http://www.arcamax.com/fiction/b-1529-24
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
Chapter 2.LXIV.
--Now, quoth Didius, rising up, and laying his right hand with his
fingers spread upon his breast--had such a blunder about a
christian-name happened before the Reformation--(It happened the day
before yesterday, quoth my uncle Toby to himself)--and when baptism
was administer'd in Latin--('Twas all in English, said my uncle)--many
things might have coincided with it, and upon the authority of sundry
decreed cases, to have pronounced the baptism null, with a power of
giving the child a new name--Had a priest, for instance, which was no
uncommon thing, through ignorance of the Latin tongue, baptized a
child of Tom-o'Stiles, in nomine patriae & filia & spiritum
sanctos--the baptism was held null.--I beg your pardon, replied
Kysarcius--in that case, as the mistake was only the terminations, the
baptism was valid--and to have rendered it null, the blunder of the
priest should have fallen upon the first syllable of each noun--and
not, as in your case, upon the last.
My father delighted in subtleties of this kind, and listen'd with
infinite attention.
Gastripheres, for example, continued Kysarcius, baptizes a child of
John Stradling's in Gomine gatris, &c. &c. instead of in Nomine
patris, &c.--Is this a baptism? No--say the ablest canonists; in as
much as the radix of each word is hereby torn up, and the sense and
meaning of them removed and changed quite to another object; for
Gomine does not signify a name, nor gatris a father.--What do they
signify? said my uncle Toby.--Nothing at all--quoth Yorick.--Ergo,
such a baptism is null, said Kysarcius.--
In course, answered Yorick, in a tone two parts jest and one part
earnest.- -
But in the case cited, continued Kysarcius, where patriae is put for
patris, filia for filii, and so on--as it is a fault only in the
declension, and the roots of the words continue untouch'd, the
inflections of their branches either this way or that, does not in any
sort hinder the baptism, inasmuch as the same sense continues in the
words as before.--But then, said Didius, the intention of the priest's
pronouncing them grammatically must have been proved to have gone
along with it.--Right, answered Kysarcius; and of this, brother
Didius, we have an instance in a decree of the decretals of Pope Leo
the IIId.--But my brother's child, cried my uncle Toby, has nothing to
do with the Pope--'tis the plain child of a Protestant gentleman,
christen'd Tristram against the wills and wishes both of his father
and mother, and all who are a-kin to it.--
If the wills and wishes, said Kysarcius, interrupting my uncle Toby,
of those only who stand related to Mr. Shandy's child, were to have
weight in this matter, Mrs. Shandy, of all people, has the least to do
in it.--My uncle Toby lay'd down his pipe, and my father drew his
chair still closer to the table, to hear the conclusion of so strange
an introduction.
--It has not only been a question, Captain Shandy, amongst the (Vide
Swinburn on Testaments, Part 7. para 8.) best lawyers and civilians in
this land, continued Kysarcius, 'Whether the mother be of kin to her
child,'-- but, after much dispassionate enquiry and jactitation of the
arguments on all sides--it has been adjudged for the negative--namely,
'That the mother is not of kin to her child.' (Vide Brook Abridg. Tit.
Administr. N. 47.) My father instantly clapp'd his hand upon my uncle
Toby's mouth, under colour of whispering in his ear;--the truth was,
he was alarmed for Lillabullero--and having a great desire to hear
more of so curious an argument--he begg'd my uncle Toby, for heaven's
sake, not to disappoint him in it.--My uncle Toby gave a nod--resumed
his pipe, and contenting himself with whistling Lillabullero
inwardly--Kysarcius, Didius, and Triptolemus went on with the
discourse as follows:
This determination, continued Kysarcius, how contrary soever it may
seem to run to the stream of vulgar ideas, yet had reason strongly on
its side; and has been put out of all manner of dispute from the
famous case, known commonly by the name of the Duke of Suffolk's
case.--It is cited in Brook, said Triptolemus--And taken notice of by
Lord Coke, added Didius.--And you may find it in Swinburn on
Testaments, said Kysarcius.
