notice of my uncle Toby's opinion, but turning to my father, they had better govern in other points; -and a father of a family, who wishes its perpetuity, in my opinion had better exchange this prerogative with them, and give up some other rights in lieu of it. I know not, quoth my father, answering a little too testily, to be quite dispassionate in what he said, I know not, quoth he, what we have left to give up, in lieu of who shall bring our children into the world,-unless that-of who shall beget them.- One would almost give up anything, replied Dr. Slop.-I beg your pardon,-answered my uncle Toby.Sir, replied Dr. Slop, it would astonish you to know what improvements we have made of late years in all branches of obstetrical knowledge, but particularly in that one single point of the safe and expeditious extraction of the fœtus, -which has received such lights that, for my part (holding up his hands), I declare I wonder how the world has I wish, quoth my unele Toby, you had seen what prodigious armies we had in Flanders.

CHAPTER XIX.

I HAVE dropped the curtain over this scene for a minute, to remind you of one thing-and to inform you of another.

What I have to inform you comes, I own, a little out of its due course;-for it should have been told thirty-five pages ago, but that I foresaw 'twould come in pat hereafter, and be of more advantage here than elsewhere.-Writers had need look before them, to keep up the spirit and connexion of what they have in hand.

When these two things are done,-the curtain shall be drawn up again, and my uncle Toby, my father, and Dr. Slop, shall go on with their discourse, without any more interruption.

First, then, the matter which I have to remind you of is this,That, from the specimens of singularity in my father's notions in point of Christian names, and that other previous point thereto, you was led, I think, into an opinion (and I am sure I said as much), that my father was a gentleman altogether as odd and whimsical in fifty other opinions. In truth, there was not a stage in the life of man, from the very first act of his begetting,-down to the lean and slippered pantaloon in his second childishness, but he had some favourite notion to himself, springing out of it, as sceptical, and as far out of the highway of thinking, as these two which have been explained. -Mr. Shandy, my father, Sir, would see nothing in the light in which others placed it ;he placed things in his own light-he would weigh nothing in common scales:-no,-he was too refined a researcher to lie open to so gross an imposition,-To come at the exact weight of things in the scientific steel-yard, the fulcrum, he would say, should be almost invisible, to avoid all friction from popular tenets ;-without this the minutiae of philosophy, which would always turn the balance, will have no weight at all.-Knowledge, like matter, he would affirm, was divisible in infinitum; -that the grains and scruples were as much a part of it as the gravitation of the whole world. In a word, he would say error was error,-no matter where it fell whether in a fraction,or a pound,-'twas alike fatal to truth; and she was kept down at the bottom of her well as inevi

tably by a mistake in the dust of a butterfly's wing, -as in the disk of the sun, the moon, and all the stars of heaven put together.

He would often lament that it was for want of considering this properly, and of applying it skilfully to civil matters, as well as to speculative truths, that so many things in this world were out of joint ;-that the political arch was giving way; -and that the very foundations of our excellent constitution, in church and state, were so sapped, as estimators had reported.

You cry out, he would say, we are a ruined, undone people. Why? he would ask, making use of the sorites or syllogism of Zeno and Chrysippus, without knowing it belonged to them.-Why? Why are we a ruined people ?-Because we are corrupted.- Whence is it, dear sir, that we are corrupted?-Because we are needyour poverty and not our wills, consent. And where fore, he would add, are we needy ?---from the neglect, he would answer, of our pence and our halfpence :—our bank-notes, sir, our guineas,— nay, our shillings, take care of themselves.

Tis the same, he would say, throughout the whole circle of the sciences ;-the great, the estab lished points of them, are not to be broke in upon. -The laws of nature will defend themselves ;— bat error-(he would add, looking earnestly at my mother)-error, sir, creeps in through the minute holes, and small crevices, which human nature leaves unguarded.

