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the first moment of your begetting it, it generally grows the stronger by every thing 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, shewing, 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 a more penetrating intuition of minds, in warmer climates; not from the loose and common-place solution of a clearer sky, and a more perpetual sun-shine, &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,-shewed that in warmer climates Nature had laid a lighter tax upon the fairest parts 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 act just as she liked.

When my father had got so far,-what a blaze of light did the accounts of the Cæsarean 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 corygis on that; and, pray, what were the happy consequences?- -Why, sir, your Julius Cæsar, 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 into 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 easily 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 new-invented 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 conjecture 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 shew 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, God-fathers and God-mothers not excepted. These, with fifty other points left yet unravelled, you may endeavour to solve, if you have time;-but I tell you before-hand, it will be in vain ;-for not the sage Alquife, 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.

CHAP. 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 and by 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.

stances with which every thing in this world is begirt, give every thing 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 have put his right hand into his right coat-pocket and taken it out;—which he might have done without any violence, or the least ungraceful twist in any one tendon or muscle of his whole body.

In this case (unless, indeed, my father had been resolved to make a fool of himself by holding the wig stiff in his left hand,-or by making some nonsensical angle or other at his elbowjoint, or arm-pit)—his whole attitude had been easy,-natural,-unforced. Reynolds himself, as 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.

CHAP. III.

It was not an easy matter in any king's reign (unless you were as lean a subject as myself) to have forced your hand diagonally, quite across your whole body, so as to gain the bottom of your opposite coat-pocket.- -In the year one thousand seven hundred and eighteen, when this happened, it was extremely difficult; so that when my uncle Toby discovered the transverse zig-zaggery of my father's approaches towards it, it instantly brought into his mind those he had done duty in, before the gate of St Nicholas; the idea of which drew off his attention so entirely from the subject in debate, that he had got his right hand to the bell, to ring up Trim, to go and fetch his map of Namur, and his compasses and sector along with it, to measure the returning angles of the traverses of that attack, but particularly of that one where he received his wound upon his groin.

My father knit his brows, and as he knit them, all the blood in his body seemed to rush

up into his face-my uncle Toby dismounted immediately.

-I did not apprehend your uncle Toby was on horseback.

CHAP. IV.

A MAN's body and his mind, with the utmost reverence to both I speak it, are exactly like a jerkin, and a jerkin's lining ;-rumple the one, you rumple the other. 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 bodylining to it of a sarcenet or thin persian.

Zeno, Cleanthes, Diogenes Babylonius, Dionysius, Heracleotes, Antipater, Panætius, and Possidonius amongst the Greeks;-Cato, and Varro, and Seneca amongst the Romans ;-Pantenus, and Clemens Alexandrinus, and Montaigne amongst the Christians; and a score and a half of good, honest, unthinking Shandean people as ever lived, whose names I can't recollect,-all pretended that their jerkins were made after this fashion; you might have rumpled and crumpled, and doubled and creased, and fretted and fridged the outside of them all to pieces ;in short, you might have play'd 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-skelter, dingdong, 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.

ers!.

-You, Messrs the Monthly Review-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, poor devil," quoth he,-" get thee gone ;

why should I hurt thee!This world is surely wide enough to hold both thee and me.”

CHAP. V.

ANY man, madam, reasoning upwards, and observing the prodigious suffusion of blood in my father's countenance, by means of which (as all the blood in his body seemed to rush 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 Scarlatti-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 into 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-will-my father, at length, went on as fol

lows:

CHAP. IV.

"WHAT prodigious armies you had in Flanders!"

-Brother Toby, quoth my father, I do believe thee to be as honest a man, and with as good and as upright a heart, as ever God created; nor is it thy fault, if all the children which have been, may, can, shall, will, or ought to be begotten, come with their heads foremost into the world; but, believe me, dear Toby, the accidents which unavoidably way-lay them not only in the article of our begetting 'em, though these, in my opinion, are well worth considering, but the dangers and difficulties our children are beset with, after they are got forth into the world, are enow ;-little need is there to expose them to unnecessary ones in their passage to it.Are these dangers, quoth my uncle Toby, laying his hand upon my father's knee, and looking up seriously in his face, for au an

swer,-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 muscles along his cheeks, and the orbicular muscles around his lips to do their duty,—he whistled Lillabullero.

CHAP. VII.

WHILST my uncle Toby was whistling Lillabuilero to my father,-Dr Slop was stamping, and cursing and damning at Obadiah at a most dreadful rate. It would have done your heart good, and cured you, sir, for ever, of the vile sin of swearing, to have heard him-I am determined, therefore, to relate the whole affair to you.

When Dr Slop's maid delivered the green baize-bag, with her master's instruments in it, to Obadiah, she very sensibly exhorted him to put his head and one arm through the strings, and ride with it slung across his body. So, undoing the bow-knot, to lengthen the strings for him, without any more ado, she helped him on with it. However, as this, in some measure, unguarded the mouth of the bag; lest any thing should bolt out, in galloping back at the speed Obadiah threatened, they consulted to take it off again: and, in the great care and caution of their hearts, they had taken the two strings, and tied them close (pursing up the mouth of the bag first) with half a dozen hard knots, each of which Obadiah, to make all safe, had twitched and drawn together with all the strength of his body.