The case, Mr. Shandy, was this:
In the reign of Edward the Sixth, Charles duke of Suffolk having issue
a son by one venter, and a daughter by another venter, made his last
will, wherein he devised goods to his son, and died; after whose death
the son died also--but without will, without wife, and without
child--his mother and his sister by the father's side (for she was
born of the former venter) then living. The mother took the
administration of her son's goods, according to the statute of the
21st of Harry the Eighth, whereby it is enacted, That in case any
person die intestate the administration of his goods shall be
committed to the next of kin.
The administration being thus (surreptitiously) granted to the mother,
the sister by the father's side commenced a suit before the
Ecclesiastical Judge, alledging, 1st, That she herself was next of
kin; and 2dly, That the mother was not of kin at all to the party
deceased; and therefore prayed the court, that the administration
granted to the mother might be revoked, and be committed unto her, as
next of kin to the deceased, by force of the said statute.
Hereupon, as it was a great cause, and much depending upon its
issue--and many causes of great property likely to be decided in times
to come, by the precedent to be then made--the most learned, as well
in the laws of this realm, as in the civil law, were consulted
together, whether the mother was of kin to her son, or no.--Whereunto
not only the temporal lawyers--but the church lawyers--the
juris-consulti--the jurisprudentes--the civilians--the advocates--the
commissaries--the judges of the consistory and prerogative courts of
Canterbury and York, with the master of the faculties, were all
unanimously of opinion, That the mother was not of (Mater non
numeratur inter consanguineos, Bald. in ult. C. de Verb. signific.)
kin to her child.--
And what said the duchess of Suffolk to it? said my uncle Toby.
The unexpectedness of my uncle Toby's question, confounded Kysarcius
more than the ablest advocate--He stopp'd a full minute, looking in my
uncle Toby's face without replying--and in that single minute
Triptolemus put by him, and took the lead as follows.
'Tis a ground and principle in the law, said Triptolemus, that things
do not ascend, but descend in it; and I make no doubt 'tis for this
cause, that however true it is, that the child may be of the blood and
seed of its parents--that the parents, nevertheless, are not of the
blood and seed of it; inasmuch as the parents are not begot by the
child, but the child by the parents--For so they write, Liberi sunt de
sanguine patris & matris, sed pater & mater non sunt de sanguine
liberorum.
--But this, Triptolemus, cried Didius, proves too much--for from this
authority cited it would follow, not only what indeed is granted on
all sides, that the mother is not of kin to her child--but the father
likewise.--It is held, said Triptolemus, the better opinion; because
the father, the mother, and the child, though they be three persons,
yet are they but (una caro (Vide Brook Abridg. tit. Administr. N
.47.)) one flesh; and consequently no degree of kindred--or any method
of acquiring one in nature.--There you push the argument again too
far, cried Didius--for there is no prohibition in nature, though there
is in the Levitical law--but that a man may beget a child upon his
grandmother--in which case, supposing the issue a daughter, she would
stand in relation both of--But who ever thought, cried Kysarcius, of
laying with his grandmother?--The young gentleman, replied Yorick,
whom Selden speaks of--who not only thought of it, but justified his
intention to his father by the argument drawn from the law of
retaliation.--'You laid, Sir, with my mother,' said the lad-- 'why may
not I lay with yours?'--'Tis the Argumentum commune, added
Yorick.--'Tis as good, replied Eugenius, taking down his hat, as they
deserve.
The company broke up.
Chapter 2.LXV.
--And pray, said my uncle Toby, leaning upon Yorick, as he and my
father were helping him leisurely down the stairs--don't be terrified,
madam, this stair-case conversation is not so long as the last--And
pray, Yorick, said my uncle Toby, which way is this said affair of
Tristram at length settled by these learned men? Very satisfactorily,
replied Yorick; no mortal, Sir, has any concern with it--for Mrs.
Shandy the mother is nothing at all a-kin to him--and as the mother's
is the surest side--Mr. Shandy, in course is still less than
nothing--In short, he is not as much a-kin to him, Sir, as I am.--
--That may well be, said my father, shaking his head.
