“_NIHIL me paenitet hujus nasi_,” quoth _Pamphagus_;——that is—“My nose
has been the making of me.”——“_Nec est cur poeniteat_,” replies
_Cocles_; that is, “How the duce should such a nose fail?”
The doctrine, you see, was laid down by _Erasmus_, as my father wished
it, with the utmost plainness; but my father’s disappointment was, in
finding nothing more from so able a pen, but the bare fact itself;
without any of that speculative subtilty or ambidexterity of
argumentation upon it, which Heaven had bestow’d upon man on purpose to
investigate truth, and fight for her on all sides.——My father pish’d
and pugh’d at first most terribly——’tis worth something to have a good
name. As the dialogue was of _Erasmus_, my father soon came to himself,
and read it over and over again with great application, studying every
word and every syllable of it thro’ and thro’ in its most strict and
literal interpretation—he could still make nothing of it, that way.
Mayhap there is more meant, than is said in it, quoth my
father.——Learned men, brother _Toby_, don’t write dialogues upon long
noses for nothing.——I’ll study the mystick and the allegorick
sense——here is some room to turn a man’s self in, brother.