I have dropped the curtain over this scene for a minute,⸺to remind you of one thing,⸺and to inform you of another.
What I have to inform you, comes, I own, a little out of its due course;⸺for it should have been told a hundred and fifty pages ago, but that I foresaw then ’twould come in pat hereafter, and be of more advantage here than elsewhere.—Writers had need look before them, to keep up the spirit and connection of what they have in hand.
When these two things are done,—the curtain shall be drawn up again, and my uncle Toby , my father, and Dr. Slop , shall go on with their discourse, without any more interruption.
First, then, the matter which I have to remind you of, is this;⸺that from the specimens of singularity in my father’s notions in the point of christian-names, and that other previous point thereto,—you was led, I think, into an opinion (and I am sure I said as much), that my father was a gentleman altogether as odd and whimsical in fifty other opinions. In truth, there was not a stage in the life of man, from the very first act of his begetting,⸺down to the lean and slippered pantaloon in his second childishness, but he had some favourite notion to himself, springing out of it, as sceptical, and as far out of the highway of thinking, as these two which have been explained.
— Mr. Shandy , my father, Sir, would see nothing in the light in which others placed it;—he placed things in his own light;—he would weigh nothing in common scales;—no, he was too refined a researcher to lie open to so gross an imposition.—To come at the exact weight of things in the scientific steelyard, the fulcrum, he would say, should be almost invisible, to avoid all friction from popular tenets;—without this