be wrapt up,It is both the one and the other, replied Phutatorius, laying his hand as he spoke, with an emphatical nod of his head, upon the part in question, and lifting up his right leg at the same time, to ease and ventilate it. If that is the case, said Eugenius, I would advise you, Phutatorius, not to tamper with it by any means; but if you will send to the next printer, and trust your cure to such a simple thing as a soft sheet of paper just come off the press, you need do nothing more than twist it round.- -The damp paper, quoth Yorick (who sat next to his friend Eugenius) though I know it has a refreshing coolness in it,-yet, I presume, is no more than the vehicle; and that the oil and lamp-black, with which the paper is so strongly impregnated, does the business.- -Right, said Eugenius; and is, of any outward application I would venture to recommend, the most anodyne and safe. Was it my case, said Gastripheres, as the main thing is the oil and lamp-black, I should spread them thick upon a rag, and clap it on directly.- -That would make a very devil of it, replied Yorick. And besides, added Eugenius, it would not answer the intention, which is the extreme neatness and elegance of the prescription; which the faculty hold to be half in half-for consider, if the type is a very small one (which it should be) the sanative particles, which come into contact in this form, have the advantage of being spread so infinitely thin, and with such a mathematical equality, (fresh paragraphs and large capitals excepted) as no art or management of the spatula can come up to.It falls out very luckily, replied Phutatorius, that the second edition of my Treatise, de Concubinis retinendis, is at this instant in the press.You may take any leaf of it, said Eugenius ;-no matter which. - - Provided, quoth Yorick, there is no bawdy in it.

They are just now, replied Phutatorius, printing off the ninth chapter;-which is the last chapter but one in the book.-Pray, what is the title of that chapter? said Yorick; making a respectful bow to Phutatorius, as he spoke. -I think, added Phutatorius, 'tis that de Re Concubinaria.

For Heaven's sake keep out of that chapter, quoth Yorick.

-By all means,—added Eugenius.

CHAP. XXIX.

-Now, quoth Didius, rising up, and laying his right hand, with his fingers spread, upon his breast, had such a blunder about a christianname happened before the Reformation, [It happened the day before yesterday, quoth my uncle Toby to himself,—and when bap

tism was administered in Latin,-['Twas all in English, said my uncle]-many things might have coincided with it; and upon the authority of sundry decreed cases, to have pronounced the baptism null, with a power of giving the child a new name.-Had a priest, for instance, which was no uncommon thing, through ignorance of the Latin tongue, baptized a child of Tomo'Stiles, in nomine patriæ et filia et spiritum sanctos,-the baptism was held null.——I beg your pardon, replied Kysarcius;-in that case, as the mistake was only the terminations, the baptism was valid;—and to have rendered it null, the blunder of the priest should have fallen upon the first syllable of each noun ;→→ and not, as in your case, upon the last. My father delighted in subtleties of this kind, and listened with infinite attention.

Gastripheres, for example, continued Kysarcius, baptizes a child of John Stradling's in go mine Gatris, &c. &c. instead of in nomine Patris, &c.Is this a baptism ?-No,-say the ablest canonists; inasmuch as the radix of each word is hereby torn up, and the sense and meaning of them removed and changed quite to another object; for Gomine does not signify a name, nor gatris a father.What do they signify? said my uncle Toby.Nothing at all,—quoth Yorick.--Ergo, such a baptism is null, said Kysarcius.

In course, answered Yorick,- -in a tone two parts jest and one part earnest.

But in the case cited, continued Kysarcius, where patria is put for patris, filia for filii, and so on:-as it is a fault only in the declension, and the roots of the word continue untouched, the inflections of their branches, either this way or that, does not in any sort hinder the baptism, inasmuch as the same sense continues in the words as before.But then, said Didius, the intention of the priests pronouncing them grammatically, must have been proved to have gone along with it.-Right, answered Kysarcius; and of this, brother Didius, we have an instance in a decree of the decretals of Pope Lco the Third- -But my brother's child, cried my uncle Toby, has nothing to do with the Pope; 'tis the plain child of a Protestant gentleman, christened Tristram against the wills and wishes both of his father and mother, and all who are akin to it.

If the wills and wishes, said Kysarcius, interrupting my uncle Toby, of those only who stand related to Mr Shandy's child, were to have weight in this matter, Mrs Shandy, of all people, has the least to do in it.My uncle Toby laid down his pipe, and my father drew his chair still closer to the table, to hear the conclusion of so strange an introduction.

-It has not only been a question, Captain Shandy, amongst the best lawyers and civili

*

CHAP. XXX.

AND pray, said my uncle Toby, leaning upon Yorick, as he and my father were helping him leisurely down the stairs,-don't be terrified, madam; this staircase conversation is not so long as the last-And pray, Yorick, said my uncle Toby, which way is this said affair of Tristram at length settled by these learned men? Very satisfactorily, replied Yorick: no mortal, sir, has any concern with it;-for Mrs Shandy, the mother, is nothing at all a-kin to him;-and as the mother's is the surest side,-Mr Shandy, in course, is still less than nothing. In short, he is not as much a-kin to him, sir, as I am.

