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<h2>Chapter 3.XVI.</h2>
<p>The first thing which entered my father's head, after affairs
were a little settled in the family, and Susanna had got possession
of my mother's green sattin night-gown,—was to sit down
coolly, after the example of Xenophon, and write a Tristra-paedia,
or system of education for me; collecting first for that purpose
his own scattered thoughts, counsels, and notions; and binding them
together, so as to form an Institute for the government of my
childhood and adolescence. I was my father's last stake—he
had lost my brother Bobby entirely,—he had lost, by his own
computation, full three-fourths of me—that is, he had been
unfortunate in his three first great casts for me—my
geniture, nose, and name,—there was but this one left; and
accordingly my father gave himself up to it with as much devotion
as ever my uncle Toby had done to his doctrine of
projectils.—The difference between them was, that my uncle
Toby drew his whole knowledge of projectils from Nicholas
Tartaglia—My father spun his, every thread of it, out of his
own brain,—or reeled and cross-twisted what all other
spinners and spinsters had spun before him, that 'twas pretty near
the same torture to him.</p>
<p>In about three years, or something more, my father had got
advanced almost into the middle of his work.—Like all other
writers, he met with disappointments.—He imagined he should
be able to bring whatever he had to say, into so small a compass,
that when it was finished and bound, it might be rolled up in my
mother's hussive.—Matter grows under our hands.—Let no
man say,—'Come—I'll write a duodecimo.'</p>
<p>My father gave himself up to it, however, with the most painful
diligence, proceeding step by step in every line, with the same
kind of caution and circumspection (though I cannot say upon quite
so religious a principle) as was used by John de la Casse, the lord
archbishop of Benevento, in compassing his Galatea; in which his
Grace of Benevento spent near forty years of his life; and when the
thing came out, it was not of above half the size or the thickness
of a Rider's Almanack.—How the holy man managed the affair,
unless he spent the greatest part of his time in combing his
whiskers, or playing at primero with his chaplain,—would pose
any mortal not let into the true secret;—and therefore 'tis
worth explaining to the world, was it only for the encouragement of
those few in it, who write not so much to be fed—as to be
famous.</p>
<p>I own had John de la Casse, the archbishop of Benevento, for
whose memory (notwithstanding his Galatea,) I retain the highest
veneration,—had he been, Sir, a slender clerk—of dull
wit—slow parts—costive head, and so forth,—he and
his Galatea might have jogged on together to the age of Methuselah
for me,—the phaenomenon had not been worth a
parenthesis.—</p>
<p>But the reverse of this was the truth: John de la Casse was a
genius of fine parts and fertile fancy; and yet with all these
great advantages of nature, which should have pricked him forwards
with his Galatea, he lay under an impuissance at the same time of
advancing above a line and a half in the compass of a whole
summer's day: this disability in his Grace arose from an opinion he
was afflicted with,—which opinion was this,—viz. that
whenever a Christian was writing a book (not for his private
amusement, but) where his intent and purpose was, bona fide, to
print and publish it to the world, his first thoughts were always
the temptations of the evil one.—This was the state of
ordinary writers: but when a personage of venerable character and
high station, either in church or state, once turned
author,—he maintained, that from the very moment he took pen
in hand—all the devils in hell broke out of their holes to
cajole him.—'Twas Term-time with them,—every thought,
first and last, was captious;—how specious and good
soever,—'twas all one;—in whatever form or colour it
presented itself to the imagination,—'twas still a stroke of
one or other of 'em levell'd at him, and was to be fenced
off.—So that the life of a writer, whatever he might fancy to
the contrary, was not so much a state of composition, as a state of
warfare; and his probation in it, precisely that of any other man
militant upon earth,—both depending alike, not half so much
upon the degrees of his wit—as his Resistance.</p>
<p>My father was hugely pleased with this theory of John de la
Casse, archbishop of Benevento; and (had it not cramped him a
little in his creed) I believe would have given ten of the best
