“I wish you saw me half starting out of my chair, with what confidence, as I grasp the elbow of it, I look up, catching the idea, even sometimes before it half-way reaches me.
——I believe in my conscience I intercept many a thought, which Heaven intended for another man.”—Tristram Shandy.
Reader;
Lest, from the fact that we have hitherto drawn our mottos from “The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy,” the suspicion may be festering in your brain that poor Nescio Quod has confined his reading among the older English writers to this single work, it may not be amiss to adduce such evidence, as shall set at rest so unjust and injurious a surmise.
For instance—had he wished to be sarcastical upon himself, and thus, by a common artifice, predispose his critics to clemency, he might, in reference to the multitudinous array of shadowy jests—flitting around the brightness of the reader’s fancy, like moths around a candle, to their own destruction—have cited this keen retort of Fuller—“It is good to make a jest, but not to make a trade of jesting.”
Or, in allusion to the somewhat pedantic display of information, varied, but worthless, he might have adopted from the same author a complaint at the frivolous attainments of the idle and riotous student—“Yet, perchance, he may get some alms of learning, here a snap, there a piece of knowledge, but nothing to purpose.”
Or, in a mood of preeminent self-complacency, he might have imagined that the reader’s feelings towards him, maugre his faults and his prolixity, might be fitly expressed in the language of the Spectator (after Martial.)
“In all thy humors, whether grave or mellow,
Thou’rt such a touchy, testy, pleasant fellow,
Hast so much wit, and mirth, and spleen about thee,