gination a thorny dance, and, before all was over, played the deuce and all with him ;-for, sure as ever the word weakness was uttered, and struck full upon his brain, so sure it set him upon running divisions upon how many kinds of weaknesses there were ;-that there was such a thing as weakness of the body, as well as weakness of the mind;-and then he would do nothing but syllogize within himself for a stage or two together, how far the cause of all these vexations might, or might not, have arisen out of himself.

In short, he had so many little subjects of disquietude springing out of this one affair, all fretting successively in his mind as they rose up in it, that my mother, whatever was her jour ney up, had but an uneasy journey of it down. -In a word, as she complained to my uncle Toby, he would have tired out the patience of any flesh alive.

CHAP. XVII.

THOUGH my father travelled homewards as I told you, in none of the best of moods,-pshawing and pish-ing all the way down,-yet he had the complaisance to keep the worst part of the story still to himself; which was the resolution he had taken, of doing himself the justice, which my uncle Toby's clause in the marriage-settlement empowered him; nor was it till the very night in which I was begot, which was thirteen months after, that she had the least intimation of his design ;- -when my father, happening, as you remember, to be a little chagrined and out of temper,-took occasion, as they lay chatting gravely in bed afterwards, talking over what was to come,-to let her know that she must accommodate herself as well as she could to the bargain made between them in their marriagedeeds; which was, to ly-in of her next child in the country, to balance the last year's journey.

My father was a gentleman of many virtues, -but he had a strong spice of that in his temper, which might, or might not, add to the number.Tis known by the name of perseverance in a good cause, and of obstinacy in a bad one of this my mother had so much knowledge, that she knew 'twas to no purpose to make any remonstrance; so she e'en resolved to sit down quietly, and make the most of it.

CHAP. XVIII.

As the point was that night agreed, or rather determined, that my mother should ly-in of me in the country, she took her measures accordingly; for which purpose, when she was three days, or thereabouts, gone with child, she began to cast her eyes upon the midwife whom you have so often heard me mention; and before

the week was well got round, as the famous Dr Maningham was not to be had, she had come to a final determination in her mind,—notwithstanding there was a scientific operator within so near a call as eight miles of us, and who, moreover, had expressly wrote a five shilling book upon the subject of midwifery, in which he had exposed, not only the blunders of the sisterhood itself,-but had likewise superadded many curious improvements for the quicker extraction of the fœtus in cross births, and some other cases of danger which delay us in getting into the world;-notwithstanding all this, my mother, I say, was absolutely determined to trust her life, and mine with it, into no soul's hand but this old woman's only.-Now this I like;-when we cannot get at the very thing we wish, never to take up with the next best in degree to it ;-no, that's pitiful beyond description. -It is no more than a week from this very day in which I am now writing this book for the edification of the world,-which is March 9, 1759, -that my dear, dear Jenny, observing I looked a little grave, as she stood cheapening a silk of five and twenty shillings a yard,—told the mercer she was sorry she had given him so much trouble; and immediately went and bought herself a yard-wide stuff of ten-pence a yard. 'Tis the duplication of one and the same greatness of soul; only, what lessened the honour of it somewhat, in my mother's case, was, that she could not heroine it into so violent and hazardous an extreme, as one in her situation might have wished, because the old midwife had really some little claim to be depended upon, as much, at least, as success could give her; having, in the course of her practice of near twenty years in the parish, brought every mother's son of them into the world without any one slip or accident which could fairly be laid to her account.

These facts, though they had their weight, yet did not altogether satisfy some few scruples and uneasinesses which hung upon my father's spirits in relation to this choice.To say nothing of the natural workings of humanity and justice, or of the yearnings of parental and connubial love, all which prompted him to leave as little to hazard as possible in a case of this kind, he felt himself concerned in a particular manner, that all should go right in the present case,-from the accumulated sorrow he lay open to, should any evil betide his wife and child, in lying-in at Shandy-hall.-He knew the world judged by events, and would add to his afflictions in such a misfortune, by loading him with the whole blame of it." Alas o' day!-had Mrs Shandy, poor gentlewoman! had but her wish in going up to town just to ly-in and come down again, which, they say, she begged and prayed for upon her bare knees, and which, in my opinion, considering the fortune which Mr Shandy got with her, was no such mighty matter to have coinplied with, the lady and her

babe might both of them have been alive at this hour."

