The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne (pdf e book reader txt) 📕

case, was, that she could not heroine it into so violent and hazardous an extreme, as one in her situation might have wished, because the old widwife had really some little claim to be depended upon,⁠—as much, at least, as success could give her; having, in the course of her practice of near twenty years in the parish, brought every mother’s son of them into the world without any one slip or accident which could fairly be laid to her account.

These facts, tho’ they had their weight, yet did not altogether satisfy some few scruples and uneasinesses which hung upon my father’s spirits in relation to this choice.⁠—To say nothing of the natural workings of humanity and justice⁠—or of the yearnings of parental and connubial love, all which prompted him to leave as little to hazard as possible in a case of this kind;⁠⸺⁠he felt himself concerned in a particular manner, that all should go right in the present case;⁠—from the accumulated sorrow he lay open to, should any evil betide his wife and child in lying-in at Shandy-Hall.⁠⸺⁠He knew the world judged by events, and would add to his afflictions in such a misfortune, by loading him with the whole blame of it.⁠⸺“Alas, o’day;⁠—had Mrs. Shandy, poor gentlewoman! had but her wish in going up to town just to lye-in and come down again;⁠—which, they say, she begged and prayed for upon her bare knees,⁠⸺⁠and which, in my opinion, considering the fortune which Mr. Shandy got with her,⁠—was no such mighty matter to have complied with, the lady and her babe might both of them have been alive at this hour.”

This exclamation, my father knew, was unanswerable;⁠—and yet, it was not merely to shelter himself,⁠—nor was it altogether for the care of his offspring and wife that he seemed so extremely anxious about this point;⁠—my father had extensive views of things,⁠⸺⁠and stood moreover, as he thought, deeply concerned in it for the publick good, from the dread he entertained of the bad uses an ill-fated instance might be put to.

He was very sensible that all political writers upon the subject had unanimously agreed and lamented, from the beginning of Queen Elizabeth’s reign down to his own time, that the current of men and money towards the metropolis, upon one frivolous errand or another,⁠—set in so strong,⁠—as to become dangerous to our civil rights,⁠—though, by the by,⁠⸺⁠a current was not the image he took most delight in,⁠—a distemper was here his favourite metaphor, and he would run it down into a perfect allegory, by maintaining it was identically the same in the body national as in the body natural where the blood and spirits were driven up into the head faster than they could find their ways down;⁠⸺⁠a stoppage of circulation must ensue, which was death in both cases.

There was little danger, he would say, of losing our liberties by French politicks or French invasions;⁠⸺⁠nor was he so much in pain of a consumption from the mass of corrupted matter and ulcerated humours in our constitution, which he hoped was not so bad as it was imagined;⁠—but he verily feared, that in some violent push, we should go off, all at once, in a state-apoplexy;⁠—and then he would say, The Lord have mercy upon us all.

My father was never able to give the history of this distemper,⁠—without the remedy along with it.

“Was I an absolute prince,” he would say, pulling up his breeches with both his hands, as he rose from his armchair, “I would appoint able judges, at every avenue of my metropolis, who should take cognizance of every fool’s business who came there;⁠—and if, upon a fair and candid hearing, it appeared not of weight sufficient to leave his own home, and come up, bag and baggage, with his wife and children, farmer’s sons, etc., etc., at his backside, they should be all sent back, from constable to constable, like vagrants as they were, to the place of their legal settlements. By this means I shall take care, that my metropolis totter’d not thro’ its own weight;⁠—that the head be no longer too big for the body;⁠—that the extremes, now wasted and pinn’d in, be restored to their due share of nourishment, and regain with it their natural strength and beauty:⁠—I would effectually provide, That the meadows and cornfields of my dominions, should laugh and sing;⁠—that good chear and hospitality flourish once more;⁠—and that such weight and influence be put thereby into the hands of the Squirality of my kingdom, as should counterpoise what I perceive my Nobility are now taking from them.

“Why are there so few palaces and gentlemen’s seats,” he would ask, with some emotion, as he walked across the room, “throughout so many delicious provinces in France? Whence is it that the few remaining Châteaus amongst them are so dismantled,⁠—so unfurnished, and in so ruinous and desolate a condition?⁠⸺⁠Because, Sir,” (he would say) “in that kingdom no man has any country-interest to support;⁠—the little interest of any kind which any man has anywhere in it, is concentrated in the court, and the looks of the Grand Monarch: by the sunshine of whose countenance, or the clouds which pass across it, every French man lives or dies.”

Another political reason which prompted my father so strongly to guard against the least evil accident in my mother’s lying-in in the country,⁠⸺⁠was, That any such instance would infallibly throw a balance of power, too great already, into the weaker vessels of the gentry, in his own, or higher stations;⁠⸺⁠which, with the many other usurped rights which that part of the constitution was hourly establishing,⁠—would, in the end, prove fatal to the monarchical system of domestick government established in the first creation of things by God.

In this point he was entirely of Sir Robert Filmer’s opinion, That the plans and institutions of the greatest monarchies in the eastern parts of the world were, originally, all stolen from that admirable pattern and prototype of this household and paternal power;⁠—which, for a century, he said, and more, had gradually been degenerating