-W0NDER what's all that noise, and running backwards
and forwards for, above stairs, quoth my father, addressing
himself, after an hour and a halfs silence, to my uncle
Toby,-who you must know, was sitting on the opposite
side of the fire, smoking his social pipe all the time, in mute
contemplation of a new pair of black-plush-breeches which
he had got on;-What can they be doing, brother?-quoth
my father,-we can scarce hear ourselves talk.
I think, replied my uncle Toby, taking his pipe from his
mouth, and striking the head of it two or three times upon
the nail of his left thumb, as he began his sentence,-I
think, says he: -But to enter rightly into my uncle Toby's
sentiments upon this matter, you must be made to enter a
little into his character, the outlines of which I shall just
give you, and then the dialogue between him and my father
will go on as well again.
Pray what was that man's name,-for I write in such a
hurry, I have no time to recollect, or look for it,-Who first
made the observation, 'That there was great inconstancy
in our air and climate?' Whoever he was, 'twas a just and
good observation in him.-But the corollary drawn from it,
namely, 'That it is this which has furnished us with such a
variety of odd and whimsical characters;'-that was not his;
-it was found out by another man, at least a century and a
half after him: Then again,-that this copious storehouse
of original materials, is the true and natural cause that our
Comedies are so much better than those of France, or any
others that either have, or can be wrote upon the Continent;
- that discovery was not fully made till about the middle
of King William's reign,-when the great Dryden, in writing
one of his long prefaces, (if I mistake not) most fortunately
hit upon it. Indeed toward the latter end of Queen Anne,
the great Addison began to patronize the notion, and more
fully explained it to the world in one or two of his Spectators;
-but the discovery was not his.-Then, fourthly and lastly,
that this strange irregularity in our climate, producing so
strange an irregularity in our characters, doth thereby,
in some sort, make us amends, by giving us somewhat to
make us merry with when the weather will not suffer us to
go out of doors,-that observation is my own;-and was
struck out by me this very rainy day, March '26, 1759, and
betwixt the hours of nine and ten in the morning.
Thus-thus, my fellow labourers and associates in this
great harvest of our learning, now ripening before our eyes;
thus it is, by slow steps of casual increase, that our know-
ledge physical, metaphysical, physiological, polemical,
nautical, mathematical, enigmatical, technical, biographical,
romantical, chemical, and obstetrical, with fifty other
branches of it, (most of 'em ending as these do, in ical) have,
for these two last centuries and more, gradually been creep-
ing upwards towards that peak of their perfections, from
which, if we may form a conjecture from the advances of
these last seven years, we cannot possibly be far off.
When that happens, it is to be hoped, it will put an end
to all kind of writings whatsoever;-the want of all kind of
writing will put an end to all kind of reading;-and that in
time, As war begets poverty; Poverty peace , -- must, in
course, put an end to all kind of knowledge,-and then--
we shall have all to begin over again; or, in other words, be
exactly where we started.
--- Happy! thrice happy Times ! I only wish that the era
of my begetting, as well as the mode and manner of it, had
been a little altered,-or that it could have been put off with
any convenience to my father or mother, for some twenty
or five-and-twenty years longer, when a man in the literary
world might have stood some chance.-
But I forget my uncle Toby, whom all this while we have
left knocking the ashes out of his tobacco-pipe.
His humour was of that particular species, which does
honour to our atmosphere; and I should have made no
scruple of ranking him amongst one of the first-rate produc-
tions of it, had not there appeared too many strong lines in
it of a family-likeness, which shewed that he derived the
singularity of his temper more from blood, than either wind
or water, or any modifications or combinations of them what-
ever: And I have, therefore, oft-times wondered, that my
father, though I believe he had his reasons for it, upon his
observing some tokens of eccentricity in my course, when I
was a boy,-should never once endeavour to account for
them in this way; for all the SHANDY FAMILY were of an
original character throughout;-l mean the males,-- the
females had no character at all,except, indeed, my great
aunt DINAH, who, about sixty years ago, was married and
got with child by the coachman, for which my father,
according to his hypothesis of Christian names, would
often say, She might thank her godfathers and god-
mothers.
