unity and peace-making of the world! What was to be had, however, he set the greater store by; and though my father would oft times sport with my uncle Toby's library,-which, by the bye, was ridiculous enough,—yet at the very same time he did it, he collected every book and treatise which had been systematically wrote upon noses, with as much care as my honest uncle Toby had done those upon military architecture. 'Tis true, a much less table would have held them;—but that was not thy transgression, my dear uncle.

Here, but why here rather than in any other part of my story?—I am not able to tell:-but here it is- -my heart stops me to pay to thee, my dear uncle Toby, once for all, the tribute I owe thy goodness.-Here let me thrust my chair aside, and kneel down upon the ground, whilst I am pouring forth the warmest sentiments of love for thee, and veneration for the excellence of thy character, that ever virtue and nature kindled in a nephew's bosom.-Peace and comfort rest for evermore upon thy head!— Thou enviedst no man's comforts,-insultedst no man's opinions;-thou blackenedst no man's character, devouredst no man's bread! Gently, with faithful Trim behind thee, didst thou ramble round the little circle of thy pleasures, jostling no creature in thy way: for each one's sorrows, thou hadst a tear,-for each man's need, thou hadst a shilling.

Whilst I am worth one, to pay a weeder, thy path from thy door to thy bowling-green shall never be grown up.-Whilst there is a rood and a half of land in the Shandy family, thy fortifications, my dear uncle Toby, shall never be demolished.

CHAP. XXXV.

der Bruscambille is, inasmuch as a prologue upon long noses might easily be done by either,

twill be no objection against the simile-to say, That when my father got home, he solaced himself with Bruscambille 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 bye, how delightful soever it may prove to the inamorato,-is of little or no entertainment at all to by-standers.-Take notice, I go no further with the simile;-ny father's eye was greater than his appetite,-his zcal greater than his knowledge;-he cooled, his affections became divided; he got hold of Prignitz,-purchased Scroderus, Andrea Paræus, Bouchet's Evening Conferences, and, above all, the great and learned Hafen Slawkenbergius; of which, as I shall have much to say by and bye,-I will say nothing now.

CHAP. XXXVI.

Or all the tracts my father was at the pains to procure and study in support of his hypothe sis, there was not any one wherein he felt a more cruel disappointment at first, than in the celebrated dialogue between Pamphagus and Cocles, 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 anywise help it; or, if he is so nimble as to slip on, let me beg of you, like an unback'd filly, to frisk it, squirt it, to jump it, to rear it, to bound it-and to kick it, with long kicks and short kicks, till, like Tickletoby's mare, you break a strap or a crupper, and throw his worship into the dirt-You need not kill him.—

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 -And pray who was Tickletoby's mare?— fortune, however, to set off well, in getting Brus- 'Tis just as discreditable and unscholar-like a cambille's prologue upon long noses, almost for question, sir, as to have asked what year (ab nothing; for he gave no more for Bruscambille urb. con.) the second Punic war broke out.than three half-crowns; owing indeed to the Who was Tickletoby's mare!Read, read, strong fancy which the stall-man saw my father read, read, my unlearned reader! read,-or by had for the book the moment he laid his hands the knowledge of the great Saint Paraleipomeupon it. There are not three Bruscambilles in non,-I tell you beforehand, you had better Christendom, said the stall-man, except what throw down the book at once; for without are chained up in the libraries of the curious. much reading, by which your reverence knows, My father flung down the money as quick as I mean much knowledge, you will no more be lightning,-took Bruscambille into his bosom, able to penetrate the moral of the next marbled -hied home from Picadilly to Coleman-street page (motley emblem of my work,) than the with it, as he would have hied home with a world with all its sagacity has been able to treasure, without taking his hand once off from unravel the many opinions, transactions, and Bruscambille all the way. truths, which still lie mystically hid under the dark veil of the black one.*

To those who do not yet know of which gen

• In the early editions, there occurred here a marbled leaf, as elsewhere a black one. unnecessary to retain them here.

It has been thought

CHAP. XXXVII.

"NIHIL me pœnitet hujus nasi,” quoth Pamphagus ;—that is," My nose has been the making of me."" Nec est cur pæniteat," replies Cocles; 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 subtilty 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 pish'd and pugh'd at first most terribly.- 'Tis 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. Mayhap 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 reverences 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 ad excitandum focum, (to stir up the fire.)

Nature 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 pen-knife, 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.- -Psha! 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.

of my Disgrazias,-thou sad foreteller of so many of the whips and short turns which in one stage or other of my life have come slap upon me from the shortness of my nose, and no other cause that I am conscious of—tell me, Slawkenbergius! what secret impulse was it? what intonation of voice? whence came it? how did it sound in thy ears ?-art thou sure thou heard'st it?-which first cried out to thee,Go,-Slawkenbergius! dedicate the labours or thy life,-neglect thy pastimes,-call forth all the powers and faculties of thy nature,—macerate thyself in the service of mankind, and write a grand FOLIO for them, upon the subject of their noses.

