THERE was not any one scene more entertaining in our family—and to do
it justice in this point;——and I here put off my cap and lay it upon
the table close beside my ink-horn, on purpose to make my declaration
to the world concerning this one article the more solemn——that I
believe in my soul (unless my love and partiality to my understanding
blinds me) the hand of the supreme Maker and first Designer of all
things never made or put a family together (in that period at least of
it which I have sat down to write the story of)——where the characters
of it were cast or contrasted with so dramatick a felicity as ours was,
for this end; or in which the capacities of affording such exquisite
scenes, and the powers of shifting them perpetually from morning to
night, were lodged and intrusted with so unlimited a confidence, as in
the SHANDY FAMILY.
Not any one of these was more diverting, I say, in this whimsical
theatre of ours——than what frequently arose out of this self-same
chapter of long noses——especially when my father’s imagination was
heated with the enquiry, and nothing would serve him but to heat my
uncle _Toby_’s too.
My uncle _Toby_ would give my father all possible fair play in this
attempt; and with infinite patience would sit smoking his pipe for
whole hours together, whilst my father was practising upon his head,
and trying every accessible avenue to drive _Prignitz_ and
_Scroderus_’s solutions into it.
Whether they were above my uncle _Toby_’s reason——or contrary to it——or
that his brain was like _damp_ timber, and no spark could possibly take
hold——or that it was so full of saps, mines, blinds, curtins, and such
military disqualifications to his seeing clearly into _Prignitz_ and
_Scroderus_’s doctrines——I say not—let schoolmen—scullions, anatomists,
and engineers, fight for it among themselves——
’Twas some misfortune, I make no doubt, in this affair, that my father
had every word of it to translate for the benefit of my uncle _Toby_,
and render out of _Slawkenbergius_’s _Latin_, of which, as he was no
great master, his translation was not always of the purest——and
generally least so where ’twas most wanted.—This naturally open’d a
door to a second misfortune;——that in the warmer paroxysms of his zeal
to open my uncle _Toby_’s eyes——my father’s ideas ran on as much faster
than the translation, as the translation outmoved my uncle
_Toby_’s——neither the one or the other added much to the perspicuity of
my father’s lecture.