As the point was that night agreed, or rather determined,
that my mother should lie-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 Manningham was not to be had, she had
come to a final determination in her mind,-notwith-
standing there was a scientific operator within so near a call
as eight miles of us, and who, moreover, had expressly wrote
a five shillings 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 improve-
ments for the quicker extraction of the foetus in cross births,
and some other cases of danger which belay 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, I759,-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 ex-
treme, 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,
-- r 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 par-
ticular 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 I had but her wish in going up to town just to
lie-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 complied with, the
lady and her babe might both of 'em 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, o 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 stop-
page 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 cor-
rupted 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-apoplexy;-and then he would
say, The Lord have mercy upon us all.
My father was never able to give the history of this dis-
temper,-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 metro-
polis, 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 shall
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 due 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 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.
'Wh y 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 king-
dom no man has any country-interest to support;-the little
interest of any kind which any man has anywhere in it, is
concentrated in the court, and the looks of the Grand
Monarch; by the sunshine of whose countenance, or the
clouds which pass across it, every French man liver, 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 estab-
lishing,-would, in the end, prove fatal to the monarchical
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 house-
hold 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 desir-
able 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 man midwife 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 con-
trary, 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 argu-
ments in all lights;-argued the matter with her like a
christian,-like a heathen,-like a husband,-like a father,-
like a patriot,-like a man: - My mother answered every
thing only like a woman; which was a little hard upon her;
-for as she could not assume and fight it out behind such
a variety of characters,-'twas no fair match;-'twas seven
to one.-What could my mother do? he had the advan-
tage (otherwise she had 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,' -I own 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 deter-
mination 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 im-
pression of me, till you had better evidence, than I am posi-
tive, 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, per-
haps, 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 I tender as the appellation is, may be my child.
Consider,-I was born in the year eighteen.-Nor is there
anything 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 supported without-Fy ! Mr Shandy: -
Without 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.