THE COURTSHIP OF UNCLE TOBY AND THE WIDOW WADMAN. [LAURENCE STERNE, the son of Roger Sterne, a lieutenant in the British Army, was born in Clonmel, Ireland, Nov. 24, 1713. He was a grandson of Richard Sterne, Archbishop of York, and a nephew of Archdeacon Jacques Sterne, LL.D. After going to school at Halifax, England, he was sent to Jesus College, Cambridge, in 1733, where he took the degree of A.B. in 1736. On leaving the University, he took church orders, and by the interest of his uncle obtained the living of Sutton, Yorkshire, and in 1740-41 was a prebend in York Cathedral. He married in 1741 and re ceived from a friend of his wife the living of Stil lington, near Sutton. He retained his connection with these two places for nearly twenty years, preaching on Sundays, and amusing himself during the week by reading, "painting, fiddling, and shooting." Im mediately after the publication of Tristram Shandy (in 1759) he became famous, and afterwards he paid still less attention to clerical duties, his time being mostly spent in London or on the continent. His earliest publications were several sermons which at the time attracted little attention; but his sermons have since had admirers. The poet Gray says of them: "They are in the style I think most proper for the pulpit, and show a strong imagination and a sensible heart; but you see him often tottering on the verge of laughter, and ready to throw his periwig in the face of his audience." A Sentimental Journey was published in the year of the author's death, 1768. Sterne led an unworthy, inconsistent, and indiscreet if not immoral life, and died unlamented and well-nigh neglected. While a few prefer his Sentimental Journey, his fame beyond question rests chiefly upon Tristram Shandy. Speaking of the latter work Hazlitt says: "The story of Le Fevre is perhaps the finest in the English language." The same writer says: "My Uncle Toby is one of the finest compliments ever paid to human nature. He is the most unoffending of God's creatures." Leigh Hunt thus apostrophizes this genial creation of Sterne's: "But what shall I say to thee, thou quintessence of the milk of human kindness, thou reconciler of war (as far as it was necessary to reconcile it), thou returner to childhood during peace, thou lover of widows, thou master of the best of corporals, thou whistler at excommunications, thou high and only final Christian gentleman, thou pitier of the devil himself, divine Uncle Toby! Why, this I will say, made bold by thy example, and caring nothing for what anybody may think of it who does not in some measure partake of thy nature, that he who created thee was the wisest man since the days of Shakspeare; and that Shakspeare himself, mighty reflector of things as they were, but no anticipator, never arrived at a character like thine." To this extreme eulogy Mr. Hunt adds: "If I were requested to name the book of all others, which combined wit and hu VOL. II.-W. H. mor under their highest appearance of levity with the profoundest wisdom, it would be Tristram Shandy.” Our selection is a portion of "Tristram Shandy" complete in itself, comprising the last two books, viz., the Eighth and the Ninth.] CHAPTER I. BUT softly, for in these sportive plains and under this genial sun, where at this instant all flesh is running out piping, fiddling, and dancing to the vintage, and every step that's taken, the judgment is surprised by the imagination, I defy, notwithstanding all that has been said upon straight lines, in sundry pages of my book, I defy the best cabbage planter that ever existed, whether he plants backwards or forwards, it makes little difference in the account (except that he will have more to answer for in the one case than in the other), I defy him to go on coolly, critically, and canonically, planting his cabbages one by one, in straight lines, and stoical distances, without ever and anon straddling out, or sliding into some bastardly digression. In Freezeland, Fog-land, and some other lands I wot of, it may be done! But in this clear climate of fantasy and perspiration, where every idea, sensible and insensible, gets vent, in this land, my dear Eugenius, in this fertile land of chivalry and romance, where I now sit, unscrewing my inkhorn to write my uncle Toby's amours, and with all the meanders of Julia's track in quest of her Diego, in full view of my study-window, if thou comest not and takest me by the hand, What a work it is likely to turn out! Let us begin it. I'm sure it is the most religious, for I begin with writing the first sentence, and trusting to Almighty God for the second. "T would cure an author forever of the fuss and folly of opening the street door, and calling in his neighbors, and friends, and kinsfolk, with the Devil and all his imps, with their hammers, and engines, &c., only to observe how one sentence of mine follows another, and how the plan follows the whole. I wish you saw me half starting out of my chair, with what confidence, as I grasp the elbow of it, I look up, catching the idea even