This turn of thinking in my father is what I had to remind you of.- The point you are to be informed of, and which I have reserved for this place, is as follows:

Amongst the many and excellent reasons with which my father had urged my mother to accept of Dr. Slop's assistance preferably to that of the old woman,-there was one of a very singular nature; which, when he had done arguing the matter with her as a Christian, and came to argue it over again with her as a philosopher, he had put his whole strength to, depending indeed upon it as his sheet-anchor,- -It failed him; though from no defect in the argument itself; but that, do what he could, he was not able for his soul to make her comprehend the drift of it.—Cursed luck! said he to himself, one afternoon, as he walked out of the room, after he had been stating it for an hour and a half to her, to no manner of purpose ;-cursed luck! said he, biting his lip, as he shut the door,-for a man to be master of one of the finest chains of reasoning in nature, and have a wife, at the same time, with such a headpiece that he cannot hang up a single inference within-side of it, to save his soul from destruction.

This argument, though it was entirely lost upon my mother, had more weight with him than all his other arguments joined together.—I will, therefore, endeavour to do it justice, and set it forth with all the perspicuity I am master of.

My father set out upon the strength of these two following axioms:

First, that an ounce of a man's own wit was worth a ton of other people's; and,

Secondly (which by the bye, was the groundwork of the first axiom,-though it comes last)— That every man's wit must come from every man's own soul--and no other body's.

Now, as it was plain to my father that all souls were by nature equal,-and that the great difference between the most acute and the most obtuse understanding-was from no original sharpness or bluntness of one thinking substance above or below another, but arose merely from the lucky or unlucky organization of the body, in that part where the soul principally took up her residence he had made it the subject of his inquiry to find out the identical place.

Now, from the best accounts he had been able to get of this matter, he was satisfied it could not be where Des Cartes had fixed it, upon the top of the pineal gland of the brain; which, as he philosophized, formed a cushion for her about the size of a marrow pea; though to speak the truth, as so many nerves did terminate all in that one place, -'twas no bad conjecture:-and my father had certainly fallen with that great philosopher plump into the centre of the mistake, had it not been for my uncle Toby,-who rescued him out of it by a story he had told him of a Walloon officer at the battle of Landen, who had one part of his brain shot away by a musket-ball, and another part of it taken out after by a French surgeon; and after all, recovered, and did his duty very well without it.

If death, said my father, reasoning with himself, is nothing but the separation of the soul from the body; and if it is true that people can walk about, and do their business without brains, then certes the soul does not inhabit there. Q. E. D.

As for that certain, very thin, subtle, and very fragrant juice which Coglionissimo Borri, the great Milanese physician, affirms, in a letter to Bartholine, to have discovered in the cellule of the occipital parts of the cerebellum, and which he likewise affirms to be the principal seat of the reasonable soul (for you must know, in these latter and more enlightened ages, there are two souls in every man living, the one according to the great Metheglingius, being called the Animus, the other the Anima)- -as for the opinion, I say, of Borri, my father could never subscribe to it by any means; the very idea of so noble, so refined, so immaterial, and so exalted a being as the Anima, or even the Animus, taking up her residence, and sitting dabbling, like a tadpole, all day long, both summer and winter, in a puddle,—or in a liquid of any kind, how thick or thin soever, he would say shocked his imagination; he would scarce give the doctrine a hearing.

What, therefore, seemed the least liable to objections of any was that the chief sensorium, or head quarters of the soul, and to which place all intelligences were referred, and whence all her mandates were issued-was in, or near, the cerebellum

or rather somewhere about the medulla oblongata, wherein, it was generally agreed by Dutch anatomists that all the minute nerves from all the organs of the seven senses concentred, like streets and winding alleys, into a square.

So far there was nothing singular in my father's opinion; he had the best of philosophers, of all ages and climates, to go along with him.-But here he took a road of his own, setting up another Shandean hypothesis upon these corner-stones they had laid for him ;-and which said hypothesis equally stood its ground: whether the subtlety and fineness of the soul depended upon the

temperature and clearness of the said liquor, or of the finer net-work and texture in the cerebellum itself; which opinion he favoured.

