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nydus/The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, GentlemanPublic

A man describes his birth and upbringing through the adventures of his family.

Page 768 of 810
Table of Contents

XIII

Ludovicus Sorbonensis makes this entirely an affair of the body ( ἐξωτερικὴ πρᾶξις ) as he calls it⁠⸺⁠but he is deceived: the soul and body are joint-sharers in everything they get: A man cannot dress, but his ideas get cloth’d at the same time; and if he dresses like a gentleman, every one of them stands presented to his imagination, genteelized along with him⁠—so that he has nothing to do, but take his pen, and write like himself.

For this cause, when your honours and reverences would know whether I writ clean and fit to be read, you will be able to judge full as well by looking into my Laundress’s bill, as my book: there was one single month in which I can make it appear, that I dirtied one and thirty shirts with clean writing; and after all, was more abus’d, cursed, criticis’d, and confounded, and had more mystic heads shaken at me, for what I had wrote in that one month, than in all the other months of that year put together.

⸺⁠But their honours and reverences had not seen my bills.

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