem, quibus ad rebuf in el obvenire de signif nom ff fol et de jure gent et civil, de protib aliena foid per federa test yoha luxeus in prolegum quem velim videas de anali cap one two three, vide idea. Had it not appeared that a dispute about some franchises of dean and chapter-lands had been determined by it 19 years before. It happened, I must say, unluckily for truth, because they were giving her a lift another way in so doing, that the two universities of Strasbourg, the Lutheran, founded in the year 1538 by Jacobus Soumis, councillor of the senate, and the Popish, founded by Leopold, Archduke of Austria, were, during all this time, employing the whole depth of their knowledge, except just what the affair of the abyss of Quedlingburg's placket-hole required, in determining the point of Martin Luther's damnation. The Popish doctors had undertaken to demonstrate a priori, that from the necessary influence of the planets on the 22nd day of October 1483, when the moon was in the twelfth house, Jupiter, Mars and Venus in the third, the sun, Saturn and Mercury all got together in the fourth, that he must, in course, and unavoidably, be a damned man, and that his doctrines, by a direct corollary, must be damned doctrines too. In reading this, my father would always shake his head. By inspection into his horoscope, where five planets were in coition, all at once with Scorpio in the ninth house, with the Arabians allotted to religion, it appeared that Martin Luther did not care one stiver about the matter, and that from the horoscope directed to the conjunction of Mars, they made it plain likewise, he must die cursing and blaspheming, with the blast of which his soul, being steeped in guilt, sailed before the wind in the lake of Hellfire. The little objection of the Lutheran doctors to this was that it must certainly be the soul of another man, born October 22nd, 83, which was forced to sail down before the wind in that manner, in as much as it appeared from the register of Islaban in the county of Mansfeld, that Luther was not born in the year 1483, but in 84, and not on the 22nd day of October, but on the 10th of November, the eve of Martin mass day, from whence he had the name of Martin. I must break off my translation for a moment, for if I did not, I know I should no more be able to shut my eyes in bed than the abyss of Quedlingburg. It is to tell the reader that my father never read this passage of Slokin Burgias to my Uncle Toby, but with triumph, not over my Uncle Toby, for he never opposed him in it, but over the whole world. Now you see, Brother Toby, he would say, looking up, that Christian names are not such indifferent things. Had Luther here been called by any other name but Martin, he would have been damned to all eternity. Not that I look upon Martin, he would add, as a good name, far from it. It is something better than a neutral, and but a little. Yet little as it is, you see it was of some service to him. My father knew the weakness of this prop to his hypothesis, as well as the best logician could show him. Yet so strange is the weakness of man at the same time, as it fell in his way, he could not for his life but make use of it. And it was certainly for this reason, that though there are many stories in half in Slokin Burgias's decades, full as entertaining as this I am translating, yet there is not one amongst them which my father read over with half the delight. It flattered two of his strangest hypotheses together, his names and his noses. I will be bold to say he might have read all the books in the Alexandrian Library, had not fate taken other care of them, and not have met with a book or passage in one, which hit two such nails as these upon the head at one stroke. The two universities of Strasbourg were hard tugging at this affair of Luther's navigation. The Protestant doctors had demonstrated that he had not sailed right before the wind, as the Popish doctors had pretended, and as everyone knew there was no sailing full in the teeth of it, they were going to settle, in case he had sailed, how many points he was off, whether Martin had doubled the cape or had fallen upon a lee shore, and no doubt, as it was an inquiry of much edification, at least to those who understood this sort of navigation, they had gone on with it in spite of the size of the stranger's nose, had not the size of the stranger's nose drawn off the attention of the world from what they were about. It was their business to follow. The abyss of Quedlingburg and her four dignitaries was no stop, for the enormity of the stranger's nose running full as much in their fancies as their case of conscience, the affair of their placket holes kept cold. In a word, the printers were ordered to distribute their types, all controversies dropped. It was a square cap with a silver tassel upon the crown of it, to a nutshell, to have guessed on which side of the nose the two universities would split. "'Tis above reason,' cried the doctors on one side. "'Tis below reason,' cried the others. "'Tis faith,' cried one. "'Tis a fiddlestick,' said the other. "'Tis possible,' cried the one. "'Tis impossible,' said the other. "'God's power is infinite,' cried the Nozerians. "'He can do anything.' "'He