This answered all that Obadiah and the maid intended; but was no remedy against some evils which neither he or she foresaw. The instru ments, it seems, as tight as the bag was tied above, had so much room to play in it, towards the bottom (the shape of the bag being conical) that Obadiah could not make a trot of it, but with such a terrible jingle, what with the tiretête, forceps, and squirt, as would have been enough, had Hymen been taking a jaunt that way, to have frightened him out of the country; but when Obadiah accelerated his motion, and from a plain trot assayed to prick his coachhorse into a full gallop,-by Heaven! sir, the jingle was incredible.

As Obadiah had a wife and three children,the turpitude of fornication, and the many other political ill consequences of this jingling, never once entered his brain ;-he had, however, his objection, which came home to himself, and

weighed with him, as it has oftentimes done with the greatest patriots." The poor fellow, sir, was not able to hear himself whistle."

CHAP. VIII.

As Obadiah loved wind-music preferably to all the instrumental music he carried with him, -he very considerately set his imagination to work, to contrive and to invent by what means he should put himself in a condition of enjoying it.

In all distresses (except musical) where small cords are wanted, nothing is so apt to enter a man's head as his hat-band :— the philosophy of this is so near the surface,-I scorn to enter into it.

As Obadiah's was a mixed case ;-mark, sirs, I say, a mixed case; for it was obstetrical,-scrip-tical, squirtical, papistical-and as far as the coach-horse was concerned in it,— cabalistical, and only partly musical;-Obadiah made no scruple of availing himself of the first expedient which offered; so taking hold of the bag and instruments, and griping them hard together with one hand, and with the finger and thumb of the other, putting the end of the hatband betwixt his teeth, and then slipping his hand down to the middle of it,-he tied and cross-tied them all fast together from one end to the other (as you would cord a trunk) with such a multiplicity of round-abouts and intricate cross turns, with a hard knot at every intersection or point where the strings met, that Dr Slop must have had three-fifths of Job's patience at least to have unloosed them.-I think, in my conscience, that had Nature been in one of her nimble moods, and in humour for such a contest, and she and Dr Slop both fairly started together, there is no man living who had seen the bag with all that Obadiah had done to it, and known likewise the great speed the Goddess can make when she thinks proper, who would have had the least doubt remaining in his mind which of the two would have carried off the prize. My mother, madam, had been delivered sooner than the green bag infallibly at least by twenty knots.- -Sport of small accidents, Tristram Shandy! that thou art, and ever will be! had that trial been made for thee, and it was fifty to one but it had,-thy affairs had not been so depressed (at least by the depression of thy nose) as they have been; nor had the fortunes of thy house and the occasions of making them, which have so often presented themselves in the course of thy life, to thee, been so often, so vexatiously, so tamely, so irrecoverably abandoned-as thou hast been forced to leave them ;-but 'tis over,-all but the account of 'em, which cannot be given to the curious till I am got into the world.

CHAP. IX.

GREAT wits jump:-for the moment Dr Slop cast his eyes upon his bag (which he had not done till the dispute with my uncle Toby about midwifery put him in mind of it) the very same thought occurred.-'Tis God's mercy, quoth he (to himself) that Mrs Shandy has had so bad a time of it, else she might have been brought to bed, seven times told, before one half of these knots could have been got untied. But here you must distinguish:--the thought floated only in Dr Slop's mind, without sail or ballast to it, as a simple proposition; millions of which, as your worship knows, are every day swimming quietly in the middle of the thin juice of a man's understanding, without being carried backwards or forwards, till some little gusts of passion or interest drive them to one side.

A sudden trampling in the room above, near my mother's bed, did the proposition the very service I am speaking of. By all that's unfortunate, quoth Dr Slop, unless I make haste, the thing will actually befall me as it is.

CHAP. X.

-

In the case of knots; by which, in the first place, I would not be understood to mean slipknots,-because in the course of my life and opinions-my opinions concerning them will come in more properly when I mention the catastrophe of my great uncle Mr Hammond Shandy, a little man,-but of high fancy:-he rushed into the Duke of Monmouth's affair :-nor, secondly, in this place, do I mean that particular species of knots called bow-knots ;-there is so little address, or skill, or patience required in the unloosing them, that they are below my giving any opinion at all about them.-But by the knots I am speaking of, may it please your reverences to believe, that I mean good, honest, devilish tight, hard knots, made bona fide, as Obadiah made his ;-in which there is no quibbling provision made by the duplication and return of the two ends of the strings through the annulus or noose made by the second implication of them to get them slipped and undone by.--I hope you apprehend me.

In the case of these knots, then, and of the several obstructions, which, may it please your reverences, such knots cast in our way in getting through life-every hasty man can whip out his pen-knife and cut through them.-'Tis wrong, Believe me, sirs, the most virtuous way, and which both reason and conscience dictate-is to take our teeth or our fingers to them.--Dr Slop had lost his teeth,-his favourite instrument by extracting in a wrong direction, or, by some misapplication of it, unfortunately slipping, he