He maintained that, next to the due care to be taken in the act of propagation of each individual, which required all the thought in the world, as it laid the foundation of this incomprehensible contexture, in which wit, memory, fancy, eloquence, and what is usually meant by the name of good natural parts, do consist ;-that next to this and his Christian name, which were the two original and most efficacious causes of all; that the third cause, or rather what logicians call the Causa sine qua non, and, without which, all that was done was of no manner of significance,-was the preservation of this delicate and fine-spun web, from the havoc which was generally made in it by the violent compression and crush which the head was made to undergo by the nonsensical method of bringing us into the world by that foremost.-This requires explanation.

My father, who dipped into all kinds of books, upon looking into Lithopædus Senonesis de Portu difficili,* published by Andrianus Smelygot, had found out that the lax and pliable state of a child's head in parturition, the bones of the cranium having no sutures at that time, was such that, by force of the woman's efforts, which, in strong labour pains, was equal, upon an average, to a weight of four hundred and seventy pounds avoirdupois acting perpendicularly upon it ;- it so happened that in forty-nine instances out of fifty, the said head was compressed and moulded into the shape of an oblong conical piece of dough, such as a pastrycook generally rolls up in order to make a pie of.

Good God! cried my father, what havoc and destruction must this make in the infinitely fine and tender texture of the cerebellum ! Or if there is such a juice, as Borri pretends,-is it not enough to make the clearest liquid in the world both feculent and mothery?

But how great was his apprehension when he further understood that this force, acting upon the very vertex of the head, not only injured the brain itself, or cerebrum, but that it necessarily squeezed and propelled the cerebrum towards the cerebellum, which was the immediate seat of the understanding.Angels and ministers of grace defend us! cried my father, can any soul withstand this shock?No wonder the intellectual web is so rent and tattered as we see it; and that so many of our best heads are no better than a puzzled skein of silk-all perplexity-all confusion within-side.

But when my father read on, and was let into the secret that when the child was turned topsyturvy, which was easy for an operator to do, and was extracted by the feet-that instead of the cerebrum being propelled towards the cerebellum, the cerebellum, on the contrary, was propelled simply towards the cerebrum, where it could do no

The author is here twice mistaken;-for Lithopædus should be wrote thus, Lithopædii Senonensis Icon. The second mistake is, that this Lithopœdus is not an author but a drawing of a petrified child. The account of this, published by Athosius, 1580, may be seen at the end of Cordæus's works in Spachius, Mr. Tristram Shandy has been led into this error either from seeing Lithopadus's name of late in a catalogue of learned writers in Dr.. or by mistaking Lithopedus for Trinecavellias,—from the too great similitude of their names.

manner of hurt. . . . . . By heavens! cried he, the world is in a conspiracy to drive out what little wit God has given us,-and the professors of the obstetric art are listed into the same conspiracy.What is it to me which end of my son comes foremost into the world, provided all goes right after, and his cerebellum escapes uncrushed?

It is the nature of an hypothesis, when once a man has conceived it, that it assimilates everything to itself as proper nourishment; and from the first moment of your begetting it, it generally grows the stronger by everything you see, hear, read, or understand. This is of great use.

When my father was gone with this about a month, there was scarce a phenomenon of stupidity or of genius which he could not readily solve by it; it accounted for the eldest son being the greatest blockhead in the family.- -Poor devil! he would say, he made way for the capacity of his younger brothers.--It unriddled the observations of drivellers and monstrous heads, showing, à priori, it could not be otherwise—unless**** -I don't know what. It wonderfully explained and accounted for the acumen of the Asiatic genius; and that sprightlier turn, and more penetrating intuition of minds, in warmer climates; not from the loose and common-place solution of a clearer sky, and a more perpetual sunshine, &c.-which, for aught he knew, might as well rarefy and dilute the faculties of the soul into nothing by one extreme, as they are condensed in colder climates by the other; but he traced the affair up to its spring-head, showed that in warmer climates nature had laid a lighter tax upon the fairest part of the creation ;-their pleasures more the necessity of their pains less, insomuch, that the pressure and resistance upon the vertex was so slight that the whole organization of the cerebellum was preserved;-nay he did not believe, in natural births, that so much as a single thread of the net-work was broke or displaced, so that the soul might just act as she liked.

