The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman · Laurence Sterne

Volume III, Chapter 33

153 of 315 · 2 min of reading

O BLESSED health! cried my father, making an exclamation, as he turned over the leaves to the next chapter, thou art before all gold and treasure; ’tis thou who enlargest the soul,--and openest all its powers to receive instruction and to relish virtue.--He that has thee, has little more to wish for;--and he that is so wretched as to want thee,--wants every thing with thee.

I have concentrated all that can be said upon this important head, said my father, into a very little room, therefore we’ll read the chapter quite through.

My father read as follows:

“The whole secret of health depending upon the due contention for mastery betwixt the radical heat and the radical moisture”--You have proved that matter of fact, I suppose, above, said Yorick._ Sufficiently, replied my father.

In saying this, my father shut the book,--not as if he resolved to read no more of it, for he kept his fore-finger in the chapter:----nor pettishly,--for he shut the book slowly; his thumb resting, when he had done it, upon the upper-side of the cover, as his three fingers supported the lower side of it, without the least compressive violence.----

I have demonstrated the truth of that point, quoth my father, nodding to Yorick, most sufficiently in the preceding chapter.

Now could the man in the moon be told, that a man in the earth had wrote a chapter, sufficiently demonstrating, That the secret of all health depended upon the due contention for mastery betwixt the radical heat and the radical moisture,--and that he had managed the point so well, that there was not one single word wet or dry upon radical heat or radical moisture, throughout the whole chapter,--or a single syllable in it, pro or con, directly or indirectly, upon the contention betwixt these two powers in any part of the animal œconomy----

“O thou eternal Maker of all beings!”--he would cry, striking his breast with his right hand (in case he had one)--“Thou whose power and goodness can enlarge the faculties of thy creatures to this infinite degree of excellence and perfection,--What have we MOONITES done?”

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End of part 153 of 315