; 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.

My uncle Toby would give my father all possible fair play in this
attempt; and with infinite patience would sit smoking his pipe for
whole hours together, whilst my father was practising upon his head,
and trying every accessible avenue to drive Prignitz and Scroderus's
solutions into it.

Whether they were above my uncle Toby's reason--or contrary to it--or
that his brain was like damp timber, and no spark could possibly take
hold--or that it was so full of saps, mines, blinds, curtins, and such
military disqualifications to his seeing clearly into Prignitz and
Scroderus's doctrines--I say not--let schoolmen--scullions, anatomists,
and engineers, fight for it among themselves--

'Twas some misfortune, I make no doubt, in this affair, that my father
had every word of it to translate for the benefit of my uncle Toby,
and render out of Slawkenbergius's Latin, of which, as he was no great
master, his translation was not always of the purest--and generally
least so where 'twas most wanted.--This naturally open'd a door to a
second misfortune;--that in the warmer paroxysms of his zeal to open
my uncle Toby's eyes--my father's ideas ran on as much faster than the
translation, as the translation outmoved my uncle Toby's--neither the
one or the other added much to the perspicuity of my father's lecture.

Chapter 2.XXXIII.

The gift of ratiocination and making syllogisms--I mean in man--for in
superior classes of being, such as angels and spirits--'tis all done,
may it please your worships, as they tell me, by Intuition;--and beings
inferior, as your worships all know--syllogize by their noses: though
there is an island swimming in the sea (though not altogether at its
ease) whose inhabitants, if my intelligence deceives me not, are
so wonderfully gifted, as to syllogize after the same fashion, and
oft-times to make very well out too:--but that's neither here nor
there--

The gift of doing it as it should be, amongst us, or