--Let the learned say what they will, there must certainly, quoth my
uncle Toby, have been some sort of consanguinity betwixt the duchess
of Suffolk and her son.
The vulgar are of the same opinion, quoth Yorick, to this hour.
Chapter 2.LXVI.
Though my father was hugely tickled with the subtleties of these
learned discourses--'twas still but like the anointing of a broken
bone--The moment he got home, the weight of his afflictions returned
upon him but so much the heavier, as is ever the case when the staff
we lean on slips from under us.--He became pensive--walked frequently
forth to the fish-pond--let down one loop of his hat--sigh'd
often--forbore to snap--and, as the hasty sparks of temper, which
occasion snapping, so much assist perspiration and digestion, as
Hippocrates tells us--he had certainly fallen ill with the extinction
of them, had not his thoughts been critically drawn off, and his
health rescued by a fresh train of disquietudes left him, with a
legacy of a thousand pounds, by my aunt Dinah.
My father had scarce read the letter, when taking the thing by the
right end, he instantly began to plague and puzzle his head how to lay
it out mostly to the honour of his family.--A hundred-and-fifty odd
projects took possession of his brains by turns--he would do this, and
that and t'other-- He would go to Rome--he would go to law--he would
buy stock--he would buy John Hobson's farm--he would new fore front
his house, and add a new wing to make it even--There was a fine
water-mill on this side, and he would build a wind-mill on the other
side of the river in full view to answer it- -But above all things in
the world, he would inclose the great Ox-moor, and send out my brother
Bobby immediately upon his travels.
But as the sum was finite, and consequently could not do every
thing--and in truth very few of these to any purpose--of all the
projects which offered themselves upon this occasion, the two last
seemed to make the deepest impression; and he would infallibly have
determined upon both at once, but for the small inconvenience hinted
at above, which absolutely put him under a necessity of deciding in
favour either of the one or the other.
This was not altogether so easy to be done; for though 'tis certain my
father had long before set his heart upon this necessary part of my
brother's education, and like a prudent man had actually determined to
carry it into execution, with the first money that returned from the
second creation of actions in the Missisippi-scheme, in which he was
an adventurer--yet the Ox-moor, which was a fine, large, whinny,
undrained, unimproved common, belonging to the Shandy-estate, had
almost as old a claim upon him: he had long and affectionately set
his heart upon turning it likewise to some account.
But having never hitherto been pressed with such a conjuncture of
things, as made it necessary to settle either the priority or justice
of their claims--like a wise man he had refrained entering into any
nice or critical examination about them: so that upon the dismission
of every other project at this crisis--the two old projects, the
Ox-moor and my Brother, divided him again; and so equal a match were
they for each other, as to become the occasion of no small contest in
the old gentleman's mind--which of the two should be set o'going
first.
--People may laugh as they will--but the case was this.
It had ever been the custom of the family, and by length of time was
almost become a matter of common right, that the eldest son of it
should have free ingress, egress, and regress into foreign parts
before marriage--not only for the sake of bettering his own private
parts, by the benefit of exercise and change of so much air--but
simply for the mere delectation of his fancy, by the feather put into
his cap, of having been abroad--tantum valet, my father would say,
quantum sonat.
Now as this was a reasonable, and in course a most christian
indulgence--to deprive him of it, without why or wherefore--and
thereby make an example of him, as the first Shandy unwhirl'd about
Europe in a post-chaise, and only because he was a heavy lad--would be
using him ten times worse than a Turk.
On the other hand, the case of the Ox-moor was full as hard.
Exclusive of the original purchase-money, which was eight hundred
pounds-- it had cost the family eight hundred pounds more in a
law-suit about fifteen years before--besides the Lord knows what
trouble and vexation.
It had been moreover in possession of the Shandy-family ever since the
middle of the last century; and though it lay full in view before the
house, bounded on one extremity by the water-mill, and on the other by
the projected wind-mill spoken of above--and for all these reasons
seemed to have the fairest title of any part of the estate to the care
and protection of the family--yet by an unaccountable fatality, common
to men, as well as the ground they tread on--it had all along most
shamefully been overlook'd; and to speak the truth of it, had suffered
so much by it, that it would have made any man's heart have bled
(Obadiah said) who understood the value of the land, to have rode over
it, and only seen the condition it was in.
