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

Volume III, Chapter 79

199 of 315 · 3 min of reading

NOW, because I have once or twice said, in my inconsiderate way of talking, That I was confident the following memoirs of my uncle Toby’s courtship of widow Wadman, whenever I got time to write them, would turn out one of the most complete systems, both of the elementary and practical part of love and love-making, that ever was addressed to the world----are you to imagine from thence, that I shall set out with a description of what love is?_ whether part God and part Devil, as Plotinus will have it----

----Or by a more critical equation, and supposing the whole of love to be as ten----to determine with Ficinus, “How many parts of it--the one,--and how many the other;_”--or whether it is all of it one great Devil, from head to tail, as Plato has taken upon him to pronounce; concerning which conceit of his, I shall not offer my opinion:--but my opinion of Plato is this; that he appears, from this instance, to have been a man of much the same temper and way of reasoning with doctor Baynyard, who being a great enemy to blisters, as imagining that half a dozen of ’em at once, would draw a man as surely to his grave, as a herse and six--rashly concluded, that the Devil himself was nothing in the world, but one great bouncing Cantharidis._----

I have nothing to say to people who allow themselves this monstrous liberty in arguing, but what Nazianzen cried out (that is, polemically) to Philagrius----

“’Ευγε!” O rare! ’tis fine reasoning, Sir indeed!_--“οτι φιλοσοφεισ ευ Παθεσ.” and most nobly do you aim at truth, when you philosophize about it in your moods and passions._

Nor is it to be imagined, for the same reason, I should stop to inquire, whether love is a disease,----or embroil myself with Rhasis and Dioscorides, whether the seat of it is in the brain or liver;--because this would lead me on, to an examination of the two very opposite manners, in which patients have been treated----the one, of Aœtius, who always begun with a cooling clyster of hempseed and bruised cucumbers;--and followed on with thin potations of water-lilies and purslane--to which he added a pinch of snuff, of the herb Hanea;_--and where Aœtius durst venture it,--his topaz-ring.

----The other, that of Gordonius, who (in his cap. 15. de Amore) directs they should be thrashed, “ad putorem usque,”----till they stink again.

These are disquisitions which my father, who had laid in a great stock of knowledge of this kind, will be very busy with in the progress of my uncle Toby’s affairs: I must anticipate thus much, That from his theories of love, (with which, by the way, he contrived to crucify my uncle Toby’s mind, almost as much as his amours themselves,)--he took a single step into practice;--and by means of a camphorated cerecloth, which he found means to impose upon the taylor for buckram, whilst he was making my uncle Toby a new pair of breeches, he produced Gordonius’s effect upon my uncle Toby without the disgrace.

What changes this produced, will be read in its proper place: all that is needful to be added to the anecdote, is this----That whatever effect it had upon my uncle Toby,----it had a vile effect upon the house;----and if my uncle Toby had not smoaked it down as he did, it might have had a vile effect upon my father too.

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End of part 199 of 315