I don’t acquaint the learned reader—in saying it, I mention it only to shew the learned, I know the fact myself———
That this Ambrose Paræus was chief surgeon and nose-mender to Francis the ninth of France, and in high credit with him and the two preceding, or succeeding kings (I know not which)—and that, except in the slip he made in his story of Taliacotius’s noses, and his manner of setting them on—he was esteemed by the whole college of physicians at that time, as more knowing in matters of noses, than any one who had ever taken them in hand.
Now Ambrose Paræus convinced my father, that the true and efficient cause of what had engaged so much the attention of the world, and upon which Prignitz and Scroderus had wasted so much learning and fine parts——was neither this nor that——but that the length and goodness of the nose was owing simply to the softness and flaccidity in the nurse’s breast———as the flatness and shortness of puisne noses was to the firmness and elastic repulsion of the same organ of nutrition in the hale and lively—which, tho’ happy for the woman, was the undoing of the child, inasmuch as his nose was so snubb’d, so rebuff’d, so rebated, and so refrigerated thereby, as never to arrive ad mensuram suam legitimam;——but that in case of the flaccidity and softness of the nurse or mother’s breast—by sinking into it, quoth Paræus, as into so much butter, the nose was comforted, nourish’d, plump’d up, refresh’d, refocillated, and set a growing for ever.
I have but two things to observe of Paræus; first, That he proves and explains all this with the utmost chastity and decorum of expression:—for which may his soul for ever rest in peace!
And, secondly, that besides the systems of Prignitz and Scroderus, which Ambrose Paræus his hypothesis effectually overthrew—it overthrew at the same time the system of peace and harmony of our family; and for three days together, not only embroiled matters between my father and my mother, but turn’d likewise the whole house and everything in it, except my uncle Toby, quite upside down.
Such a ridiculous tale of a dispute between a man and his wife, never surely in any age or country got vent through the key-hole of a street-door.
My mother, you must know———but I have fifty things more necessary to let you know first——I have a hundred difficulties which I have promised to clear up, and a thousand distresses and domestick misadventures crowding in upon me thick and threefold, one upon the neck of another. A cow broke in (to-morrow morning) to my uncle Toby’s fortifications, and eat up two rations and a half of dried grass, tearing up the sods with it, which faced his horn-work and covered way.——Trim insists upon being tried by a court-martial—the cow to be shot—Slop to be crucifix’d—myself to be tristram’d and at my very baptism made a martyr of;——poor unhappy devils that we all are!——I want swaddling———but there is no time to be lost in exclamations———I have left my father lying across his bed, and my uncle Toby in his old fringed chair, sitting beside him, and promised I would go back to them in half an hour; and five-and-thirty minutes are laps’d already.———Of all the perplexities a mortal author was ever seen in——this certainly is the greatest, for I have Hafen Slawkenbergius’s folio, Sir, to finish——a dialogue between my father and my uncle Toby, upon the solution of Prignitz, Scroderus, Ambrose Paræus, Ponocrates, and Grangousier to relate—a tale out of Slawkenbergius to translate, and all this in five minutes less than no time at all;———such a head!—would to Heaven my enemies only saw the inside of it!
[ CHAPTER XXXIX]
There was not any one scene more entertaining in our family—and to do it justice in this point;——and I here put off my cap and lay it upon the table close beside my ink-horn, on purpose to make my declaration to the world concerning this one article the more solemn——that I believe in my soul (unless my love and partiality to my understanding blinds me) the hand of the supreme Maker and first Designer of all things never made or put a family together (in that period at least of it which I have sat down to write the story of)——where the characters of it were cast or contrasted with so dramatick a felicity as ours was, for this end; or in which the capacities of affording such exquisite scenes, and the powers of shifting them perpetually from morning to night, were lodged and intrusted with so unlimited a confidence, as in the Shandy Family.
Not any one of these was more diverting, I say, in this whimsical theatre of ours——than what frequently arose out of this self-same chapter of long noses———especially when my father’s imagination was heated with the enquiry, and nothing would serve him but to heat my uncle Toby’s too.