can do nothing,' replied the anti-Nozerians, which implies contradictions. "'He can make matter think,' said the Nozerians, as certainly as you can make a velvet cap out of a sows-ear,' replied the anti-Nozerians. "'He cannot make two and two five,' replied the Popish doctors. "'Tis false,' said their other opponents. "'Infinite power is infinite power,' said the doctors, who maintained the reality of the nose. "'It extends only to all possible things,' replied the Lutherans. "'By God in heaven,' cried the Popish doctors. "'He can make a nose, if he thinks fit, as big as the Steeple of Strasburg.' "'Now the Steeple of Strasburg, being the biggest and the tallest church Steeple to be seen in the whole world, the anti-Nozerians denied that a nose of five hundred and seventy-five geometrical feet in length could be worn, at least by a middle-sized man. The Popish doctors swore it could. The Lutheran doctors said, No, it could not.' This at once started a new dispute, which they pursued a great way upon the extent and limitation of the moral and natural attributes of God. That controversy led them naturally into Thomas Aquinas and Thomas Aquinas to the devil. The stranger's nose was no more heard of in the dispute. It just served as a frigate to launch them into the gulf of school divinity, and then they all sailed before the wind. Heat is in the proportion to the want of true knowledge. The controversy about the attributes, etc., instead of cooling, on the contrary, had inflamed the Strasburgers' imaginations to a most inordinate degree. The less they understood of the matter, the greater was their wonder about it. They were left in all the distresses of desire unsatisfied. Saw their doctors, the Parchmentarians, the Brassarians, the Terpentarians, on one side. The Popish doctors on the other, like Pantagruel and his companions in quest of the Oracle of the Bottle, all embarked out of sight. The poor Strasburgers left upon the beach. What was to be done? No delay. The uproar increased. Everyone in disorder. The city gates left open. Unfortunate Strasburgers! Was there in the storehouse of nature? Was there in the lumber rooms of learning? Was there in the great arsenal of chance one single engine left undrawn forth to torture your curiosities and stretch your desires, which was not pointed by the hand of fate to play upon your hearts? I dip not my pen into my ink to excuse the surrender of yourselves. It is to write your Panegyric. Show me a city so macerated with expectation, who neither eat, or drank, or slept, or prayed, or hearkened to the calls either of religion or nature, for seven and twenty days together who could have held out one day longer. On the twenty-eighth, the courteous stranger had promised to return to Strasburg. Seven thousand coaches. Slurkin Burgias must certainly have made some mistake in his new role characters. Seven thousand coaches. Fifteen thousand single horse chairs. Twenty thousand wagons, crowded as full as they could all hold with senators, counselors, syndics, beguines, widows, wives, virgins, canons, concubines, all in their coaches. The abyss of Quedlingburg, with the prioresse, the dinesse, and the subchantress, leading the procession in one coach, and the dean of Strasburg, with the four great dignitaries of his chapter, on her left hand, the rest following higgledy-piggledy as they could, some on horseback, some on foot, some led, some driven, some down the Rhine, some this way, some that, all set out at sunrise to meet the courteous stranger on the road. Haste we now towards the catastrophe of my tale. I say catastrophe, Christ Slurkin Burgias, in as much as a tale, with parts rightly disposed, not only Rejoicef, Gaudet, in the catastrophe and the peripaitia of a drama, but Rejoicef, moreover, in all the essential and integrant parts of it. It has its protesis, epitesis, catastasis, its catastrophe, or peripaitia, growing one out of the other in it, in the order Aristotle first planted them, without which a tale had better never be told at all, says Slurkin Burgias, but be kept to a man's self. In all my ten tales, in all my ten decades, have I, Slurkin Burgias, tied down every tale of them as tightly to this rule, as I have done this of the stranger and his nose. From his first parley with the sentinel, to his leaving of the city of Strasbourg, after pulling off his crimson satin pair of britches, is the protesis, or first entrance, where the characters of the personae dramatis are just touched in, and the subject slightly begun. The epitesis, wherein the action is more fully entered upon and heightened, till it arrives at its state, or height, called the catastasis, and which usually takes up the second and third act, is included within that busy period of my tale, betwixt the first night's uproar about the nose, to the conclusion of the trumpeter's wife's lectures upon it in the middle of the grand parade, and from the first embarking of the learned in the dispute, to the doctor's finally sailing away, and leaving the Strasburgers upon the beach in distress, is the catastasis, or the ripening of the incidents and passions for their bursting forth in the fifth act. This commences with the setting out of the Strasburgers in the