However, as neither the purchasing this tract of ground--nor indeed
the placing of it where it lay, were either of them, properly
speaking, of my father's doing--he had never thought himself any way
concerned in the affair--till the fifteen years before, when the
breaking out of that cursed law-suit mentioned above (and which had
arose about its boundaries)--which being altogether my father's own
act and deed, it naturally awakened every other argument in its
favour, and upon summing them all up together, he saw, not merely in
interest, but in honour, he was bound to do something for it--and that
now or never was the time.
I think there must certainly have been a mixture of ill-luck in it,
that the reasons on both sides should happen to be so equally balanced
by each other; for though my father weigh'd them in all humours and
conditions-- spent many an anxious hour in the most profound and
abstracted meditation upon what was best to be done--reading books of
farming one day--books of travels another--laying aside all passion
whatever--viewing the arguments on both sides in all their lights and
circumstances--communing every day with my uncle Toby--arguing with
Yorick, and talking over the whole affair of the Ox-moor with
Obadiah--yet nothing in all that time appeared so strongly in behalf
of the one, which was not either strictly applicable to the other, or
at least so far counterbalanced by some consideration of equal weight,
as to keep the scales even.
For to be sure, with proper helps, in the hands of some people, tho'
the Ox-moor would undoubtedly have made a different appearance in the
world from what it did, or ever could do in the condition it lay--yet
every tittle of this was true, with regard to my brother Bobby--let
Obadiah say what he would.--
In point of interest--the contest, I own, at first sight, did not
appear so undecisive betwixt them; for whenever my father took pen and
ink in hand, and set about calculating the simple expence of paring
and burning, and fencing in the Ox-moor, &c. &c.--with the certain
profit it would bring him in return--the latter turned out so
prodigiously in his way of working the account, that you would have
sworn the Ox-moor would have carried all before it. For it was plain
he should reap a hundred lasts of rape, at twenty pounds a last, the
very first year--besides an excellent crop of wheat the year
following--and the year after that, to speak within bounds, a
hundred--but in all likelihood, a hundred and fifty--if not two
hundred quarters of pease and beans--besides potatoes without
end.--But then, to think he was all this while breeding up my brother,
like a hog to eat them- -knocked all on the head again, and generally
left the old gentleman in such a state of suspense--that, as he often
declared to my uncle Toby--he knew no more than his heels what to do.
No body, but he who has felt it, can conceive what a plaguing thing it
is to have a man's mind torn asunder by two projects of equal
strength, both obstinately pulling in a contrary direction at the same
time: for to say nothing of the havock, which by a certain
consequence is unavoidably made by it all over the finer system of the
nerves, which you know convey the animal spirits and more subtle
juices from the heart to the head, and so on--it is not to be told in
what a degree such a wayward kind of friction works upon the more
gross and solid parts, wasting the fat and impairing the strength of a
man every time as it goes backwards and forwards.
My father had certainly sunk under this evil, as certainly as he had
done under that of my Christian Name--had he not been rescued out of
it, as he was out of that, by a fresh evil--the misfortune of my
brother Bobby's death.
What is the life of man! Is it not to shift from side to side?--from
sorrow to sorrow?--to button up one cause of vexation--and unbutton
another?
Chapter 2.LXVII.
From this moment I am to be considered as heir-apparent to the Shandy
family--and it is from this point properly, that the story of my Life
and my Opinions sets out. With all my hurry and precipitation, I have
but been clearing the ground to raise the building--and such a
building do I foresee it will turn out, as never was planned, and as
never was executed since Adam. In less than five minutes I shall have
thrown my pen into the fire, and the little drop of thick ink which is
left remaining at the bottom of my ink-horn, after it--I have but half
a score things to do in the time--I have a thing to name--a thing to
lament--a thing to hope--a thing to promise, and a thing to
threaten--I have a thing to suppose--a thing to declare--a thing to
conceal--a thing to choose, and a thing to pray for-- This chapter,
therefore, I name the chapter of Things--and my next chapter to it,
that is, the first chapter of my next volume, if I live, shall be my
chapter upon Whiskers, in order to keep up some sort of connection in
my works.
