The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman | Page 8

wit and judgment, were two incompatible movements.--But that upon his steed--he could unite and reconcile every thing,--he could compose his sermon--he could compose his cough,--and, in case nature gave a call that way, he could likewise compose himself to sleep.--In short, the parson upon such encounters would assign any cause but the true cause,--and he with-held the true one, only out of a nicety of temper, because he thought it did honour to him.
But the truth of the story was as follows: In the first years of this gentleman's life, and about the time when the superb saddle and bridle were purchased by him, it had been his manner, or vanity, or call it what you will,--to run into the opposite extreme.--In the language of the county where he dwelt, he was said to have loved a good horse, and generally had one of the best in the whole parish standing in his stable always ready for saddling: and as the nearest midwife, as I told you, did not live nearer to the village than seven miles, and in a vile country,--it so fell out that the poor gentleman was scarce a whole week together without some piteous application for his beast; and as he was not an unkind-hearted man, and every case was more pressing and more distressful than the last;--as much as he loved his beast, he had never a heart to refuse him; the upshot of which was generally this; that his horse was either clapp'd, or spavin'd, or greaz'd;--or he was twitter-bon'd, or broken-winded, or something, in short, or other had befallen him, which would let him carry no flesh;--so that he had every nine or ten months a bad horse to get rid of,--and a good horse to purchase in his stead.
What the loss in such a balance might amount to, communibus annis, I would leave to a special jury of sufferers in the same traffick, to determine;-- but let it be what it would, the honest gentleman bore it for many years without a murmur, till at length, by repeated ill accidents of the kind, he found it necessary to take the thing under consideration; and upon weighing the whole, and summing it up in his mind, he found it not only disproportioned to his other expences, but withal so heavy an article in itself, as to disable him from any other act of generosity in his parish: Besides this, he considered that with half the sum thus galloped away, he could do ten times as much good;--and what still weighed more with him than all other considerations put together, was this, that it confined all his charity into one particular channel, and where, as he fancied, it was the least wanted, namely, to the child-bearing and child-getting part of his parish; reserving nothing for the impotent,--nothing for the aged,--nothing for the many comfortless scenes he was hourly called forth to visit, where poverty, and sickness and affliction dwelt together.
For these reasons he resolved to discontinue the expence; and there appeared but two possible ways to extricate him clearly out of it;--and these were, either to make it an irrevocable law never more to lend his steed upon any application whatever,--or else be content to ride the last poor devil, such as they had made him, with all his aches and infirmities, to the very end of the chapter.
As he dreaded his own constancy in the first--he very chearfully betook himself to the second; and though he could very well have explained it, as I said, to his honour,--yet, for that very reason, he had a spirit above it; choosing rather to bear the contempt of his enemies, and the laughter of his friends, than undergo the pain of telling a story, which might seem a panegyrick upon himself.
I have the highest idea of the spiritual and refined sentiments of this reverend gentleman, from this single stroke in his character, which I think comes up to any of the honest refinements of the peerless knight of La Mancha, whom, by the bye, with all his follies, I love more, and would actually have gone farther to have paid a visit to, than the greatest hero of antiquity.
But this is not the moral of my story: 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