When my father had got so far,-what a blaze of light did the accounts of the Caesarean section, and of the towering geniuses who had come safe into the world by it, cast upon this hypothesis? Here you see, he would say, there was no injury done to the sensorium ;—no pressure of the head against the pelvis ;-no propulsion of the cerebrum towards the cerebellum, either by the os pubis on this side, or the os coccygis on that ; - and, pray, what were the happy consequences ;- Why, sir, your Julius Caesar, who gave the operation a name; and your Hermes Trismegistus, who was born so before ever the operation had a name ;your Scipio Africanus; your Manlius Torquatus; our Edward the Sixth, who, had he lived, would have done the same honour to the hypothesis ;-these, and many more, who figured high in the annals of fame -all came sideway, sir, into the world.

The incision of the abdomen and uterus ran for six weeks together in my father's head;-he had read, and was satisfied, that wounds in the epigastrium, and those in the matrix, were not mortal; —so that the belly of the mother might be opened

extremely well to give a passage to the child.He mentioned the thing one afternoon to my mother, merely as a matter of fact; but seeing her turn as pale as ashes at the very mention of it, as much as the operation flattered his hopes,— he thought it as well to say no more of it-contenting himself with admiring what he thought was to no purpose to propose.

This was my father Mr. Shandy's hypothesis; concerning which I have only to add that my brother Bobby did as great honour to it (whatever he did to the family) as any one of the great heroes we spoke of.-For happening not only to be christened, as I told you, but to be born too, when my father was at Epsom-being, moreover, my mother's first child-coming into the world with his head foremost,—and turning out afterwards a lad of wonderful slow parts-my father spelt all these together in his opinion; and, as he had failed at one end, he was determined to try the other.

This was not to be expected from one of the sisterhood, who are not casily to be put out of their way,—and was, therefore, one of my father's great reasons in favour of a man of science, whom he could better deal with.

Of all men in the world, Dr. Slop was the fittest for my father's purpose; for though his newinvented forceps was the armour he had proved, and what he maintained to be the safest instrument of deliverance, yet it seems he had scattered a word or two in his book in favour of the very thing which ran in my father's fancy ;though not with a view to the soul's good, in extracting by the feet, as was my father's system, but for reasons merely obstetrical.

This will account for the coalition betwixt my father and Dr. Slop, in the ensuing discourse, which went a little hard against my uncle Toby.

In what manner a plain man, with nothing but common sense, could bear up against two such allies in science, is hard to conceive.- You may conjec-| ture upon it, if you please, and whilst your imagination is in motion, you may encourage it to go on, and discover by what causes and effects in nature it could come to pass that my uncle Toby got his modesty by the wound he received upon his groin.- You may raise a system to account for the loss of my nose by marriage articles, and show the world how it could happen that I should have the misfortune to be called TRISTRAM, in opposition to my father's hypothesis, and the wish of the whole family, godfathers and godmothers not excepted.- These, with fifty other points left yet unravelled, you may endeavour to solve, if you have time;-but, I tell you beforehand, it will be in vain ;-for not the sage Alquise, the magician in Don Belianis of Greece, nor the no less famous Urganda, the sorceress, his wife (were they alive), could pretend to come within a league of the truth.

The reader will be content to wait for a full explanation of these matters till the next year, when a series of things will be laid open which he little expects.

CHAPTER I.

"I WISH, Dr. Slop," quoth my uncle Toby (repeating his wish for Dr. Slop a second time, and with a degree of more zeal and earnestness in his manner of wishing than he had wished at first*) -"I WISH, Dr. Slop," quoth my uncle Toby, "you had seen what prodigious armies we had in Flanders."

My uncle Toby's wish did Dr. Slop a disservice, which his heart never intended any man.-Sir, it confounded him and thereby putting his ideas first into confusion, and then to flight, he could not rally them again for the soul of him.

In all disputes, male or female,-whether for honour, for profit, or for love, it makes no difference in the case; nothing is more dangerous, madam, than a wish coming sideways in this unexpected manner upon a man: the safest way, in general, to take off the force of the wish is for the party wished at instantly to get upon his legs,and wish the wisher something in return, of pretty near the same value;-so, balancing the account upon the spot, you stand as you were,-nay, sometimes gain the advantage of the attack by it.