-That may well be, said my father, shaking his head.

-Let the learned say what they will, there must certainly, quoth my uncle Toby, have been some sort of consanguinity betwixt the Duchess of Suffolk and her son.

The vulgar are of the same opinion, quoth Yorick, to this hour.

CHAP. XXXI.

THOUGH my father was hugely tickled with the subtleties of these learned discourses,-'twas still but like the anointing of a broken bone. The moment he got home, the weight of his afflictions returned upon him but so much the heavier, as is ever the case when the staff we lean on slips from under us. He became pensive, walked frequently forth to the fish-pond, -let down one loop of his hat,-sighed often,forbore to snap ;-and, as the hasty sparks of temper, which occasion snapping, so much assist perspiration and digestion, as Hippocrates tells us, he had certainly fallen ill with the extinction of them, had not his thoughts been critically drawn off, and his health rescued by a fresh train of disquietudes left him, with a legacy of a thousand pounds, by my aunt Dinah. My father had scarce read the letter, when, taking the thing by the right end, he instantly began to plague and puzzle his head how to lay it out mostly to the honour of his family.-A hundred-and-fifty odd projects took possession of his brains by turns; he would do this, and that, and t'other.-He would go to Rome ;-he would go to law ;-he would buy stock ;-he would buy John Hobson's farm ;-he would new fore-front his house, and add a new wing to make it even.-There was a fine water-mill on this side; and he would build a wind-mill on the other side of the river, in full view to answer it. But, above all things in the world, he would inclose the great Ox-moor, and send out my brother Bobby immediately upon his travels.

But as the sum was finite, and consequently could not do every thing;-and in truth very few of these to any purpose,-of all the projects which offered themselves upon this occasion, the two last seemed to make the deepest impression; and he would infallibly have determined upon both at once, but for the small inconvenience hinted at above, which absolutely put him under a necessity of deciding in favour either of the one or the other.

This was not altogether so easy to be done; for though 'tis certain my father had long before set his heart upon this necessary part of my brother's education, and, like a prudent man, had actually determined to carry it into execution with the first money that returned from the second creation of actions in the Mississippischeme, in which he was an adventurer;-yet the Ox-moor, which was a fine, large, whinny, undrained, unimproved cómmon, belonging to the Shandy-estate, had almost as old a claim upon him: he had long and affectionately set his heart upon turning it likewise to some ac

count.

But having never hitherto been pressed with such a conjuncture of things as made it necessary to settle either the priority or justice of their claims,-like a wise man, he had refrained entering into any nice or critical examination about them: so that, upon the dismission of every other project at this crisis,—the two old projects, the Ox-moor and my brother, divided him again; and so equal a match were they for each other, as to become the occasion of no small contest in the old gentleman's mind,-which of the two should be set agoing first.

-People may laugh as they will ;-but the case was this:

It had ever been the custom of the family, and by length of time was almost become a matter of common right, that the eldest son of it should have free ingress, egress, and regress into foreign parts before marriage ;-not only for the sake of bettering his own private parts, by the benefit of exercise and change of so much air,—but simply for the mere delectation of his fancy, by the feather put into his cap of having been abroad.—Tantum valet, my father would say, quantum sonat.

Now as this was a reasonable, and in course a most Christian indulgence,—to deprive him of it, without why or wherefore,-and thereby make an example of him, as the first Shandy unwhirled about Europe, in a post-chaise, and only because he was a heavy lad,--would be using him ten times worse than a Turk.

On the other hand, the case of the Ox-moor was full as hard.

Exclusive of the original purchase-money, which was eight hundred pounds,-it had cost the family eight hundred pounds more in a lawsuit about fifteen years before,-besides the Lord knows what trouble and vexation.

It had been, moreover, in possession of the

Shandy family ever since the middle of the last century; and though it lay full in view before the house, bounded on one extremity by the water-mill; and on the other by the projected wind-mill spoken of above;-and for all these reasons seemed to have the fairest title of any part of the estate to the care and protection of the family,-yet, by an unaccountable fatality, common to men, as well as the ground they tread on,-it had all along most shamefully been overlooked; and to speak the truth of it, had suffered so much by it, that it would have made any man's heart have bled (Obadiah said) who understood the value of land, to have rode over it, and only seen the condition it was in. However, as neither the purchasing this tract of ground,-nor indeed the placing of it where it lay, were either of them, properly speaking, of my father's doing, he had never thought himself any way concerned in the affair-till the fifteen years before, when the breaking out of that cursed law-suit mentioned above (and which had arose about its boundaries)-which being altogether my father's own act and deed, it naturally awakened every other argument in its favour; and upon summing them all up together, he saw, not merely in interest, but in honour, he was bound to do something for it; and that now or never was the time.

