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Chapter 32 There was not any one scene more entertaining in our familyand 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 solemnthat 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 instrusted 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 oursthan what frequently arose out of this self-same chapter of long nosesespecially when my fathers imagination was heated with the enquiry, and nothing would serve him but to heat my uncle Tobys 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 Scroderuss solutions into it. Whether they were above my uncle Tobys reasonor contrary to itor that his brain was like damp timber, and no spark could possibly take holdor that it was so full of saps, mines, blinds, curtins, and such military disqualifications to his seeing clearly into Prignitz and Scroderuss doctrinesI say notlet schoolmenscullions, 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 Slawkenbergiuss Latin, of which, as he was no great master, his translation was not always of the purestand generally least so where twas most wanted.This naturally opend a door to a second misfortune; that in the warmer paroxysms of his zeal to open my uncle Tobys eyesmy fathers ideas ran on as much faster than the translation, as the translation outmoved my uncle Tobysneither the one or the other added much to the perspicuity of my fathers lecture. |
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