acres in the Shandy estate, to have been the broacher of
it.—How far my father actually believed in the devil, will be
seen, when I come to speak of my father's religious notions, in the
progress of this work: 'tis enough to say here, as he could not
have the honour of it, in the literal sense of the
doctrine—he took up with the allegory of it; and would often
say, especially when his pen was a little retrograde, there was as
much good meaning, truth, and knowledge, couched under the veil of
John de la Casse's parabolical representation,—as was to be
found in any one poetic fiction or mystic record of
antiquity.—Prejudice of education, he would say, is the
devil,—and the multitudes of them which we suck in with our
mother's milk—are the devil and all.—We are haunted
with them, brother Toby, in all our lucubrations and researches;
and was a man fool enough to submit tamely to what they obtruded
upon him,—what would his book be? Nothing,—he would
add, throwing his pen away with a vengeance,—nothing but a
farrago of the clack of nurses, and of the nonsense of the old
women (of both sexes) throughout the kingdom.</p>
<p>This is the best account I am determined to give of the slow
progress my father made in his Tristra-paedia; at which (as I said)
he was three years, and something more, indefatigably at work, and,
at last, had scarce completed, by this own reckoning, one half of
his undertaking: the misfortune was, that I was all that time
totally neglected and abandoned to my mother; and what was almost
as bad, by the very delay, the first part of the work, upon which
my father had spent the most of his pains, was rendered entirely
useless,—every day a page or two became of no
consequence.—</p>
<p>—Certainly it was ordained as a scourge upon the pride of
human wisdom, That the wisest of us all should thus outwit
ourselves, and eternally forego our purposes in the intemperate act
of pursuing them.</p>
<p>In short my father was so long in all his acts of
resistance,—or in other words,—he advanced so very slow
with his work, and I began to live and get forwards at such a rate,
that if an event had not happened,—which, when we get to it,
if it can be told with decency, shall not be concealed a moment
from the reader—I verily believe, I had put by my father, and
left him drawing a sundial, for no better purpose than to be buried
under ground.</p>
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<h2>Chapter 3.XVII.</h2>
<p>—'Twas nothing,—I did not lose two drops of blood by
it—'twas not worth calling in a surgeon, had he lived next
door to us—thousands suffer by choice, what I did by
accident.—Doctor Slop made ten times more of it, than there
was occasion:—some men rise, by the art of hanging great
weights upon small wires,—and I am this day (August the 10th,
1761) paying part of the price of this man's reputation.—O
'twould provoke a stone, to see how things are carried on in this
world!—The chamber-maid had left no .......... under the
bed:—Cannot you contrive, master, quoth Susannah, lifting up
the sash with one hand, as she spoke, and helping me up into the
window-seat with the other,—cannot you manage, my dear, for a
single time, to..................?</p>
<p>I was five years old.—Susannah did not consider that
nothing was well hung in our family,—so slap came the sash
down like lightning upon us;—Nothing is left,—cried
Susannah,—nothing is left—for me, but to run my
country.—My uncle Toby's house was a much kinder sanctuary;
and so Susannah fled to it.</p>
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<h2>Chapter 3.XVIII.</h2>
<p>When Susannah told the corporal the misadventure of the sash,
with all the circumstances which attended the murder of
me,—(as she called it,)—the blood forsook his
cheeks,—all accessaries in murder being
principals,—Trim's conscience told him he was as much to
blame as Susannah,—and if the doctrine had been true, my
uncle Toby had as much of the bloodshed to answer for to heaven, as
either of 'em;—so that neither reason or instinct, separate
or together, could possibly have guided Susannah's steps to so
proper an asylum. It is in vain to leave this to the Reader's
imagination:—to form any kind of hypothesis that will render
these propositions feasible, he must cudgel his brains
sore,—and to do it without,—he must have such brains as
no reader ever had before him.—Why should I put them either
to trial or to torture? 'Tis my own affair: I'll explain it
myself.</p>
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