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Chapter 54 My father was returned from his walk to the fish-pondand opened the parlour-door in the very height of the attack, just as my uncle Toby was marching up the glacisTrim recovered his armsnever was my uncle Toby caught in riding at such a desperate rate in his life! Alas! my uncle Toby! had not a weightier matter called forth all the ready eloquence of my fatherhow hadst thou then and thy poor Hobby-Horse too been insulted! My father hung up his hat with the same air he took it down; and after giving a slight look at the disorder of the room, he took hold of one of the chairs which had formed the corporals breach, and placing it over- against my uncle Toby, he sat down in it, and as soon as the tea-things were taken away, and the door shut, he broke out in a lamentation as follows: My Fathers Lamentation. It is in vain longer, said my father, addressing himself as much to Ernulphuss curse, which was laid upon the corner of the chimney-pieceas to my uncle Toby who sat under itit is in vain longer, said my father, in the most querulous monotony imaginable, to struggle as I have done against this most uncomfortable of human persuasionsI see it plainly, that either for my own sins, brother Toby, or the sins and follies of the Shandy family, Heaven has thought fit to draw forth the heaviest of its artillery against me; and that the prosperity of my child is the point upon which the whole force of it is directed to play.Such a thing would batter the whole universe about our ears, brother Shandy, said my uncle Tobyif it was so- Unhappy Tristram! child of wrath! child of decrepitude! interruption! mistake! and discontent! What one misfortune or disaster in the book of embryotic evils, that could unmechanize thy frame, or entangle thy filaments! which has not fallen upon thy head, or ever thou camest into the worldwhat evils in thy passage into it!what evils since!produced into being, in the decline of thy fathers dayswhen the powers of his imagination and of his body were waxing feeblewhen radical heat and radical moisture, the elements which should have temperd thine, were drying up; and nothing left to found thy stamina in, but negationstis pitifulbrother Toby, at the best, and called out for all the little helps that care and attention on both sides could give it. But how were we defeated! You know the event, brother Tobytis too melancholy a one to be repeated nowwhen the few animal spirits I was worth in the world, and with which memory, fancy, and quick parts should have been conveydwere all dispersed, confused, confounded, scattered, and sent to the devil. Here then was the time to have put a stop to this persecution against him;- -and tried an experiment at leastwhether calmness and serenity of mind in your sister, with a due attention, brother Toby, to her evacuations and repletionsand the rest of her non-naturals, might not, in a course of nine months gestation, have set all things to rights.My child was bereft of these!What a teazing life did she lead herself, and consequently her foetus too, with that nonsensical anxiety of hers about lying-in in town? I thought my sister submitted with the greatest patience, replied my uncle TobyI never heard her utter one fretful word about it.She fumed inwardly, cried my father; and that, let me tell you, brother, was ten times worse for the childand then! what battles did she fight with me, and what perpetual storms about the midwife.There she gave vent, said my uncle Toby.Vent! cried my father, looking up. But what was all this, my dear Toby, to the injuries done us by my childs coming head foremost into the world, when all I wished, in this general wreck of his frame, was to have saved this little casket unbroke, unrifled. With all my precautions, how was my system turned topside-turvy in the womb with my child! his head exposed to the hand of violence, and a pressure of 470 pounds avoirdupois weight acting so perpendicularly upon its apexthat at this hour tis ninety per Cent. insurance, that the fine net-work of the intellectual web be not rent and torn to a thousand tatters. Still we could have done.Fool, coxcomb, puppygive him but a Nose Cripple, Dwarf, Driveller, Goosecap(shape him as you will) the door of fortune stands openO Licetus! Licetus! had I been blest with a foetus five inches long and a half, like theeFate might have done her worst. |
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