Scaliger within an ace of never getting his tools sharpened at all? forty-four years old was he before he could manage his Greek. And Peter Damianus, Lord Bishop of Ostia, as all the world knows, could not so much as read when he was of man's estate. And Baldus himself, as eminent as he turned out after, entered upon the law so late in life that everybody imagined he intended to be an advocate in the other world. No wonder when Eudamidas, the son of Archidamas, heard Xenocrates at seventy-five disputing about wisdom, that he asked gravely, "If the old man be yet disputing and inquiring concerning wisdom, what time will he have to make use of it?"

Yorick listened to my father with great attention; there was a seasoning of wisdom unaccountably mixed up with his strangest whims, and he had sometimes such illuminations in the darkest of his eclipses as almost atoned for them. Be wary, sir, when you imitate him.

"I am convinced, Yorick," continued my father, half reading and half discoursing, "that there is a north-west passage to the intellectual world; and that the soul of man has shorter ways of going to work, in furnishing itself with knowledge and instruction, than we generally take with it. But alack! all fields have not a river or spring running beside them; every child, Yorick, has not a parent to point it out.

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"The whole entirely depends," added my father in a low voice, upon the auxiliary verbs, Mr. Yorick."

Had Yorick trode upon Virgil's snake, he could not have looked more surprised." I am surprised too," cried my father, observing it; "and I reckon it as one of the greatest calamities which ever befell the republic of letters, that those who have been entrusted with the education of our children, and whose business it was to open their minds and stock them early with ideas, in order to set the imagination loose upon them, have made so little use of the auxiliary verbs in doing it as they have done. So that, except Raymond Lullius and the elder Pelegrini, the last of which arrived to such perfection in the use of them with his topics, that in a few lessons he could teach a young gentleman to discourse with plausibility upon any subject pro and con, and to say and write all that could be spoken or written concerning it, without blotting a word, to the admiration of all who beheld him.”—“I should be glad, said Yorick, interrupting my father, "to be made to comprehend this matter."-"You shall," said my father.

"The highest stretch of improvement a single word is capable of is a high metaphor-for which, in my opinion, the idea is generally the worse, and not the better; but be that as it may, when the mind has done with it, there is an end: the mind and the idea are at rest until a second idea enters, and so on.

"Now the use of the auxiliaries is, at once to set the soul agoing by herself upon the materials as they are brought her; and by the versa. tility of this great engine, round which they are twisted, to open new tracts of enquiry, and make every idea engender millions." "You excite my curiosity greatly," said Yorick.

"For my own part," quoth my Uncle Toby, "I have given it up.” "The Danes, an' please your honour," quoth the Corporal, "who were on the left at the siege of Limerick, were all auxiliaries. And very good ones," said my Uncle Toby."-" And your honour rolled with them, captains with captains, very well," said the Corporal.

"But the auxiliaries, Trim, my brother is talking about," answered my Uncle Toby, "I conceive to be different things- "" "You do?" said my father, rising up.

CHAPTER XLIII.

My father took a single turn across the room, then sat down and finished the chapter.

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"The verbs auxiliary we are concerned in here," continued my father, are-am; was; have; had; do; did make; made; suffer; shall; should; will; would; can; could; owe; ought; used; or is wont. And these varied with tenses, present, past, future, and conjugated with the verb see; or with these questions added to themIs it? Was it? Will it be? Would it be? May it be? Might it be? And these again put negatively-Is it not? Was it not? Ought it not? Or affirmatively-It is; It was; It ought to be. Or chronologically -Has it been always? Lately? How long ago? Or hypothetically-If it was? If it was not? What would follow if the French should beat the English, if the sun go out of the zodiac?

"Now, by the right use and application of these," continued my father, "in which a child's memory should be exercised, there is no one idea can enter his brain, how barren soever, but a magazine of conceptions and conclusions may be drawn forth from it."-"Didst thou ever see a white bear?" cried my father, turning his head round to Trim, who stood at the back of his chair.-"No, an' please your honour," replied the Corporal." But thou couldst discourse about one, Trim," said my father, "in case of need.". How is it possible, brother," quoth my Uncle Toby, "if the Corporal never saw one?""'Tis the fact I want," replied my father," and the possibility of it is as follows:

"A white bear! Very well. Have I ever seen one? Might I ever have seen one? Am I ever to see one? Ought I ever to have seen one? Or can I ever see one?