Frankfurt Road, and terminates in the unwinding the labyrinth, and bringing the hero out of a state of agitation, as Aristotle calls it, to a state of rest and quietness. This, says Hafen Slurkenbergius, constitutes the catastrophe, or peripatia, of my tale, and that is the part of it I am going to relate. We left the stranger behind the curtain asleep. He enters now upon the stage. What does thou prick up thy ears at? It is nothing but a man upon a horse, was the last word the stranger uttered to his mule. It was not proper, then, to tell the reader, that the mule took his master's word for it, and without any more ifs or ands, let the traveller and his horse pass by. The traveller was hastening with all diligence to get to Strasburg that night. What a fool am I, said the traveller to himself, when he had rowed about a league father, to think of getting into Strasburg this night. Strasburg, the great Strasburg. Strasburg, the capital of all Alsatia. Strasburg, an imperial city. Strasburg, a sovereign state. Strasburg, garrisoned with five thousand of the best troops in all the world. Alas! If I was at the gates of Strasburg this moment, I could not gain admittance into it for a ducket. Nay, a ducket and a half. It is too much. Better go back to the last inn I have passed, than lie I know not where, or give I know not what. The traveller, as he made these reflections in his mind, turned his horse's head about, and three minutes after the stranger had been conducted into his chamber, he arrived at the same inn. We have bacon in the house, said the host, and bread, and till eleven o'clock this night had three eggs in it. But a stranger, who arrived an hour ago, has had them dressed into an omelette, and we have nothing. Alas! said the traveller, harassed as I am, I want nothing but a bed. I have one as soft as is in Alsatia, said the host. The stranger, continued he, should have slept in it, foot is my best bed, but upon the score of his nose. He has got a defluxion, said the traveller. Not that I know, cried the host. But is a camp-bed, and Jacinta, said he, looking towards the maid, imagined there was not room in it to turn his nose in. Why so, cried the traveller, starting back. It is so long a nose, replied the host. The traveller fixed his eyes upon Jacinta, then upon the ground, kneeled upon his right knee, had just got his hand upon his breast. Trifle knocked with my anxiety, said he, rising up again. "'Tis no trifle,' said Jacinta. "'Tis the most glorious nose.' The traveller fell upon his knee again, laid his hand upon his breast. Then, said he, looking up to heaven, thou hast conducted me to the end of my pilgrimage. "'Tis Diego!' The traveller was the brother of the Julia, so often invoked that night by the stranger, as he rode from Strasbourg upon his mule, and was come, on her part, in quest of him. He had accompanied his sister from Valladolid across the Pyrenean mountains through France, and had many an entangled skein to wind off in pursuit of him through the many meanders and abrupt turnings of a lover's thorny tracks. Julia had sunk under it, and had not been able to go a step further than to Lyon, where, with the many disquietudes of a tender heart, which all talk of, but few feel, she sickened, but had just strength enough to write a letter to Diego, and having conjured her brother never to see her face till he had found him out, and put the letter into his hands, Julia took to her bed. Fernandez, for that was her brother's name, though the camp-bed was as soft as any one in Alsace, yet he could not shut his eyes in it. As soon as it was day he rose, and hearing Diego was risen to, he entered his chamber, and discharged his sister's commission. The letter was as follows. Senor Diego, whether my suspicions of your nose were justly excited or not, it is not now to inquire, it is enough I have not had firmness to put them to farther trial. How could I know so little of myself when I sent my duena to forbid your coming more under my lattice? Or how could I know so little of you, Diego, as to imagine you would not have stayed one day in Valadolid to have given ease to my doubts? Was I to be abandoned, Diego, because I was deceived? Or was it kind to take me at my word, whether my suspicions were just or no, and leave me, as you did, a prey to much uncertainty and sorrow? In what manner, Julia has resented this, my brother, when he puts this letter into your hands, will tell you. He will tell you in how few moments she repented of the rash message she had sent to you, in what frantic haste she flew to her lattice, and how many days and nights together she leaned immovably upon her elbow, looking through it towards the way which Diego was wont to come. He will tell you when she heard of your departure, how her spirits deserted her, how her heart sickened, how piteously she mourned, how low she hung her head. Oh, Diego, how many weary steps as my brother's pity led me by the hand languishing to trace out yours, how far has desire carried me beyond strength, and how oft have I fainted by the way and sunk into his arms with only power to cry out. Oh, my Diego! If the gentleness of your carriage has not belied your heart, you will fly to me, almost as fast as