sometimes before it half-way reaches me! I believe, in my conscience, I intercept many a thought which Heaven intended for another man. Pope and his portrait are fools to me; no martyr is ever so full of faith or fire. I wish I could say of good works too; but I have no Zeal or Anger-or Anger or Zeal; and, till gods and men agree together to call it by the same name, the arrantest Tartufe in science, in politics, or in religion, shall never kindle a spark within me, or have a worse word, or a more unkind greeting, than what he will read in the next chapter. CHAPTER III. Bon jour! good morrow! so you have got your cloak on betimes, but 't is a cold morning, and you judge the matter rightly; 't is better to be well mounted than go o'foot; and obstructions in the glands are dangerous. And how goes it with thy wife and little ones? and when did you hear from the old gentleman and lady, your sister, aunt, uncle and cousins? I hope they have got the better of their colds, coughs, tooth-aches, fevers, stranguaries, sciaticas, swellings, and sore eyes. What a devil of an apothecary! to take so much blood, give such a vile purge, puke, poultice, plaster, night draught, clyster, blister! And why so many grains of calomel? Santa Maria! and such a dose of opium! periclitating, pardi! the whole family of ye, from head to tail! By my great-aunt Dinah's old black velvet mask! I think there was no occasion for it. Now this being a little bald about the chin, by frequently putting off and on, not one of our family would wear it after. To cover the mask afresh, was more than the mask was worth; and to wear a mask which was bald, or which could be half seen through, was as bad as having no mask at all. This is the reason, may it please your Reverences, that in all our numerous family, for these four generations, we count no more than one Archbishop, a Welsh Judge, some three or four Aldermen, and a single Mountebank. In the sixteenth century, we boast of no less than a dozen alchemists. CHAPTER IV. "IT is with Love as with Cuckoldom;" the suffering party is at least the third, but, generally, the last in the house who knows any thing about the matter: this comes, as all the world knows, from having half a dozen words for one thing; and so long as what in this vessel of the human frame is Love, may be Hatred in that, Sentiment half a yard higher, and Nonsense -No, Madam, not there; I mean at the part I am now pointing to with my forefinger-how can we help ourselves? Of all mortal, and immortal men too, if you please, who ever soliloquized upon this mystic subject, my uncle Toby was the worst fitted to have pushed his researches through such a contention of feelings; and he had infallibly let them all run on, as we do worse matters, to see what they would turn out, had not Bridget's prenotification of them to Susannah, and Susannah's repeated manifestoes thereupon to all the world, made it neces sary for my uncle Toby to look into the affair. CHAPTER V. WHY weavers, gardeners, and gladiators, or a man with a pined leg (proceeding from some ailment in the foot) should ever have had some tender nymph breaking her heart in secret for them, are points well and duly settled and accounted for, by ancient and modern physiologists. Á water-drinker, provided he is a pro fessed one, and does it without fraud or | ship, less than love: something, no matter covin, is precisely in the same predica- what, no matter where; I would not give ment: not that, at first sight, there is any a single hair of my mule's tail, and be consequence, or show of logic in it, "That obliged to pluck it off myself (indeed, the a rill of cold water dribbling through my villain has not many to spare, and is not inward parts, should light up a torch in a little vicious into the bargain) to be let my Jenny's heart-" by your Worships into the secret. The proposition does not strike one; on the contrary, it seems to run opposite to the natural workings of causes and effects. But it shows the weakness and imbecility of human reason. And in perfect good health with it!" The most perfect, Madam, that Friendship herself could wish me. "And drink nothing! nothing but water?" Impetuous fluid! the moment thou pressest against the flood-gates of the brain, see how they give way! In swims Curiosity, beckoning to her damsels to follow; they dive into the centre of the current. Fancy sits musing upon the bank, and, with her eyes following the stream, turns straw and bulrushes into masts and bowsprits. And Desire, with vest held up to the knee in one hand, snatches at them, as they swim by her, with the other. O ye water-drinkers! is it then by this delusive fountain, that ye have so often governed and turn'd this world about like a mill-wheel, grinding the faces of the impotent, bepowdering their ribs, bepeppering their noses, and changing sometimes even the very frame and face of nature! If I was you, quoth Yorick, I would drink more water, Eugenius. And, if I was you, Yorick, replied Eugenius, so would I. Which shows they had both read