"Would I had seen a white bear? (for how can I imagine it?)

"If I should see a white bear, what should I sav? If I should never see a white bear, what then?

If I never have, can, must, or shall see a white bear alive, have I ever seen the skin of one? Did I ever see one painted?-described? Have I never dreamed of one?

"Did my father, mother, uncle, aunt, brothers or sisters ever see a white bear? What would they give? How would they behave? How would the white bear have behaved? Is he wild? tame? terrible?

rough? smooth?

Is the white bear worth seeing?

"Is there no sin in it?

"Is it better than a black one?

VOLUME VI.

CHAPTER I.

WE'LL not stop two moments, my dear sir; only, as we have got through these five volumes-do, sir, sit down upon a set, they are better than nothing let us just look back upon the country we have passed through.

What a wilderness has it been! and what a mercy that we have not both of us been lost or devoured by wild beasts in it!

Did you think the world itself, sir, had contained such a number of jackasses? How they viewed and re-viewed us as we passed over the rivulet at the bottom of that little valley; and when we climbed over that hill, and were just getting out of sight, good God! what a braying did they all set np together!

Pr'ythee, shepherd, who keeps all these jackasses?

Heaven be their comforter. What! are they never curried? Are they never taken in in winter? Bray, bray, bray. Bray on, the world is deeply your debtor; louder still, that's nothing; in good sooth, you are ill used. Was I a jackass, I solemnly declare I would bray in G-fol-re-ut from morning even unto night.

CHAPTER II.

WHEN my father had danced his white bear backwards and forwards through half a dozen pages, he closed the book for good and all, and in a kind of triumph redelivered it into Trim's hand, with a nod to lay it upon the escritoire where he found it.

"Tristram," said he, "shall be made to conjugate every word in the dictionary backwards and forwards the same way; every word, Yorick, by this means, you see, is converted into a thesis or an hypothesis; every thesis and hypothesis have an offspring of propositions, and each propo sition has its own consequences and conclusions; every one of which leads the mind on again into fresh tracts of inquiries and doubtings. The force of this engine," added my father, "is incredible in opening a child's head."-"Tis enough, brother Shandy," cried my Uncle Toby, "to burst it into a thousand splinters."

"I presume," said Yorick, smiling, "it must be owing to this (for

let logicians say what they will, it is not to be accounted for sufficiently from the bare use of the ten predicaments), that the famous Vincent Quirino, amongst the many other astonishing feats of his childhood, of which the Cardinal Bembo has given the world so exact a story, should be able to paste up in the public schools at Rome, so early as in the eighth year of his age, no less than four thousand five hundred and sixty different theses upon the most abstruse points of the most abstruse theology, and to defend and maintain them in such sort as to cramp and dumbfound his opponents." "What is that," cried my father, "to what is told us of Alphonsus Tostatus, who, almost in his nurse's arms, learned all the sciences and liberal arts without being taught any one of them?""What shall we say of the great Peireskius? "That's the very man," cried my Uncle Toby, "I once told you of, brother Shandy, who walked a matter of five hundred miles, reckoning from Paris to Scheveling, and from Scheveling back again, merely to see Stevinus's flying chariot."-" He was a very great man!" added my Uncle Toby (meaning Stevinus)." He was so, by other Toby," said my father (meaning Peireskius), "and had multiplied his ideas so fast, and increased his knowledge to such a prodigious stock, that-if we may give credit to an anecdote concerning him, which we cannot withhold here without shaking the authority of all anecdotes whatever at seven years of age his father committed entirely to his care the education of his younger brother, a boy of five years old, with the sole management of all his concerns. -"Was the father as wise as the son?" quoth my Uncle Toby. "I should think not," said Yorick.- "But what are these,' continued my father, breaking out in a kind of enthusiasm ; these to those prodigies of childhood in Grotius, Scioppius, Heinsius, Politian, Pascal, Joseph Scaliger, Ferdinand de Cordoue, and others; some of which left off their substantial forms at nine years old, or sooner, and went on reasoning without them; others went through their classics at seven; wrote tragedies at eight. Ferdinand de Cordonè was so wise at nine, 'twas thought the devil was in him; and at Venice gave such proofs of his knowledge and goodness, that the monks imagined he was Antichrist or nothing. Others were masters of fourteen languages at ten; finished the course of their rhetoric, poetry, logic, and ethics at eleven; put forth their commentaries upon Servius, and Martianus Capella at twelve; and at thirteen received their degrees in philosophy, laws, and divinity.". But you forget the great Lipsius," quoth Yorick, "who composed a work the day he was born." "They should have wiped it up," said my Uncle Toby, "and said no more about it."