This exclamation, my father knew, was unanswerable; and yet, it was not merely to shelter himself, nor was it altogether for the care of his offspring and wife, that he seemed so extremely anxious about this point;my father had extensive views of things, and stood, moreover, as he thought, deeply concerned in it for the public good, from the dread he entertained of the bad uses an ill-fated instance might be put to.

He was very sensible that all political writers upon the subject had unanimously agreed and lamented, from the beginning of Queen Elizabeth's reign down to his own time, that the current of men and money towards the metropolis, upon one frivolous errand or another, set in so strong,-as to become dangerous to our civil rights;though, by the bye, a current was not the image he took most delight in,-a distemper was here his favourite metaphor; and he would run it down into a perfect allegory, by maintaining it was identically the same in the body national as in the body natural; where the blood and spirits were driven up into the head faster than they could find their ways down,-a stoppage of circulation must ensue, which was death in both cases.

There was little danger, he would say, of losing our liberties by French politics or French invasions; nor was he so much in pain of a consumption from the mass of corrupted matter and ulcerated humours in our constitution, which he hoped was not so bad as it was imagined, but he verily feared, that in some violent push, we should go off, all at once, in a state of apoplexy ;- and then he would say, The Lord have mercy upon us all.

My father was never able to give the history of this distemper,-without the remedy along with it.

"Was I an absolute prince," he would say, pulling up his breeches with both his hands, as he rose from his arm-chair, “I would appoint able judges at every avenue of my metropolis, who should take cognizance of every fool's business who came there; and if, upon a fair and candid hearing, it appeared not of weight sufficient to leave his own home, and come up, bag and baggage, with his wife and children, farmers' sons, &c. &c. at his backside, they should be all sent back from constable to constable, like vagrants, as they were, to the place of their legal settlements. By this means, I should take care, that my metropolis tottered not through its own weight;-that the head be no longer too big for the body; that the extremes, now wasted and pined in, be restored to their duc share of nourishment, and regain, with it, their natural strength and beauty. I would effectually provide, that the meadows and corn fields of my dominions should laugh and sing ;-that good

VOL. V.

cheer and hospitality flourish once more ;and that such weight and influence be put thereby into the hands of the 'Squirality of my kingdom, as should counterpoise what I perceive my Nobility are now taking from them.

Why are there so few palaces and gentlemen's seats," he would ask, with some emotion, as he walked across the room," throughout so many delicious provinces in France? Whence is it that the few remaining chateaus amongst them are so dismantled,--so unfurnished, and in so ruinous and desolate a condition ?-Because, sir (he would say,) in that kingdom no man has any country interest to support ;- -the little interest of any kind, which any man has any where in it, is concentrated in the court, and the looks of the Grand Monarque; by the sunshine of whose countenance, or the clouds which pass across it, every Frenchman lives or dies."

Another political reason which prompted my father so strongly to guard against the least evil accident in my mother's lying-in in the country, -was, That any such instance would infallibly throw a balance of power, too great already, into the weaker vessels of the gentry, in his own, or higher stations;which, with the many other usurped rights which that part of the constitution was hourly establishing, would, in the end, prove fatal to the monarchial system of domestic government established in the first creation of things by God.

In this point he was entirely of Sir Robert Filmer's opinion, That the plans and institutions of the greatest monarchies in the eastern parts of the world, were originally all stolen from that admirable pattern and prototype of this household and paternal power; which, for a century, he said, and more, had gradually been degenerating away into a mixed government ;-the form of which, however desirable in great combinations of the species, was very troublesome in small ones, and seldom produced any thing, that he saw, but sorrow and confusion.

For all these reasons, private and public, put together, my father was for having the manmidwife by all means,-my mother by no means. My father begged and entreated she would for once recede from her prerogative in this matter, and suffer him to choose for her ;-my mother, on the contrary, insisted upon her privilege in this matter, to choose for herself,—and have no mortal's help but the old woman's. What could my father do? He was almost at his wit's end;-talked it over with her in all moods ;- -placed his arguments in all lights;

-My

-argued the matter with her like a Christian, like a heathen,-like a husband,—like a father, like a patriot,-like a man.mother answered every thing only like a woman; which was a little hard upon her ;she could not assume and fight it out behind such a variety of characters,-it was no fair match;-'twas seven to one. -What could

B

-for as

my mother do? -She had the advantage (otherwise she would have been certainly overpowered) of a small reinforcement of chagrin personal at the bottom, which bore her up, and enabled her to dispute the affair with my father with so equal an advantage,-that both sides sung Te Deum. In a word, my mother was to have the old woman,-and the operator was to have licence to drink a bottle of wine with my father, and my uncle Toby Shandy, in the back parlour, for which he was to be paid five guineas.

