The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman | Page 9

The thing I had in view was to shew the temper of
the world in the whole of this affair.--For you must know, that so long as this explanation
would have done the parson credit,--the devil a soul could find it out,--I suppose his
enemies would not, and that his friends could not.--But no sooner did he bestir himself in
behalf of the midwife, and pay the expences of the ordinary's licence to set her up,- -but
the whole secret came out; every horse he had lost, and two horses more than ever he had
lost, with all the circumstances of their destruction, were known and distinctly
remembered.--The story ran like wild-fire.--'The parson had a returning fit of pride which
had just seized him; and he was going to be well mounted once again in his life; and if it
was so, 'twas plain as the sun at noon-day, he would pocket the expence of the licence ten
times told, the very first year:--So that every body was left to judge what were his views
in this act of charity.'
What were his views in this, and in every other action of his life,--or rather what were the
opinions which floated in the brains of other people concerning it, was a thought which
too much floated in his own, and too often broke in upon his rest, when he should have
been sound asleep.
About ten years ago this gentleman had the good fortune to be made entirely easy upon
that score,--it being just so long since he left his parish,--and the whole world at the same
time behind him,--and stands accountable to a Judge of whom he will have no cause to
complain.
But there is a fatality attends the actions of some men: Order them as they will, they pass
thro' a certain medium, which so twists and refracts them from their true directions--that,
with all the titles to praise which a rectitude of heart can give, the doers of them are
nevertheless forced to live and die without it.
Of the truth of which, this gentleman was a painful example.--But to know by what
means this came to pass,--and to make that knowledge of use to you, I insist upon it that
you read the two following chapters, which contain such a sketch of his life and
conversation, as will carry its moral along with it.--When this is done, if nothing stops us
in our way, we will go on with the midwife.
Chapter 1.
XI.
Yorick was this parson's name, and, what is very remarkable in it, (as appears from a
most ancient account of the family, wrote upon strong vellum, and now in perfect
preservation) it had been exactly so spelt for near,--I was within an ace of saying nine
hundred years;--but I would not shake my credit in telling an improbable truth, however
indisputable in itself,--and therefore I shall content myself with only saying--It had been

exactly so spelt, without the least variation or transposition of a single letter, for I do not
know how long; which is more than I would venture to say of one half of the best
surnames in the kingdom; which, in a course of years, have generally undergone as many
chops and changes as their owners.- -Has this been owing to the pride, or to the shame of
the respective proprietors?--In honest truth, I think sometimes to the one, and sometimes
to the other, just as the temptation has wrought. But a villainous affair it is, and will one
day so blend and confound us all together, that no one shall be able to stand up and swear,
'That his own great grandfather was the man who did either this or that.'
This evil had been sufficiently fenced against by the prudent care of the Yorick's family,
and their religious preservation of these records I quote, which do farther inform us, That
the family was originally of Danish extraction, and had been transplanted into England as
early as in the reign of Horwendillus, king of Denmark, in whose court, it seems, an
ancestor of this Mr. Yorick's, and from whom he was lineally descended, held a
considerable post to the day of his death. Of what nature this considerable post was, this
record saith not;--it only adds, That, for near two centuries, it had been totally abolished,
as altogether unnecessary, not only in that court, but in every other court of the Christian
world.
It has often come into my head, that this post could be no other than that of the king's
chief Jester;--and that Hamlet's Yorick, in our Shakespeare, many of whose plays, you
know, are founded upon authenticated facts, was certainly the very man.
I have not the time to look into Saxo-Grammaticus's Danish history, to