down coolly, and consider within himself the true state and condition of man, and distinguish the main end and design of his being;⸺or—to shorten my translation, for Slawkenbergius’s book is in Latin , and not a little prolix in this passage—ever since I understood, quoth Slawkenbergius , anything⸺or rather what was what ⸺and could perceive that the point of long noses had been too loosely handled by all who had gone before;⸺have I, Slawkenbergius , felt a strong impulse, with a mighty and unresistible call within me, to gird up myself to this undertaking.
And to do justice to Slawkenbergius , he has entered the list with a stronger lance, and taken a much larger career in it than any one man who had ever entered it before him⸺and indeed, in many respects, deserves to be en-nich’d as a prototype for all writers, of voluminous works at least, to model their books by⸺for he has taken in, Sir, the whole subject—examined every part of it dialectically ⸻then brought it into full day; dilucidating it with all the light which either the collision of his own natural parts could strike—or the profoundest knowledge of the sciences had impowered him to cast upon it—collating, collecting, and compiling⸻begging, borrowing, and stealing, as he went along, all that had been wrote or wrangled thereupon in the schools and porticos of the learned: so that Slawkenbergius his book may properly be considered, not only as a model—but as a thorough-stitched digest and regular institute of noses , comprehending in it all that is or can be needful to be known about them.
For this cause it is that I forbear to speak of so many (otherwise) valuable books and treatises of my father’s collecting, wrote either, plump upon noses⸺or collaterally touching them;⸻such for instance as Prignitz , now lying upon the table before me, who with infinite learning, and from the most candid and scholar-like examination of above four thousand different skulls, in upwards of twenty charnel-houses in Silesia , which he had rummaged⸻has informed us, that