I must beg leave, before I finish this chapter, to enter a caveat in the breast of my fair reader; and it is this:Not to take it absolutely for granted, from an unguarded word or two which I have dropped in it," that I am a married man."-Town, the tender appellation of my dear, dear Jenny, with some other strokes of conjugal knowledge interspersed here and there, might, naturally enough, have misled the most candid judge in the world into such a determination against me.-- -All I plead for in this case, madam, is strict justice, and that you do so much of it, to me as well as to yourself,- -as not to prejudge or receive such an impression of me, till you have better evidence, than, I am positive, at present can be produced against me:- -Not that I can be so vain, or unreasonable, madam, as to desire you should therefore think, that my dear, dear Jenny, is my kept mistress;-no,-that would be flattering my character in the other extreme, and giving it an air of freedom, which, perhaps, it has no kind of right to. All I contend for, is the utter impossibility for some volumes, that you, or the most penetrating spirit upon earth, should know how this matter really stands.- -It is not impossible, but that my dear, dear Jenny! tender as the appellation is, may be my child.Consider, I was born in the year eighteen.

-Nor is there any thing unnatural or extravagant in the supposition, that my dear Jenny may be my friend.- -Friend!- -My friend. -Surely, madam, a friendship between the two sexes may subsist, and be support

ed without

-Fy! Mr Shandywithout any thing, madam, but that tender and delicious sentiment, which ever mixes in friendship, where there is a difference of sex. Let me entreat you to study the pure and sentimental parts of the best French romances; it will really, madam, astonish you to see with what a variety of chaste expressions this delicious sentiment, which I have the honour to speak of, is dressed out.

CHAP. XIX.

I WOULD Sooner undertake to explain the hardest problem in geometry, than pretend to account for it, that a gentleman of my father's

great good sense,-knowing, as the reader must have observed him, and curious too, in philosophy-wise also in political reasoning, and in polemical (as he will find) no way ignorant,— could be capable of entertaining a notion in his head, so out of the common track,-that I fear the reader, when I come to mention it to him, if he is the least of a choleric temper, will immediately throw the book by ;-if mercurial, he will laugh most heartily at it; and if he is of a grave and saturnine cast, he will, at first sight, absolutely condemn as fanciful and extravagant; and that was in respect to the choice and imposition of Christian names, on which he thought a great deal more depended, than what superficial minds were capable of conceiving.

His opinion, in this matter, was, That there was a strange kind of magic bias, which good or bad names, as he called them, irresistibly impressed upon our characters and conduct.

The Hero of Cervantes argued not the point with more seriousness,-nor had he more faith, -or more to say on the powers of Necromancy in dishonouring his deeds,-or on DULCINEA'S name, in shedding lustre upon them, than my father had on those of TRISMEGISTUS OF ARCHIMEDES, on the one hand,- -or of NYKY and SIMKIN on the other. How many CÆSARS and POMPEYS, he would say, by mere inspiration of the names, have been rendered worthy of them? And how many, he would add, are there, who might have done exceeding well in the world, had not their characters and spirits been totally depressed and NICODEMUS'D into nothing.

I see plainly, sir, by your looks, (or as the case happened) my father would say, that you do not heartily subscribe to this opinion of mine,

which, to those, he would add, who have not carefully sifted it to the bottom,-I own has an air more of fancy than of solid reasoning in it;

and yet, my dear sir, if I may presume to know your character, I am morally assured, I should hazard little in stating a case to younot as a party in the dispute,—but as a judge, and trusting my appeal upon it to your own good sense and candid disquisition in this matter.- -You are a person free from as many narrow prejudices of education as most men; and, if I may presume to penetrate farther into you,-of a liberality of genius above bearing down an opinion, merely because it wants friends. Your son!-your dear son,from whose sweet and open temper you have so much to expect, your BILLY, sir,would you for the world have called him JUDAS?-Would you, my dear sir, he would say, laying his hand upon your breast with the genteelest address, and in that soft and irresistible piano of voice, which the nature of the argumentum ad hominem absolutely requires,- -Would you, sir, if a Jew of a godfather had proposed the name of your child, and offered you his purse along with it, would you have consented to such a desecra

kinds of Christian names, which operated very little either way; and as my father happened to be at Epsom when it was given him, he would oft-times thank Heaven it was no worse. Andrew was something like a negative quantity in algebra with him :-it was worse, he said, than nothing.- -William stood pretty high:Numps again was low with him-and Nick, he said, was the DEVIL.

