“And the money these Christian youths pay for rents,” continued my father, “is to be used to maintain a company of strolling players” [Here my uncle Toby, throwing back his head, gave a monstrous, long, loud whew-w-w.], “who are to go up and down the country showing the plays of Shakespeare. Up and down, and that, by the way, is how their curtain went on twenty-two occasions in Romeo and Juliet.”
“Who says so?” asked my uncle Toby.
“A parson,” replied my father.
“Had he been a soldier,” said my uncle, “he would never have told such a taradiddle. He would have known that the curtain is that part of the wall or rampart which lies between the two bastions, and joins them.”
“By the mother who bore us! brother Toby,” quoth my father, “you would provoke a saint. Here have you got us, I know not how, souse into the middle of the old subject again. We are speaking of Shakespeare and not of fortifications.”
“Was Shakespeare a soldier, Mr. Shandy, or a young men’s Christian?” said my mother, who had lost her way in the argument.
“Neither one nor t’other, my dear,” replied my father (my uncle Toby softly whistled “Lillibullero”); “he was a writer of plays.”
“They are foolish things,” said my mother.
“Sometimes,” replied my father, “but you have not seen Shakespeare’s, Mrs. Shandy. And it is for the like of you, I tell you point-blank——”
As my father pronounced the word point-blank my uncle Toby rose up to say something upon projectiles, but my father continued:—