It will seem very strange,-and I would as soon think of
dropping a riddle in the reader's way, which is not my
interest to do, as set him upon guessing how it could come
to pass, that an event of this kind, so many years after it
had happened, should be reserved for the interruption of
the peace and unity, which otherwise so cordially subsisted,
between my father and my uncle Toby. One would have
thought, that the whole force of the misfortune should have
spent and wasted itself in the family at first,-as is generally
the case:-But nothing ever wrought with our family after
the ordinary way. Possibly at the very time this happened,
it might have something else to afflict it; and as afflictions
are sent down for our good, and that as this had never done
the SHANDY FamiLy any good at all, it might lie waiting
till apt times and circumstances should give it an opportun-
ity to discharge its office.-Observe, I determine nothing
upon this.-My way is ever to point out to the curious,
different tracts of investigation, to come at the first springs
of the events I tell;-not with a pedantic Fescue,-- are in the
decisive manner of Tacitus, who outwits himself and his
reader;-but with the officious humility of a heart devoted
to the assistance merely of the inquisitive;-to them I write,
-and by them I shall be read,-if any such reading
as this could be supposed to hold out so long, to the very end
of the world.
Why this cause of sorrow, therefore, was thus reserved for
my father and uncle, is undetermined by me. But how and
in what direction it exerted itself, so as to become the cause
of dissatisfaction between them, after it began to operate,
is what I am able to explain with great exactness, and is as
follows:
My uncle, Toby SHANDY, Madam, was a gentleman, who,
with the virtues which usually constitute the character of a
man of honour and rectitude,-possessed one in a very emi-
nent degree, which is seldom or never put into the catalogue;
and that was a most extreme and unparalleled modesty of
nature;-though I correct the word nature, for this reason,
that I may not prejudge a point which must shortly come to
a hearing, and that is, Whether this modesty of his was
natural or acquired.-Whichever way my uncle Toby came
by it, 'twas nevertheless modesty in the truest sense of it;
and that is, Madam, not in regard to words, for he was so
unhappy as to have very little choice in them,-but to things;
-and this kind of modesty so possessed him, and it arose
to such a height in him, as almost to equal, if such a thing
could be, even the modesty of a woman: That female nicety,
Madam, and inward cleanliness of mind and fancy, in your
sex, which makes you so much the awe of ours.
You will imagine, Madam, that my uncle Toby had con-
tracted all this from this very source;-that he had spent
a great part of his time in converse with your sex; and that,
from a thorough knowledge of you, and the force of imita-
tion which such fair examples render irresistible, he had
acquired this amiable turn of mind.
I wish I could say so,-for unless it was with his sister-in-
law, my father's wife and my mother,-my uncle Toby
scarce exchanged three words with the sex in as many years;
-no, he got it, Madam, by a blow.-A blow I-Yes,
Madam, it was owing to a blow from a stone, broke off by a
ball from the parapet of a horn-work at the siege of Namur,
which struck full upon my uncle Toby's groin.-Which way
could that affect it? The story of that, Madam, is long and
interesting;-but it would be running my history all upon
heaps to give it you here.-'Tis for an episode hereafter;
and every circumstance relating to it, in its proper place,
shall be faithfully laid before you:-'Till then, it is not in
my power to give further light into this matter, or say more
than what I have said already,-That my uncle Toby was
a gentleman of unparalleled modesty, which happening to
be somewhat subtilized and rarefied by the constant heat of
a little family pride,-they both so wrought together within
him, that he could never bear to hear the affair of my aunt
DINAH touched upon, but with the greatest emotion.-The
least hint of it was enough to make the blood fly into his
face;-but when my father enlarged upon the story in mixed
companies, which the illustration of his hypothesis fre-
quently obliged him to do,-the unfortunate blight of one
of the fairest branches of the family, would set my uncle
Toby's honour and modesty o'bleeding; and he would often
take my father aside, in the greatest concern imaginable,
to expostulate and tell him, he would give him any thing
in the world, only to let the story rest.