How the communication was conveyed into Slawkenbergius's sensorium,—so that Slawkenbergius should know whose finger touch'd the key, and whose hand it was that blew the bellows,-as Hafen Slawkenbergius has been dead and laid in his grave above fourscore and ten years, we can only raise conjectures.

:

Slawkenbergius was play'd upon, for aught I know, like one of Whitefield's disciples :that is, with such a distinct intelligence, sir, of which of the two masters it was that had been practising upon his instrument,-as to make all reasoning upon it needless.

For, in the account which Hafen Slawkenbergius gives the world of his motives and occasions for writing and spending so many years of his life upon this one work,-towards the end of his prolegomena; which, by the bye, should have come first, but the bookbinder has most injudiciously placed it betwixt the analytical contents of the book and the book itself,-he informs his reader, that ever since he had arrived at the age of discernment, and was able to sit down coolly and consider within himself the true state and condition of man,-and distinguish the main end and design of his being ;or,-to shorten my translation, for Slawkenbergius's book is in Latin, and not a little prolix in this passage ;-ever since I understood, quoth Slawkenbergius, any thing,-or rather what was what, and could perceive that the point of long noses had been too loosely handled by all who had gone before,-have I, Slawkenbergius, felt a strong impulse, with a mighty and unresistible call within me, to gird up myself to this undertaking.

And to do justice to Slawkenbergius, he has entered the list with a stronger lance, and taken a much larger career in it, than any one man, who had ever entered it before him ;and, indeed, in many respects, deserves to be en-nich'd as a prototype for all writers of voluminous works at least, to model their works by; for he has taken in, sir, the whole subject,— examined every part of it dialectically ;—then brought it into full day; dilucidating it with all the light which either the collison of his own O, SLAWKENBERGIUS! thou faithful analyser natural parts could strike,- -or the profoundest

CHAP. XXXVIII.

knowledge of the sciences had empowered him to cast upon it,-collating, collecting, and compiling;-begging, borrowing, and stealing, as he went along, all that had been wrote or wrangled thereupon in the schools and porticoes of the learned; so that Slawkenbergius his book may properly be considered, not only as a model, but as a thorough stitched DIGEST, and regular institute of noses; comprehending in it all that is, or can be, needful to be known

about them.

Be witness,

I don't acquaint the learned reader ;—in saying it, I mention it only to shew the learned, I know the fact myself

That this Ambrose Paræus was chief surgeon and nose-mender to Francis the Ninth of France; and in high credit with him and the two preceding or succeeding kings (I know not which)

and that, except in the slip he made in his story of Taliacotius's noses, and his manner of setting them on,-he was esteemed by the whole college of physicians at that time, as more knowing in matters of noses, than any one who had ever taken them in hand.

Now, Ambrose Paræus convinced my father, that the true and efficient cause of what had engaged so much the attention of the world, and upon which Prignitz and Scroderus had wasted so much learning and fine parts,-was neither this nor that ;-but that the length and goodness of the nose, was owing simply to the softness and flaccidity in the nurse's breast, as the flatness and shortness of puisne noses was to the firmness and elastic repulsion of the same organ of nutrition in the hale and lively;—which, though happy for the woman, was the undoing of the child, inasmuch as his nose was so snubbed, so rebuffed, so rebated, and so refrigerated thereby, as never to arrive ad mensuram suam legitimam;-but that in case of flaccidity and softness of the nurse or mother's breast,—by sinking into it, quoth Paræus, as into so much butter, the nose was comforted, nourished, plumped up, refreshed, refocilated, and set a-growing for ever.

For this cause it is that I forbear to speak of so many (otherwise) valuable books and treatises of my father's collecting, wrote either plump upon noses, or collaterally touching them ;such, for instance, as Prignitz, now laying upon the table before me, who with infinite learning, and from the most candid and scholar-like examination of above four thousand different skulls in upwards of twenty charnel-houses in Silesia, which he had rummaged, has informed us, that the mensuration and configuration of the osseous or bony parts of human noses, in any given tract of country, except Crim Tartary, where they are all crush'd down by the thumb, so that no judgment can be formed upon them, are much nearer alike than the world imagines; the difference amongst them being, he says, a mere trifle, not worth taking notice of;-but that the size and jollity of every individual nose, and by which one nose ranks above another, and bears a higher price, is owing to the cartilaginous and muscular parts of it, into whose ducts and sinuses the blood and animal spirits being impelled, and driven by the warmth and force of imagination, which is but a step from it (ba- I have but two things to observe of Paræus ; ting the case of idiots, whom Prignitz, who had first, That he proves and explains all this with lived many years in Turkey, supposes under the the utmost chastity and decorum of expression; more immediate tutelage of Heaven)-it so hap--for which, may his soul for ever rest in peace; pens, and ever must, says Prignitz, that the excellency of the nose is in a direct arithmetical proportion to the excellency of the wearer's fancy.

It is for the same reason; that is, because 'tis all comprehended in Slawkenbergius, that I say nothing likewise of Scroderus (Andrea,) who, all the world knows, set himself up to oppugn Prignitz with great violence,-proving it in his own way, first, logically, and then by a series of stubborn facts, "That so far was Prignitz from the truth, in affirming that the fancy begat the nose, that, on the contrary, the nose begat the fancy."