you fled from me, haste as you will, you will arrive but to see me expire. Tis a bitter draught, Diego, but oh, tis embittered still more by dying un. She could proceed no further. Slokinburgius, supposes the word intended, was unconvinced, but her strength would not enable her to finish her letter. The heart of the courteous Diego overflowed as he read the letter. He ordered his mule forthwith and Fernandez Horst to be saddled, and as no vent in prose is equal to that of poetry in such conflicts, chance, which as often directs us to remedies as to diseases. Having thrown a piece of charcoal into the window, Diego availed himself of it, and whilst the hustler was getting ready his mule, he eased his mind against the wall as follows. Harsh and untuneful are the notes of love, unless my Julia strikes the key. Her hand alone can touch the part whose dulcet movement charms the heart, and governs all the man with sympathetic sway. Oh, Julia! The lines were very natural, for they were nothing at all to the purpose, says Slokinburgius, and tis a pity there were no more of them. But whether it was that senor Diego was slow in composing verses, or the osla quick in saddling mules, is not a word. Certain it was that Diego's mule and Fernandez's horse were ready at the door of the inn, before Diego was ready for his second stanza. So, without staying to finish his ode, they both mounted, sallied forth, passed the Rhine, traversed Alsace, shaped their course towards Lyon, and before the Strasburgers and the Abyss of Quedlingburg had set out on their cavalcade, had Fernandez, Diego and his Julia crossed the Pyrenean mountains, and got safe to Valadolid. It is needless to inform the geographical reader that when Diego was in Spain it was not possible to meet the courteous stranger in the Frankfurt Road. It is enough to say, that of all restless desires, curiosity being the strongest, the Strasburgers felt the full force of it, and that for three days and nights they were tossed to and fro in the Frankfurt Road, with the tempestuous fury of this passion, and that they were ready to leave the with the tempestuous fury of this passion, before they could submit to return home. When, alas, an event was prepared for them of all other the most grievous that could befall a free people. As this revolution of the Strasburgers affairs is often spoken of, and little understood, I will, in ten words, says Slauchenburgius, give the world an explanation of it, and with it put an end to my tale. Everybody knows of the grand system of universal monarchy, wrote by order of M. Colbert, and put in manuscript into the hands of Louis XIV in the year 1664. It is as well known that one branch out of many of that system was the getting possession of Strasburg to favour an entrance at all times into Swabia, in order to disturb the quiet of Germany, and that in consequence of this plan Strasburg unhappily fell at length into their hands. It is the lot of a few to trace out the true springs of this and such like revolutions. The vulgar look too high for them. Statesmen look too low. Truth, for once, lies in the middle. What a fatal thing is the popular pride of a free city, cries one historian. The Strasburgers deemed it a diminution of their freedom to receive an imperial garrison, so fell a prey to a French one. The fate, says another, of the Strasburgers may be a warning to all free people to save their money. They anticipated their revenues, brought themselves under taxes, exhausted their strength, and in the end became so weaker people they had not strength to keep their gates shut, and so the French pushed them open. Alas, alas, Christ-Slauchenburg is, it was not the French, it was curiosity pushed them open. The French indeed, who are ever upon the catch, when they saw the Strasburgers, men, women and children, all marched out to follow the stranger's nose, each man followed his own and marched in. Trade and manufacturers have decayed and gradually grown down ever since, but not from any cause which commercial heads have assigned, for it is owing to this only, that noses have ever so run in their heads that the Strasburgers could not follow their business. Alas, alas, cries Slauchenburgis, making an exclamation, it is not the first, and I fear will not be the last fortress that has been either won or lost by noses. The end of Slauchenburgis's tale. End of chapter 35 part 2. Chapters 36 to 39 of Tristram Shandy, volume 2. This is a LibriVox recording, all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording gradually from William. Chapter 36. With all this learning upon noses running perpetually in my father's fancy, with so many familiar prejudices, and ten decades of such tales running on forever along with them, how was it possible with such exquisite, was it a true nose, that a man with such exquisite feelings as my father had, could bear the shock at all below stairs, or indeed above stairs, in any other posture but at the very posture I have described? Throw yourself down upon the bed a dozen times, taking care only to place a looking glass first in a chair on one side of it before you do it. But was a stranger's nose a true nose, or was it a false one? To tell that beforehand, madam, would