But, of all the names in the universe, he had the most unconquerable aversion for TRISTRAM; -he had the lowest and most contemptible opinion of it, of any thing in the world, thinking it could possibly produce nothing, in rerum natura, but what was extremely mean and pitiful: so that in the midst of a dispute on the subject, in which, by the bye, he was frequently involved he would sometimes break off in a sudden and spirited EPIPHONEMA, or rather EROTESIS, raised a third, and sometimes a full fifth, above the key of the discourse,-and demand it categorically of his antagonist, whether he would take upon him to say, he had ever remembered, whether he had ever read, or even whether he had ever heard tell of a man, called Tristram, performing any thing great, or worth recording?—No,-he would say TRISTRAM!The thing is impossible. What could be wanting in my father, but to have wrote a book, to publish this notion of his to the world! Little boots it to the subtle speculatist to stand single in his opinions,—unless he gives them proper vent :-It was the identical thing which my father did ;for in the year sixteen, which was two years before I was born, he was at the pains of writing an express DISSERTATION Simply upon the word Tristram, -shewing the world, with great candour and modesty, the grounds of his great abhorrence to the name.

When this story is compared with the titlepage-will not the gentle reader pity my father from his soul?- -To see an orderly and welldisposed gentleman, who, though singular, yet inoffensive in his notions,—so played upon in them by cross-purposes; to look down upon the stage, and see him baffled and overthrown in all his little systems and wishes ;to behold a train of events perpetually falling out against him, and in so critical and cruel a way, as if they had purposely been planned and pointed against him, merely to insult his speculations, in -in a word, to behold such a one, in his old age, ill-fitted for troubles, ten times in a day suffering sorrow;- -ten times in a day calling the child of his prayers TRISTRAM! -Melancholy dissyllable of sound! which, to his ears, was unison to Nincompoop, and every name vituperative under heaven.

By his ashes! I swear it,-if ever malignant spirit took pleasure, or busied itself in traversing the purposes of mortal man,-it must have been here; and if it was not necessary I should be born before I was christened, I would this moment give the reader an account of it.

CHAP. XX.

-How could you, madam, be so inattentive in reading the last chapter? I told you in it, That my mother was not a Papist.Papist! you told me no such thing, sir.-Madam, I beg leave to repeat it over again, that I told you as plain, at least, as words, by direct inference, could tell you such_a_thing.Then, sir, I must have missed a page.No, madam,-you have not missed a word.Then I was asleep, sir.- -My pride, madam, cannot allow you that refuge.- -Then, I declare, I know nothing at all about the matter. -That, madam, is the very fault I lay to your charge; and, as a punishment for it, I do insist upon it, that you immediately turn back, that is, as soon as you get to the next full stop, and read the whole chapter over again.

I have imposed this penance upon the lady, neither out of wantonness nor cruelty, but from the best of motives; and, therefore, shall make her no apology for it when she returns back:

-It is to rebuke a vicious taste which has crept into thousands besides herself,-of reading straight forwards, more in quest of the adventures, than of the deep erudition and knowledge which a book of this cast, if read over as it should be, would infallibly impart with them.

-The mind should be accustomed to make wise reflections, and draw curious conclusions as it goes along; the habitude of which made Pliny the younger affirm, "That he never read a book so bad, but he drew some profit from it." The stories of Greece and Rome, run over without this turn aud application,-do less service, I affirm it, than the history of Parismus and Parismenes, or of the Seven Champions of England, read with it.

-But here comes my fair lady. Have you read over again the chapter, madam, as I desired you?—You have: And did you not observe the passage, upon the second reading, which admits the inference?Not a word like it.Then, madam, be pleased to ponder well the last line but one of the chapter, where I take upon me to say, "It was necessary I should be born before I was christened.” Had my mother, madam, been a Papist, that consequence did not follow.*

Mr Tristram Shandy's compliments to Messrs