Longinus. For my own part, I am resolved never to read any book but my own as long as I live. CHAPTER VI. I WISH my uncle Toby had been a water-drinker, for then the thing had been accounted for, That the first moment Widow Wadman saw him, she felt something stirring within her in his favor; something! something. Something, perhaps, more than friend But the truth is, my uncle Toby was not a water-drinker; he drank it neither pure nor mixed, nor anyhow, nor anywhere, except fortuitously upon some advanced posts, where better liquor was not to be had, or during the time he was under cure; when, the surgeon telling him it would extend the fibres, and bring them sooner into contact, my uncle Toby drank it for quietness' sake. Now, as all the world knows that no effect in nature can be produced without a cause, and as it is as well known that my uncle Toby was neither a weaver, a gardener, nor a gladiator, unless as a captain, you will needs have him one, but then he was only a captain of foot, and, besides, the whole is an equivocation. There is nothing left for us to suppose, but that my uncle Toby's leg-but that will avail us little in the present hypothesis, unless it had proceeded from some ailment in the foot, whereas his leg was not emaciated from any disorder in his foot, for my uncle Toby's leg was not emaciated at all. It was a little stiff and awkward, from a total disuse of it for the three years he lay confined at my father's house in town; but it was plump and muscular, and, in all other respects, as good and promising a leg as the other. I declare, I do not recollect any one opinion or passage of my life, where my understanding was more at a loss to make ends meet, and torture the chapter I had been writing, to the service of the chapter following it, than in the present case: one would think I took a pleasure in running into difficulties of this kind, merely to make fresh experiments of getting out of 'em. Inconsiderate soul that thou art! What are not the unavoidable distresses with which, as an author and a man, thou art hemmed in on every side of thee; are they, Tristram, not sufficient, but thou must entangle thyself still more? CHAPTER VII. BUT, for Heaven's sake, let us take the story straight before us; it is so nice and intricate a one, it will scarce bear the transposition of a single tittle; and somehow or other, you have got me thrust almost into the middle of it. I beg we may take more care. CHAPTER VIII. My uncle Toby and the corporal had posted down with so much heat and precipitation, to take possession of the spot of ground we have so often spoken of, in order to open their campaign as early as the rest of the allies; that they had forgot one of the most necessary articles of the whole affair; it was neither a pioneer's spade, a pick-axe, or a shovel. It was a bed to lie on: so that as Shandy-hall was at that time unfurnished, and the little inn where poor Le Fevre died, not yet built, my uncle Toby was constrained to accept of a bed of Mrs. Wadman's, for a night or two, till corporal Trim (who, to the character of an excellent valet, groom, cook, sempster, surgeon, and engineer, superadded that of an excellent upholsterer too), with the help of a carpenter and a couple of tailors, constructed one in my uncle Toby's house. CHAPTER IX. I Do not speak it with regard to the coarseness or cleanness of them, or the strength of their gussets; but pray Do not night-shifts differ from day-shifts as much in this particular, as in anything else in the world, That they so far exceed the others in length, that, when you are laid down in them, they fall almost as much below the feet as the day-shifts fall short of them? Widow Wadman's night-shifts (as was the mode, I suppose, in King William's and Queen Anne's reigns) were cut, however, after this fashion; and, if the fashion is changed (for in Italy they are come to nothing) so much the worse for the public; they were two Flemish ells and a half in length: so that, allowing a moderate woman two ells, she had half an ell to spare. Now, from one little indulgence gained after another, in the many bleak and Decemberly nights of a seven years' widowhood, things had insensibly come to this pass, and, for the two last years, had got established into one of the ordinances of the bedchamber, That as soon as Mrs. Wadman was put to bed, and had got her legs stretched down to the bottom of it, of which she always gave Bridget notice, Bridget, with all suitable decorum, having first opened the bed-clothes at the feet, took hold of the half-ell of cloth we were speaking of, and having gently, and with both her hands, drawn it downwards to "That she was a perfect woman," had its furthest extension, and then contractbetter be fifty leagues off, or in her warm ed it again sidelong by four or five even bed, or playing with a case-knife, or any-plaits, she took a large corking-pin out of thing you please, than make a man the object of her attention, when the house and all the furniture is her own. A daughter of Eve, for such was