be to do injury to one of the best tales in the Christian world, and that is a tenth of the tenth decade which immediately follows this. This tale, cried Slauchenburgis, somewhat exultingly, has been reserved by me for the concluding tale of my whole work, knowing right well that when I shall have taught it, and my reader shall have read it through, it would be even high time for both of us to shut up the book in as much, continued Slauchenburgis, as I know of no tale which could possibly ever go down after it. It is a tale indeed. This sets out was the first interview in the Yen at Lyon, when Fernandez left the courgette's stranger and his sister Julia alone in her chamber and is overwritten. The Intriguacies of Diego and Julia Havents, thou art a strange creature, Slauchenburgis, what a whimsical view of the involutions of the heart of woman hath thou opened. How this can ever be translated, and yet of this specimen of Slauchenburgis's tales, and the exquisitiveness of his morals should please the world, translated shall a couple of volumes be. Else, how this can ever be translated into good English, I have no sort of conception. There seems in some passages to want a sixth sense to do it rightly. What can he mean by the lambent pupilability of slow, low, dry, chet, five notes below the natural tone, which you know, madam, is little more than a whisper. The moment I pronounced the words, I could perceive an attempt towards a vibration in the strings about the region of the heart. The brain made no acknowledgement. There is often no good understanding betwixt them. I felt as if I understood it. I had no ideas. The movement could not be without cause. I'm lost. I can make nothing of it. A less made please your worships, the voice in that case being little more than a whisper, unavoidably forces the eyes to approach, not only within six inches of each other, but to look into the pupils. It's not that dangerous. But it can't be voided. For to look up to the ceiling, in that case, the two gents unavoidably meet, and to look down into each other's laps, the four hits come to immediate contact, which at once puts an end to the conference. I mean to the sentimental part of it. What is left, madam, is not worth stooping for. Chapter 37 My father lay stretched across the bed, as still as if the hand of death had pushed him down, for a full hour and a half before he began to play upon the floor with the toe of that foot, which hung over the bedside. My uncle Toby's heart was a pound lighter for it. In a few moments, his left hand, the knuckers of which had all the time reclined upon the handle of the chamber pot, came to its feeling. He thrust it a little more within the valence, drew up his hand when he had done into his bosom, given him. My good uncle Toby, with infinite pleasure, answered it, and full glad he would have engrafted a sentence of consolation upon the opening it afforded. But having no talents, as I said, that way, and fearing moreover that he might set out with something which might make him bad matter worse, he contented himself with resting his chin placidly upon the cross of his crutch. Now, whether the compression shortened my uncle Toby's face into a more pleasurable oval, or that the philanthropy of his heart, and seeing his brother beginning to emerge out of the sea of his afflictions, had braced up his muscles, so that the compression upon this chin only doubled the benignity which was there before, is not hard to decide. My father, in turning his eyes, was struck with such a gleam of sunshine in his face, as melted down the saliners of his grief in a moment. He broke silence as follows. Chapter 38 Did ever man, brother Toby? cried my father, raising himself upon his elbow, and turning himself round to the opposite side of the bed, where my uncle Toby was sitting in his old fringe chair with his chin resting upon his scrunch. Did ever a poor unfortunate man, brother Toby? cried my father, received so many lashes. The most I ever saw given, growth my uncle Toby, ringing the bell at the bed's head for trim, was during Grenadier, I think, a McKay's regiment. I had my uncle Toby shot a bullet through my father's heart. He could not have fallen down with his nose upon the quilt more suddenly. Bless me! said my uncle Toby. Chapter 39 Was it McKay's regiment, growth my uncle Toby, where the poor Grenadier was so unmercifully whipped at Bruges about the Ducats? Oh, Christ! he was innocent! cried Trim with the deep sigh. And he was whipped, made please your honour, almost to death's door. They had better have shot him out dry, as he begged, and he had gone directly to heaven, for he was as innocent as your honour. I think, see, Trim, growth my uncle Toby. I never think of his, continued Trim, and my poor brother's tum is fortunes. For we were all three school-fellows, but I cry like a coward. It is a no-proof of cowardice, Trim. I drop them off times myself, cried my uncle Toby. I know your honour does, replied Trim, and I am not ashamed of it myself. But to think, made please your honour, continued Trim, a tear stealing into the corner of his eye as he spoke, to think of two verges led with hearts as warm in their bodies, and as honest as God could make them, the