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

Volume II, Chapter 21

74 of 315 · 1 min of reading

FROM the first moment I sat down to write my life for the amusement of the world, and my opinions for its instruction, has a cloud insensibly been gathering over my father.----A tide of little evils and distresses has been setting in against him.--Not one thing, as he observed himself, has gone right: and now is the storm thicken’d and going to break, and pour down full upon his head.

I enter upon this part of my story in the most pensive and melancholy frame of mind that ever sympathetic breast was touched with.----My nerves relax as I tell it.----Every line I write, I feel an abatement of the quickness of my pulse, and of that careless alacrity with it, which every day of my life prompts me to say and write a thousand things I should not----And this moment that I last dipp’d my pen into my ink, I could not help taking notice what a cautious air of sad composure and solemnity there appear’d in my manner of doing it.----Lord! how different from the rash jerks and hair-brain’d squirts thou art wont, Tristram, to transact it with in other humours--dropping thy pen----spurting thy ink about thy table and thy books--as if thy pen and thy ink, thy books and furniture cost thee nothing!

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End of part 74 of 315