THE LIFE AND OPINIONS OF TRISTRAM SHANDY, GENTLEMAN. CHAPTER CLXII. -WE'LL not stop two moments, my dear sir ;-only, as we have got through these five volumes,1 (do, sir, sit down upon a set, they are better than nothing) let us just look back upon the country we have passed through. -What a wilderness has it been! and what a mercy that we have not both of us been lost, or devoured by wild beasts in it! Did you think the world itself, sir, had contained such a number of Jack-asses ?- -How they viewed and reviewed us as we passed over the rivulet at the bottom of that little valley!-and when we climbed over that hill, and were just getting out of sight,good God! what a braying did they all set up together! Prythee, shepherd, who keeps all those Jack -Heaven be their comforter!—What! are they never curried?-Are they never taken in in winter?— Bray,-bray,-bray.-Bray on, the world is deeply your debtor ;-louder still;-that's nothing:-in good sooth, you are ill-used.-Was I a Jack-ass, I solemnly declare, I would bray in G-sol-re-ut from morning even unto night. CHAPTER CLXIII. When my father had danced his white bear backwards and forwards, through half a dozen pages, he closed the book for good and all;—and, in a kind of triumph, redelivered it into Trim's hand, with a nod to lay it upon the escritoire, where he found it. Tristram, said he, shall be made to conjugate every word in the dictionary, backwards and forwards the same way :—every word, Yorick, by this means, you see, is converted into a thesis, or a hypothesis ;every thesis and hypothesis have an offspring of propositions; and each proposition has its own consequences and conclusions; every one of which leads the mind on again into fresh tracts of inquiries and doubtings. The force of this engine, added my father, is incredible in opening a child's head.- 'Tis enough, brother Shandy, cried my uncle Toby, to burst it into a thousand splinters. I presume, said Yorick, smiling,-it must be owing to this, (for let logicians say what they will, it is not to be accounted for sufficiently from the bare use of the ten predicaments)-that the famous Vincent Quirino, amongst the many other astonishing feats of his childhood, of which the Cardinal Bembo has given the world so exact a story, should be able to paste up in the public schools at Rome, so early as in the eighth year of his age, no less than four thousand five |