children of honest people going forth with gallant spirits to seek their fortunes in the world, and fall into such evils. Poor tum! to be tortured upon a wreck for nothing, but marrying a Jew's widow who sought sausages, almost dick-johns and salt to be scorched out of his body for the duckets another man put into his snap-sack. These are misfortunes, cried Trim, pulling out his handkerchief. These are misfortunes, made please your honour, worth lying down and crying over. My father could not help blushing. It would be a pity, Trim, cried my uncle Toby, thou shouldst ever feel sorry of thy own. Thou feelest it so tenderly for others. I like a day, replied the corporal, brightening up his face. Your honour knows I have neither wife nor child. I can have no sorrows in this world. My father could not help smiling. As you as an Imandrim, replied my uncle Toby, nor can I see how a fellow of thy light heart can suffer. But from the distress of poverty in thy old age, when thou art past all services, Trim, and hest outlifts thy friends. And please, your honour, never fear, replied Trim, cheerily. But I would have thee never fear, Trim, replied my uncle Toby. And therefore, continued to my uncle Toby, throwing down his crutch and getting up upon his legs as he uttered the word therefore, in recompense, Trim, of thy long fidelity to me and that goodness of thy heart, I have had such brews of. Whilst thy master's voice is shilling, thou shalt never ask us where, Trim, for a penny. Trim attempted to thank my uncle Toby, but had not power. Tears trickled down his cheeks faster than he could wipe them off. He laid his hands upon his breast, made about to the ground, and shut the door. I have left Trim my violin-green, cried to my uncle Toby. My father smiled. I have left him moreover a penchant, continued my uncle Toby. My father looked grave. End of chapters 36 to 39. Chapters 40 to 44 of Trim's Shandy, Volume 2. This is a LibriVox recording, or LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Shilifa Malikem. The Life and Opinions of Trism Shandy, Gentlemen, Volume 2, by Lauren Stone. Chapter 40. Is it this a fit time, said my father to himself, to talk of pensions and grenadiers? Chapter 41. When my uncle Toby first mentioned the grenadier, my father, I said, fell down with his nose flat to the quilt, and suddenly, as if my uncle Toby had shot him. But it was not edit that every other limp and member of my father instantly relapsed with his nose into the same precise attitude, in which he lay first described. So that when Corporal Trim left the room and my father found himself disposed to rise of the bed, he had all the little preparatory movement to run over again before he could do it. Attitudes are nothing, madam. It is the transition from one attitude to another, like the preparation and resolution of the discord into harmony, which is all in all. For which reason my father, played the same jake over again with his toe upon the floor, pushed the chamber pot still a little farther within the valence, gave a hum, raised himself up upon his elbow, and was just beginning to address himself to my uncle Toby. When recollecting the unsuccessfulness of his first effort in that attitude, he got upon his legs, and at making the third turn across the room, he stopped short before my uncle Toby, and laying the three first fingers of his right hand in the palm of his left and stooping a little, he addressed himself to my uncle Toby as follows. Chapter 42 When I reflect brother Toby upon men, and take a view of their dark side of him which represent his life as open to so many causes of trouble, when I consider brother Toby how often we eat the bread of affliction, and that we are born to it as to the portion of our inheritance. I was born to nothing with my uncle Toby, interrupting my father, but my commission. Zooks, said my father, did not my uncle leave you a hundred and twenty pounds a year. What could I have done without it? replied my uncle Toby. That's another concern, said my father testily, but I say Toby. When one runs over the catalogue of all the cross reckonings and sorrowful items with which the heart of men is overcharged, diswonderful by what hidden resources the mind is enabled to stand out and bear itself up, as it does, against the impositions laid upon our nature. Tis by the assistance of Almighty God, cried my uncle Toby, looking up and pressing the palms of his hands close together. Does not from our own strength, brother Chandy, a sentinel in a wooden sentry box might as well pretend to stand it out against the detachment of fifty men. We are upheld by the grades and the assistance of the best of beings. That is cutting the knot, said my father, instead of entying it. But give me leave to lead you, brother Toby, a little deeper into the mystery. With all my heart, replied my uncle Toby. My father instantly exchanged the attitude he was in, for that in which Socrates is so finally painted by Raphael in his school of Athens, which your connoisseurship knows is so exquisitely imagined, that even the particular manner of the reasoning of Socrates is expressed by it. For he holds the forefinger of his left hand between the forefinger and the thumb of his