My father, I believe, had the truest love and tenderness
for my uncle Toby, that ever one brother bore towards
another, and would have done anything in nature, which
one brother in reason could have desired of another, to have
made my uncle Toby's heart easy in this, or any other point.
But this lay out of his power.
-My father, as I told you, was a philosopher in grain,
-speculative,-systematical;-and my aunt Dinah's affair
was a matter of as much consequence to him, as the retro-
gradation of the planets to Copernicus:-The backslidings
of Venus in ber orbit fortified the Copernican system, called
so after his name; and the backslidings of my aunt Dinah
in her orbit, did the same service in establishing my father's
system, which, I trust, will for ever hereafter be called the
Shandean System, after his.
In any other family dishonour, my father, I believe, had
as nice a sense of shame as any man whatever;-and neither
he, nor, I dare say, Copernicus, would have divulged the
affair in either case, or have taken the least notice of it to the
world, but for the obligations they owed, as they thought,
to truth.-Amicus Plato, my father would say, construing
the words to my uncle Toby, as he went along, Amicus
Plato; that is, DINAH was my aunt;-sed magis amica veritas
-but TRUTH is my sister.
This contrariety of humours betwixt my father and my
uncle, was the source of many a fraternal squabble. The
one could not bear to hear the tale of family disgrace re-
corded,-and the other would scarce ever let a day pass to
an end without some hint at it.
For God's sake, my uncle Toby would cry;-and for my
sake, and for all our sakes, my dear brother Shandy,-do let
this story of our aunt's and her ashes sleep in peace;-how
can you,-how can you have so little feeling and compas-
sion for the character of our family?---Wh at is the charac-
ter of a family to an hypothesis? my father would reply.
Nay, if you come to that-what is the life of a family?
The life of a family I-my uncle Toby would say, throwing
himself back in his arm-chair, and lifting up his hands, his
eyes, and one leg.-Yes, the life,-- my father would say,
maintaining his point. How many thousands of 'em are
there every year that come cast away, (in all civilized
countries at least)-and considered as nothing but common
air, in competition of an hypothesis. In my plain sense of
things, my uncle Toby would answer,--e very such instance
is downright MURDER, let who will commit it.-There lies
your mistake, my father would reply;-for, in Foro Scientiae
there is no such thing as MURDER,--'tis only DEATH,
brother.
My uncle Toby would never offer to answer this by any
other kind of argument, than that of whistling half a dozen
bars of lillabullero.-You must know it was the usual
channel through which his passions got vent, when any
thing shocked or surprised him;-but especially when any
thing, which he deemed very absurd, was offered.
As not one of our logical writers, nor any of the com-
mentators upon them, that I remember, have thought proper
to give a name to this particular species of argument,-I
here take the liberty to do it myself, for two reasons. First,
That, in order to prevent all confusion in disputes, it may
stand as much distinguished for ever, from every other
species of argument,-as the Argumentum ad Verecun-
diam, ex Absurdo, ex Fortiori, or any other argument what-
soever: -And, secondly, That it may be said by my
children's children, when my head is laid to rest,-- that their
learned grandfather's head had been busied to as much
purpose once, as other people's: -That he had invented a
name,-and generously thrown it into the TREASURY of the
Ars Logica, for one of the most unanswerable arguments
in the whole science. And, if the end of disputation is more
to silence than convince,-they may add, if they please, to
one of the best arguments too.
I do therefore, by these presents, strictly order and com-
mand, That it be known and distinguished by the name and
title of the Argumentum Fistulatorium, and no other;-and
that it rank hereafter with the Argumentum Baculinum and
the Argumentum ad Crumenam, and for ever hereafter be
treated of in the same chapter.
As for the Argumentum Tripodium, which is never used
but by the woman against the man;-and the Argumentum
ad Rem, which, contrarywise, is made use of by the man
only against the woman: -As these two are enough in con-
science for one lecture;-and, moreover, as the one is the
best answer to the other,-let them likewise be kept apart,
and be treated of in a place by themselves.