OF all the tracts my father was at the pains to procure and study in
support of his hypothesis, there was not any one wherein he felt a more
cruel disappointment at first, than in the celebrated dialogue between
_Pamphagus_ and _Cocles_, written by the chaste pen of the great and
venerable _Erasmus_, upon the various uses and seasonable applications
of long noses.——Now don’t let Satan, my dear girl, in this chapter,
take advantage of any one spot of rising ground to get astride of your
imagination, if you can any ways help it; or if he is so nimble as to
slip on—let me beg of you, like an unback’d filly, _to frisk it, to
squirt it, to jump it, to rear it, to bound it—and to kick it, with
long kicks and short kicks_, till like _Tickletoby_’s mare, you break a
strap or a crupper, and throw his worship into the dirt.—You need not
kill him.—
—And pray who was _Tickletoby_’s mare?—’tis just as discreditable and
unscholar-like a question, Sir, as to have asked what year (_ab. urb.
con._) the second Punic war broke out.—Who was _Tickletoby_’s
mare!—Read, read, read, read, my unlearned reader! read—or by the
knowledge of the great saint _Paraleipomenon_—I tell you before-hand,
you had better throw down the book at once; for without much reading,
by which your reverence knows I mean much knowledge, you will no more
be able to penetrate the moral of the next marbled page (motley emblem
of my work!) than the world with all its sagacity has been able to
unravel the many opinions, transactions, and truths which still lie
mystically hid under the dark veil of the black one.