Few men of great genius had exercised their parts in writing books upon
the subject of great noses: by the trotting of my lean horse, the thing
is incredible! and I am quite lost in my understanding, when I am
considering what a treasure of precious time and talents together has
been wasted upon worse subjects--and how many millions of books in all
languages, and in all possible types and bindings, have been fabricated
upon points not half so much tending to the unity and peace-making of
the world. What was to be had, however, he set the greater store by; and
though my father would ofttimes sport with my uncle Toby's
library--which, by the by, was ridiculous enough--yet at the very same
time he did it, he collected every book and treatise which had been
systematically wrote upon noses, with as much care as my honest uncle
Toby had done those upon military architecture.... My father's
collection was not great, but, to make amends, it was curious; and
consequently he was some time in making it ... he got hold of
Prignitz--purchased Scroderus, Andrea Paraeus, Bouchet's Evening
Conferences, and above all, the great and learned Hafen
Slawkenbergius.... To do justice to Slawkenbergius, he has entered the
list with a stronger lance, and taken a much larger career in it than
any one man who had ever entered it before him--and indeed, in many
respects, deserves to be en-niched as a prototype for all writers, of
voluminous works at least, to model their books by--for he has taken in,
Sir, the whole subject--examined every part of it dialectically----then
brought it into full day; dilucidating it with all the light which
either the collision of his own natural parts could strike--or the
profoundest knowledge of the sciences had empowered him to cast upon
it--collating, collecting, and compiling--begging, borrowing, and
stealing, as he went along, all that had been wrote or wrangled
thereupon in the schools and porticoes of the learned: so that
Slawkenbergius his book may properly be considered, not only as a
model--but as a thorough-stitched digest and regular institute of noses,
comprehending in it all that is or can be needful to be known about
them.
For this cause it is that I forbear to speak of so many (otherwise)
valuable books and treatises of my father's collecting, wrote either,
plump upon noses--or collaterally touching them;----such for instance
as Prignitz, now lying upon the table before me, who with infinite
learning, and from the most candid and scholar-like examination of above
four thousand different skulls, in upwards of twenty charnel-houses in
Silesia, which he had rummaged----has informed us, that the mensuration
and configuration of the osseous or bony parts of human noses, in any
given tract of country, except Crim Tartary, where they are all crushed
down by the thumb, so that no judgement can be formed upon them--are
much nearer alike, than the world imagines.--L. STERNE. _Tristram
Shandy._