right, and seems as if he were saying to the libertine he is reclaiming, You grant me this, and this, and this, and this, I don't ask of you, they follow of themselves in course. So stood my father, holding far his forefinger, betwixt his finger and his thumb, and reasoning with my uncle Toby, as he said in his old finch chair, balanced around with party-coloured worst pops. Oh, Garrick, what a rich scene of this would thy exquisite powers make, and how gladly would I write such another to avail myself of thy immortality, and secure my own behind it. Chapter 43 Though man is of all others the most curious vehicle, said my father, yet at the same time, to self so slight a frame, and so totteringly put together, that to certain jerks and hard jostlings it unavoidably meet within this rugged journey, would overset and tear it to pieces a dozen times a day, was it not, brother Toby, that there is a secret spring within us. Which spring, said my uncle Toby, I take to be religion. Well, that said my child's nose on, cried my father, letting go his finger, and striking one hand against the other. It makes everything straight for us, answered my uncle Toby. Figuratively speaking, dear Toby, it may, for all I know, said my father, but the spring I am speaking of is at great and elastic power within us, of count-balancing evil which, like a secret spring in a well-ordered machine, though it can't prevent the shock, at least it imposes upon our sense of it. Now, my dear brother, said my father, replacing his forefinger as he was coming closer to the point, had my child arrived safe into the world, and martyred in that precious part of him, fanciful and extravagant as I may appear to the world my opinion of Christian names, and of that magic bias which good or bad names irresistibly impress upon our characters and conducts, having as a witness, that in the warmest transport of my wishes for the prosperity of my child, I never once wished to crown his head with more glory and honour than what George or Edward would have spread around it. But alas, continued my father, as a greatest evil has befallen him, I must counteract and undo it with great as good. He shall be christened, just Magistus' brother. I wished my answer, replied my ingotobi, rising up. What a chapter of chances, said my father, turning himself about upon the first landing, as he and my ingotobi were going downstairs. What a long chapter of chances do the events of this world lay open to us. Take pen and ink in hand, brother Toby, and calculate it fairly. I know no more of calculation than this baluster, said my ingotobi, striking short of it with this grudge, and hitting my father, a desperate blow soothes upon his shin bone. "'Twas a hundred to one,' cried my ingotobi. I thought, ghost my father, rubbing his shin, you had known nothing of calculations, brother Toby. A mere chance,' said my ingotobi. Then it adds one to the chapter,' replied my father. The double success of my father's reputies tickled off the pain of his shin at once. It was well it so fell out. Chance again! Or the world to this day had never known the subject of my father's calculation. To guess it, there was no chance. What a lucky chapter of chances, has it this turned out, for it has saved me the trouble of writing one express, and in truth, I have enough already upon my hands without it. Have not I promised the world a chapter of knots? Two chapters upon the ride and the wrong end of a woman? A chapter upon whiskers? A chapter upon wishes? A chapter of noses? No, I have done that. A chapter upon my ingotobi's modesty? To say nothing of a chapter upon chapters, which I will finish before I sleep, by my great-grandfather's whiskers? I shall never get half of them through this year. Take pen and ink in hand and calculate it fairly, brother Toby,' said my father, and it will turn out a million to one, that of all the parts of the body, the edge of the forceps should have the ill luck just to fall upon and rag down that one part which should rag down the fortunes of our house, was it? It might have been worse,' replied my ingotobi. I don't comprehend,' said my father. Suppose the hip had presented,' replied my ingotobi, as Dr. Slopp forboded. My father reflected half a minute. Look down. Touched the middle of his forehead slightly with his finger. True,' said he, and of chapters 40 to 44. Chapters 45 to 47 of Tristram Shandy, Volume 2. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org, recording by Jalee van Wallehem. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, Volume 2, by Lauren Stern. Chapter 45. Is it not a shame to make two chapters of what passed in going down one pair of stairs? For we have got no farther yet than to the first landing, and there are fifteen more steps down to the bottom, and for all to I know, as my father and my ingotobi are in a talking humour, there may be as many chapters as steps. Let that be as it will, sir. I can no more help it than my destiny. A sudden impulse comes across me. Drop the curtain, Shandy. I drop it. Strike a line here across the paper, Tristram. I strike it, and hey, for a new chapter. That use of any other rule have I to govern myself by in this affair. And if I had one, as I do all things out of all rule, I would twist it and tear it to pieces and throw it to the fire when I had done. Am I warm? I am, and the cause demands it. A pretty story. It's a man to follow rules, or rules to follow him. Now this, you must know, being my chapter upon chapters, which I promised to ride, before I went to sleep, I thought it me to ease my conscience entirely before I laid down, by telling the world all I knew about the matter at once. It's not this ten times better than to set out dogmatically with a sententious parade of wisdom, and telling the world a story of a roasted horse, that chapters relieve the mind that they assist, or impose upon the imagination, and that in a work of this dramatic cast, they are as necessary as a shifting of scenes, with fifty other called conceits enough to extinguish the fire which roasted him. Oh, but to understand this, which is a poof at the fire of Diana's temple, you must read Longinus. Read away. If you are not a jot the wise there by reading him the first time over, never fear, read him again. Avicenna and Lysetus read Aristotle's metaphysics forty times through a piece, and never understood a single word. But mark the consequence. Avicenna turned out a desperate writer at all kinds of writing, for he read books day only scribbly. And for Lysetus, Fortunio, though all the world knows he was born a foetus, the other medicine of the place. We find that he does not lack anything essential to life, and his father, to make him see the birth of his experience, between the price of achieving the work of nature, and to work in the training of the child with the same artifice that if he gives, we use to make the chickens in Egypt. He finds no risk of everything that he will do, and having put his son in a room properly accommodated, he manages to raise him and make him take his necessary crossings by the uniformity of a foreign heat measured exactly on the decrees of a thermometer, or of another equivalent instrument. Vida Michel Giussiniani, Nellie, Scridori Liguri, 223-488 Our king has always been very satisfied with the industry of a father so experimented in the art of the generation that his king can extend his life to his son for a few months or for a few years. But when we represent that the child has lived for almost 80 years and that he composed 80 different works, all fruit of a language, it must be convinced that everything that is incredible is not always false and that the true resemblance is not always on the side of the truth. Les enfants célèbres, revues et corrigés par Monsieur de la Monnois de l'Académie Françoise Of no more than five inches and a half in length, yet he grew to that astonishing height in literature as to write a book with the title as long as himself. The learned know I mean his gonosac entropologia upon the origin of the human soul. So much for my chapter upon chapters, which I hold to be the best chapter in my whole work, and take my word whoever read it, is full as well employed as impinging straws. We shall bring all things to rights, said my father, setting his foot upon the first step from the landing. This just magisters continued my father drawing his leg back and turning to my uncle Toby, was the greatest Toby of all earthly beings. He was the greatest king, the greatest law-giver, the greatest philosopher and the greatest priest and engineer, said my uncle Toby. In course, said my father. Chapter 47 And how does your mistress cried my father, taking the same step over again from the landing and calling to Cezana whom he saw passing by the foot of the stairs with a huge pincushion in her hand. How does your mistress, as well, said Cezana, dripping by but without looking up as can be expected. What a fool am I, said my father, drawing his leg back again, that things be as they will, brother Toby, is ever the precise answer. And how is a child pray? No answer. And where is Dr. Slopp, added my father, raising his voice aloud and looking over the balusters. Cezana was out of hearing. Of all the riddles of a married life, said my father, crossing the landing in order to set his back against the wall, whilst he propounded it to my uncle Toby. Of all the puzzling riddles, said he, In a marriage state, of which you may trust me, brother Toby, there are more asses loads than all jobstock of asses could have carried. There is not one that has more intricacies in it than this, that from the very moment the mistress of the house is brought to bed, every female in it, from my lady's gentlewoman down to the cinder wench, becomes an inch taller for it, and give themselves more airs upon that single inch than all their other wrenches put together. I think rather, replied my uncle Toby, that as we who sink an inch lower, if I meet but a woman with child, I do it. It is a heavy tax upon that half of our fellow creatures, brother Shandy, said my uncle Toby. Is it pitch his burden upon them? continued he, shaking his head. Yes, yes, it is a painful thing, said my father, shaking his head too. But certainly, since shaking of heads came into fashion, never did two heads shake together in concert, from two such different springs. God bless, just take them all, said my uncle Toby, and my father each to himself.