-The learned suspected Scroderus of an indecent sophism in this ;—and Prignitz cried out aloud in the dispute, that Scroderus had shifted the idea upon him, but Scroderus went on, maintaining his thesis.

My father was just balancing within himself, which of the two sides he should take in this affair; when Ambrose Paræus decided it in a moment, and, by overthrowing the systems, both of Prignitz and Scroderus, drove my father out of both sides of the controversy at once.

And, secondly, that besides the systems of Prignitz and Scroderus, which Ambrose Paræus his hypothesis effectually overthrew, it overthrew at the same time the system of peace and harmony of our family; and, for three days together, not only embroiled matters between my father and my mother, but turned likewise the whole house, and every thing in it, except my uncle Toby, quite upside down.

Such a ridiculous tale of a dispute between a man and his wife, never surely, in any age or country, got vent through the key-hole of a street-door!

My mother, you must know--but I have fifty things more necessary to let you know first;

I have a hundred difficulties which I have promised to clear up, and a thousand distresses and domestic misadventures crowding in upon me thick and three-fold, one upon the neck of another. A cow broke in (to-morrow morning) to my uncle Toby's fortifications, and eat up two rations and a half of dried grass, tearing up the sods with it which faced his horn-work and covered-way.Trim insists upon being tried by a court-martial,—the cow to be shot,-Slop

to be crucifix'd,--myself to be tristram'd, and at schoolmen,―scullions,-anatomists, and engimy very baptism made a martyr of;-poor un- neers, fight for it among themselves.happy Devils that we all are!-I want swaddling;--but there is no time to be lost in exclamations, I have left my father lying across his bed, and uncle Toby in his old fringed chair, sitting beside him, and promised I would go back to them in half an hour; and five-andthirty minutes are lapsed already.Of all the perplexities a mortal author was ever seen in, this certainly is the greatest; for I have Hafen Slawkenbergius's folio, sir, to finish;-a dialogue between my father and my uncle Toby, upon the solution of Prignitz, Scroderus, Ambrose Paræus, Panocrates, and Grangousier to relate; a tale out of Slawkenbergius to translate;—and all this in five minutes less than no time at all. Such a head!-would to Heaven my enemies only saw the inside of it!

as you will read in the next chapter, did neither the one or the other.

CHAP. XLI.

"Tis a pity, cried my father, one winter's night, after a three hours painful translation of Sławkenbergius,-'tis a pity, 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 up sometimes 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 Prignitz to him, having nothing to stay it there, had taken a short flight to the bowling-green-his body might as well have taken a turn there too; --so that with all the semblance of a deep schoolman, intent upon the medius terminus,-my uncle Toby was in fact as ignorant of the whole lecture, and all its pro's and con's, as if my father had been translating Hafen Slawkenbergius 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 with a desire to profit, my father with great pleasure began his sentence again,-changing only the plan, and dropping the metaphor of the siege in it, to keep clear of some dangers my father apprehended from it.

"Tis a pity, said my father, that truth 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.

1

a busy life on't; 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 mettle so much, or make his passions go off so like gun-powder, as the unexpected strokes his science met with from the quaint simplicity of my uncle Toby's questions.Had 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 in full upon him in his hobby-horsical career.

"Twas all one to my uncle Toby :-he smoaked his pipe on, with unvaried 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 Ernulphus's digest of curses-(though, to do my father justice, it was a fault, as he told Dr Slop in the affair of Ernulphus, which he as 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 befriend 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 learned men of different kinds of knowledge have given the world, of the causes of short and long noses.— There is no cause but one, replied my uncle Toby, why one man's nose is longer than another's, but because that God pleases to have it so. That is Grangousier's solution, said my father. It is He, continued my uncle Toby, -My father thrust back his chair,-rose up, looking up, and not regarding my father's in-put on his hat,-took four long strides to the terruption, who makes us all, and frames and door,-jerked it open, thrust his head half-way puts us together in such forms and proporout, shut the door again,-took no notice of tions, and for such ends, as is agreeable to his the bad hinge,-returned to the table,-pluck- infinite wisdom.'Tis a pious account, cried ed my mother's thread-paper out of Slawken- my father, but not philosophical;-there is more bergius's book, went hastily to his bureau, religion in it than sound science. It was no walked slowly back, twisted my mother's thread- inconsistent part of my uncle Toby's character, paper about his thumb,-unbuttoned his waist--that he feared God, and reverenced religion. coat,-threw my mother's thread-paper into the fire,-bit her satin pincushion in two,-filled his mouth with bran,-confounded it; but mark, the oath of confusion was levelled at my uncle Toby's brain-which was even confused enough already;-the curse came charged only with the bran;-the bran, may it please your Honours, was no more than powder to the ball.

'Twas well my father's passions lasted not long; for so long as they did last, they led him

So the moment my father finished his remark,-my uncle Toby fell a whistling Lillabullero, with more zeal (though more out of tune) than usual

What is become of my wife's thread-paper?

CHAP. XLII.

No matter. As an appendage to seamstressy, the thread-paper might be of some consequence