This will be fully illustrated to the world in my chapter of wishes.

Dr. Slop did not understand the nature of this defence ;-he was puzzled with it, and it put an entire stop to the dispute for four minutes and a half;-five had been fatal to it my father saw the danger :-the dispute was one of the most interesting disputes in the world, "Whether the child of his prayers and endeavours should be born without a head or with one." -He waited to the last moment, to allow Dr. Slop, in whose behalf the wish was made, his right of returning it; but perceiving, I say, that he was confounded, and continued looking with that perplexed vacuity of eye which puzzled souls generally stare with,-first in my uncle Toby's face-then in his-then up-then down-then east-east-andby-east, and so on,-coasting it along by the plinth of the wainscot, till he had got to the opposite point of the compass,-and that he had actually begun to count the brass nails upon the arm of his chair, my father thought there was no time to be lost with my uncle Toby, so took up the discourse as follows::

CHAPTER II.

"WHAT prodigious armies you had in Flanders!".

Brother Toby, replied my father, taking his wig from off his head with his right hand, and with his left pulling out a striped India handkerchief from his right coat-pocket, in order to rub his head, as he argued the point with my uncle Toby

-Now, in this, I think my father was much

* Vide page 40.

to blame; and I will give you my reasons for it. Matters of no more seeming consequence in themselves than "Whether my father should have taken off his wig with his right hand or with his left "--have divided the greatest kingdoms, and made the crowns of the monarchs who governed them to totter upon their heads.--But need 1 tell you, sir, that the circumstances with which everything in this world is begirt give everything in this world its size and shape!-and by tightening it, or relaxing it, this way or that, make the thing to be, what it is,-great,-little,-good,bad,-indifferent or not indifferent-just as the case happens?

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, called out for his handkerchief, he would have had nothing in the world to have done but to put his right hand into his right coat-pocket and take 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 easynatural-unforced. Reynolds himself, great and graceful 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.

CHAPTER III.

Ir 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, 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

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. 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 gum-taffeta, and the body-lining to it of a sarsenet or thin persian.

Zeno, Cleanthes, Diogenes Babylonins, Dionysius, Heraclitus, Antipater, Panætius, and Possidonius, amongst the Greeks;-Cato, and Varro, and Seneca, amongst the Romans; Pantenus, and Clemens Alexandrinus, and Montaigne, amongst the Christians; and a score and a half of good, honest, unthinking Shandean people as ever lived, whose names I can't recollect,-all pretend that their jerkins were made after this fashion; you might have rumpled and crumpled, and doubled and creased, and fretted and fringed the outside 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 jerkin has been tickled off at such a rate as it has been these last nine months together; and yet, I declare, the lining to it,-as far as I am a judge of the matter, is not a three-penny piece the worse;-pell-mell, helter-shelter, ding-dong, cut and thrust, back stroke and fore stroke, side way and long way, have they been trimming it for me: -had there been the least gumminess in my lining, by Heaven! it had all of it, long ago, been frayed and fretted to a thread.

You, Messrs. the Monthly Reviewers! -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 buzzed about his nose all dinner-time: "Go,-go, Loor devil," quoth he,-"get thee gone ;-why

1 I hurt thee !-This world is surely wide hold both thee and me."

CHAPTER 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 into his face, as I told you) he must have reddened, pictorically and scientifically speaking, six whole tints and a half, if not a full octave above his natural colour;— 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 in exact tune,--he would instantly have screwed 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 Searlatti-con furia-like mad.-Grant me patience!-What has con furia, con strepito -or any other hurly-burly 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 tailor 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-willmy father, at length, went on as follows:--

CHAPTER 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 waylay them, not only in the articl 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-a-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 farther.

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 just see the cornice of the room, and then, directing the buccinatory museles along his cheeks, and the orbicular muscles around his lips to do their duty,-he whistled Lillibullero.

CHAPTER VII.

WHILST my uncle Toby was whistling Lillibullero to my father, Dr. Slop was stamping, and cursing and damning at Obadiah at a most dreadful rate.