"what are

CHAPTER V.

"You see 'tis high time," said my father, addressing himself equally to my Uncle Toby and Yorick, "to take this young creature out of these women's hands, and put him into those of a private governor. Marcus Antoninus provided fourteen governors all at once to superintend his son Commodus's education, and in six weeks he cashiered five of them. I am of opinion that those five whom. Antonimus dismissed,

did Commodus's temper in that short time more hurt than the other nine were able to rectify all their lives long.

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"Now, as I consider the person who is to be about my son as the mirror in which he is to view himself from morning to night, and by which he is to adjust his looks, his carriage, and perhaps the inmost sentiments of his heart, I would have one, Yorick, if possible, polished at all points, fit for my child to look into."-"This is very good sense," quoth my Uncle Toby to himself. "There is," continued my father, a certain mien and motion of the body and all its parts, both in acting and speaking, which argues a man well within; and I am not at all surprised that Gregory of Nazianzum, upon observing the hasty and untoward gestures of Julian, should foretell he would one day become an apostate; or that St. Ambrose should turn his amanuensis out of doors because of an indecent motion of his head, which went backwards and forwards like a flail; or that Democritus should conceive Protagoras to be a scholar from seeing him bind up a faggot, and thrusting, as he did it, the small twigs inwards. There are a thousand unnoticed openings," continued my father, "which let a penetrating eye at once into a man's soul; and I maintain it," added he, "that a man of sense does not lay down his hat in coming into a room, or take it up in going out of it, but something escapes, which discovers him.

"It is for these reasons," continued my father, "that the governor I make choice of shall neither lisp, or squint, or wink, or talk loud, or look fierce or foolish, or bite his lips, or grind his teeth, or speak through his nose, or pick it or blow it with his fingers.

"He shall neither walk fast, or slow, or fold his arms-for that is laziness; or hang them down-for that is folly; or hide them in his pocket-for that is nonsense.

'He shall neither strike, or pinch, or tickle, or bite, or cut his nails, or hawk, or spit, or snift, or drum with his feet or fingers in company.' -"Now, this is all nonsense again," auoth my Uncle Toby to himself.

"I will have him," continued my father, "cheerful, faceté, jovial; at the same time, prudent, attentive to business, vigilant, acute, argute, inventive, quick in resolving doubts and speculative questions; he shall be wise and judicious, and learned."-" And why not humble, and moderate, and gentle-tempered, and good?” said Yorick.-" And why not," cried my Uncle Toby, "free, and generous, and bountiful, and brave?"-" He shall, my dear Toby," replied my father, getting up and shaking him by his hand.-" Then, brother Shandy," answered my Uncle Toby, raising himself off the chair, and laying down his pipe to take hold of my father's other hand, "I humbly beg I may recommend poor Le Fevre's son to you." A tear of joy of the first water sparkled in my Uncle Toby's eye, and another, the fellow to it, in the Corporal's as the proposition was made; you will see why when you read Le Fevre's story. Fool that I was, nor can I recollect (nor perhaps you) without turning back to the place, what it was that hindered me from letting the Corporal tell it in his own words. But the occasion is lost; I must tell it now in my own.