I think there must certainly have been a mixture of ill-luck in it, that the reasons on both sides should happen to be so equally balanced by each other; for though my father weighed them in all humours and conditions, spent many an anxious hour in the most profound and abstracted meditation upon what was best to be done ;-reading books of farming one day,-books of travels another,-laying aside all passion whatever,-viewing the arguments on both sides in all their lights and circumstances, communing every day with my uncle Toby, arguing with Yorick, and talking over the whole affair of the Ox-moor with Obadiah, -yet nothing in all that time appeared so strongly in behalf of the one, which was not either strictly applicable to the other, or at least so far counterbalanced by some consideration of equal weight, as to keep the scales even.

For to be sure, with proper helps, and in the hands of some people, though the Ox-moor would undoubtedly have made a different appearance in the world from what it did, or ever could do in the condition it lay,-yet every tittle of this was true with regard to my brother Bobby,-let Obadiah say what he would.

ing the account, that you would have sworn the Ox-moor would have carried all before it; for it was plain he should reap a hundred lasts of rape, at twenty pounds a last, the very first year,-besides an excellent crop of wheat the year following;-and the year after that, to speak within bounds, a hundred, but, in all likelihood, a hundred and fifty,-if not two hundred quarters of pease and beans, besides potatoes without end.-But then to think he was all this while breeding up my brother, like a hog to eat them,-knocked all on the head again, and generally left the old gentleman in such a state of suspense,-that, as he often declared to my uncle Toby, he knew no more than his heels what to do.

Nobody but he who has felt it, can conceive what a plaguing thing it is to have a man's mind torn asunder by two projects of equal strength, both obstinately pulling in a contrary direction at the same time; for, to say nothing of the. havoc, which by a certain consequence is unavoidably made by it all over the finer system of the nerves, which you know convey the animal spirits and more subtle juices from the heart to the head, and so on,-it is not to be told in what a degree such a wayward kind of friction works upon the more gross and solid parts, wasting the fat and impairing the strength of a man every time as it goes backwards and forwards.

My father had certainly sunk under this evil, as certainly as he had done under that of my CHRISTIAN NAME, had he not been rescued out of it, as he was out of that, by a fresh evil:

the misfortune of my brother Bobby's death.

What is the life of man? Is it not to shift from side to side?—from sorrow to sorrow ?— to button up one cause of vexation,—and unbutton another?

CHAP. XXXII.

chapter to it, that is, the first chapter of my next volume, if I live, shall be my chapter upon WHISKERS, in order to keep up some sort of connexion in my works.

The thing I lament is, that things have crowded in so thick upon me, that I have not been able to get into that part of my work, towards which I have all the way looked forwards with so much earnest desire; and that is the campaigns, but especially the amours, of my uncle Toby, the events of which are of so singular a nature, and so Cervantic a cast, that if I can so manage it, as to convey but the same impressions to every other brain which the occurrences themselves excite in my own,-I will answer for it, the book shall make its way in the world much better than its master has done before it. -Oh Tristram! Tristram! can this but be once brought about,-the credit which will attend thee as an author, shall counterbalance the many evils which have befallen thee as a man: -thou wilt feast upon the one,-when thou hast lost all sense and remembrance of the other!

No wonder I itch so much as I do to get at these amours:-they are the choicest morsel of my whole story! and when I do get at 'em, assure yourselves, good folks-(nor do I value whose squeamish stomach takes offence at it) I shall not be at all nice in the choice of my words!—and that's the thing I have to declare. -I shall never get all through in five minutes, that I fear :—and the thing I hope is, that your worships and reverences are not offended:if you are, depend upon't I'll give you something, my good gentry, next year to be offended at ;-that's my dear Jenny's way;-but who my Jenny is, and which is the right and which

the wrong end of a woman,-is the thing to be concealed:-it shall be told you in the next chapter but one to my chapter of Button-holes ; -and not one chapter before.

And now that you have just got to the end of these four volumes,*-the thing I have to ask is, how you feel your heads?-my own aches dismally!-As for your healths, I know they are much better.-True Shandeism, think what you will against it, opens the heart and lungs; and, like all those affections which partake of its nature, it forces the blood and other vital fluids of the body to run freely through their channels, and makes the wheel of life run long and cheerfully round.

Was I left, like Sancho Pança, to choose my kingdom, it should not be maritime, or a kingdom of blacks, to make a penny of;-no, it should be a kingdom of hearty laughing subjects: and as the bilious and more saturnine passions, by creating disorders in the blood and humours, have as bad an influence, I see, upon the body politic as body natural ;—and as nothing but a habit of virtue can fully govern those passions, and subject them to reason,-I should add to my prayer,-that God would give my subjects grace to be WISE as they were MERRY; and then should I be the happiest monarch, and they the happiest people, under heaven.

And so with this moral for the present, may it please your worships and your reverences, I take my leave of you till this time twelvemonth, when (unless this vile cough kills me in the meantime) I'll have another pluck at your beards, and lay open a story to the world you little dream of.-FINIS.