imagination,—’twas still a stroke of one or other of ’em levell’d at him, and was to be fenced off.—So that the life of a writer, whatever he might fancy to the contrary, was not so much a state of composition , as a state of warfare ; and his probation in it, precisely that of any other man militant upon earth,—both depending alike, not half so much upon the degrees of his wit —as his resistance .
My father was hugely pleased with this theory of John de la Casse , archbishop of Benevento ; and (had it not cramped him a little in his creed) I believe would have given ten of the best acres in the Shandy estate, to have been the broacher of it.—How far my father actually believed in the devil, will be seen, when I come to speak of my father’s religious notions, in the progress of this work: ’tis enough to say here, as he could not have the honour of it, in the literal sense of the doctrine—he took up with the allegory of it; and would often say, especially when his pen was a little retrograde, there was as much good meaning, truth, and knowledge, couched under the veil of John de la Casse’s parabolical