Widow Wadman, and it's all the character I intended to give her, There is nothing in it out of doors and in broad daylight, where a woman has a power, physically speaking, of viewing a man in more lights than one; but here, for her soul, she can see him in no light without mixing something of her own goods and chattels along with him, till, by reiterated acts of such combinations, he gets foisted into her inventory, And then, good night. But this is not matter of System; for I have delivered that above; nor is it a matter of Breviary; for I make no man's creed but my own: nor matter of Fact, at least that I know of: but 'tis matter introductory to what follows. her sleeve, and, with the point directed towards her, pinn'd the plaits all fast together, a little above the hem; which done, she tuck'd all in tight at the feet, and wished her mistress good-night. This was constant, and without any other variation than this: that on shivering and tempestuous nights, when Bridget untuck'd the feet of the bed, &c., to do this, she consulted no thermometer but that of her own passions: and so performed it standing, kneeling, or squatting, according to the different degrees of faith, hope, and charity, she was in, and bore towards her mistress that night. In every other respect, the etiquette was sacred, and might have vied with the most mechanical one of the most inflexible bed-chamber in Christendom. And, let me tell you gentry, a wide one The first night, as soon as the corporal nad conducted my uncle Toby up stairs, too. which was about ten, Mrs. Wadman threw herself into her arm-chair, and crossing her left knee with her right, which formed a resting-place for her elbow, she reclin'd her cheek upon the palm of her hand, and, leaning forwards, ruminated till midnight upon both sides of the question. The second night she went to her,bureau, and, having ordered Bridget to bring her up a couple of fresh candles and leave them upon the table, she took out her marriage-settlement, and read it over with great devotion: and the third night (which was the last of my uncle Toby's stay) when Bridget had pulled down the night-shift, and was essaying to stick in the corking-pin, With a kick of both heels at once, but at the same time the most natural kick that could be kick'd in her situation * * * * * * she kick'd the pin out of her fingers, the etiquette which hung upon it, down, down it fell to the ground, and was shivered into a thousand atoms. From all which, it was plain that Widow Wadman was in love with my uncle Toby. CHAPTER X. My uncle Toby's head at that time was full of other matters, so that it was not till the demolition of Dunkirk, when all the other civilities of Europe were settled, that he found leisure to return this. This made an armistice (that is, speaking with regard to my uncle Toby; but, with respect to Mrs. Wadman, a vacancy) of almost eleven years. But in all cases of this nature, as it is the second blow, happen at what distance of time it will, which makes the fray, I choose, for that reason, to call these the amours of my uncle Toby with Mrs. Wadman, rather than the amours of Mrs. Wadman with my uncle Toby. This is not a distinction without a difference. It is not like the affair of an old hat cock'd, and a cock'd old hat, about which your Reverences have so often been at odds with one another; but there is a difference here in the nature of things: CHAPTER XI. Now, as Widow Wadınan did love my uncle Toby, and my uncle Toby did not love Widow Wadman, there was nothing for Widow Wadman to do, but to go on and love my uncle Toby, or let it alone. Widow Wadman would do neither the one nor the other. Gracious Heaven! but I forget I am a little of her temper myself: for whenever it so falls out, which it sometimes does, about the equinoxes, that an earthly goddess is so much this, and that, and t'other, that I cannot eat my breakfast for her, and that she careth not three half-pence whether I eat my breakfast or not, Curse on her! and so I send her to Tartary, and from Tartary to Terra del Fucgo, and so on to the Devil. In short, there is not an infernal niche where I do not take her divinityship and stick it. But as the heart is tender, and the passions in these tides ebb and flow ten times in a minute, I instantly bring her back again; and, as I do all things in extremes, I place her in the very centre of the milky way, Brightest of Stars! thou wilt shed thy influence upon some one. The deuce take her and her influence too for at that word, I lose all patience; much good may it do him! By all that is hirsute! I cry, taking my furred cap, and twisting it round my finger, I would not give sixpence for a dozen such! * * "NOT touch it for the world," did I say? Lord, how I have heated my imagination with this metaphor. CHAPTER XIII. WHICH shows, let your Reverences and Worships say what you will of it (for, as for thinking, all who do think, think pretty much alike both upon it and other matters), Love is certainly, at least alphabetically speaking, one of the most |