The thing I lament is, that things have crowded in so thick upon me,
that I have not been able to get into that part of my work, towards
which I have all the way looked forwards, with so much earnest desire;
and that is the Campaigns, but especially the amours of my uncle Toby,
the events of which are of so singular a nature, and so Cervantick a
cast, that if I can so manage it, as to convey but the same
impressions to every other brain, which the occurrences themselves
excite in my own--I will answer for it the book shall make its way in
the world, much better than its master has done before it.--Oh
Tristram! Tristram! can this but be once brought about--the credit,
which will attend thee as an author, shall counterbalance the many
evils will have befallen thee as a man--thou wilt feast upon the
one--when thou hast lost all sense and remembrance of the other!--
No wonder I itch so much as I do, to get at these amours--They are the
choicest morsel of my whole story! and when I do get at 'em--assure
yourselves, good folks--(nor do I value whose squeamish stomach takes
offence at it) I shall not be at all nice in the choice of my
words!--and that's the thing I have to declare.--I shall never get all
through in five minutes, that I fear--and the thing I hope is, that
your worships and reverences are not offended--if you are, depend
upon't I'll give you something, my good gentry, next year to be
offended at--that's my dear Jenny's way--but who my Jenny is--and
which is the right and which the wrong end of a woman, is the thing to
be concealed--it shall be told you in the next chapter but one to my
chapter of Button-holes--and not one chapter before.
And now that you have just got to the end of these (According to the
preceding Editions.) three volumes--the thing I have to ask is, how
you feel your heads? my own akes dismally!--as for your healths, I
know, they are much better.--True Shandeism, think what you will
against it, opens the heart and lungs, and like all those affections
which partake of its nature, it forces the blood and other vital
fluids of the body to run freely through its channels, makes the wheel
of life run long and cheerfully round.
Was I left, like Sancho Panca, to choose my kingdom, it should not be
maritime--or a kingdom of blacks to make a penny of;--no, it should be
a kingdom of hearty laughing subjects: And as the bilious and more
saturnine passions, by creating disorders in the blood and humours,
have as bad an influence, I see, upon the body politick as body
natural--and as nothing but a habit of virtue can fully govern those
passions, and subject them to reason--I should add to my prayer--that
God would give my subjects grace to be as Wise as they were Merry; and
then should I be the happiest monarch, and they are the happiest
people under heaven.
And so with this moral for the present, may it please your worships
and your reverences, I take my leave of you till this time
twelve-month, when, (unless this vile cough kills me in the mean time)
I'll have another pluck at your beards, and lay open a story to the
world you little dream of.
End of the Second Volume.
Volume the Third.
Dixero si quid forte jocosius, hoc mihi juris Cum venia dabis.--Hor.
--Si quis calumnietur levius esse quam decet theologum, aut mordacius
quam deceat Christianum--non Ego, sed Democritus dixit.--Erasmus.
Si quis Clericus, aut Monachus, verba joculatoria, risum moventia,
sciebat, anathema esto. Second Council of Carthage.
To the Right Honorable John, Lord Viscount Spencer.
My Lord,
I Humbly beg leave to offer you these two Volumes (Volumes V. and VI.
in the first Edition.); they are the best my talents, with such bad
health as I have, could produce:--had Providence granted me a larger
stock of either, they had been a much more proper present to your
Lordship.
I beg your Lordship will forgive me, if, at the same time I dedicate
this work to you, I join Lady Spencer, in the liberty I take of
inscribing the story of Le Fever to her name; for which I have no
other motive, which my heart has informed me of, but that the story is
a humane one.
I am, My Lord, Your Lordship's most devoted and most humble Servant,
Laur. Sterne.
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gent.