t fancy to the contrary, was not so much a state of composition,
as a state of warfare; and his probation in it, precisely that of any
other man militant upon earth,--both depending alike, not half so much
upon the degrees of his wit--as his Resistance.

My father was hugely pleased with this theory of John de la Casse,
archbishop of Benevento; and (had it not cramped him a little in his
creed) I believe would have given ten of the best acres in the Shandy
estate, to have been the broacher of it.--How far my father actually
believed in the devil, will be seen, when I come to speak of my father's
religious notions, in the progress of this work: 'tis enough to say
here, as he could not have the honour of it, in the literal sense of
the doctrine--he took up with the allegory of it; and would often say,
especially when his pen was a little retrograde, there was as much good
meaning, truth, and knowledge, couched under the veil of John de la
Casse's parabolical representation,--as was to be found in any one
poetic fiction or mystic record of antiquity.--Prejudice of education,
he would say, is the devil,--and the multitudes of them which we suck
in with our mother's milk--are the devil and all.--We are haunted with
them, brother Toby, in all our lucubrations and researches; and was a
man fool enough to submit tamely to what they obtruded upon him,--what
would his book be? Nothing,--he would add, throwing his pen away with
a vengeance,--nothing but a farrago of the clack of nurses, and of the
nonsense of the old women (of both sexes) throughout the kingdom.

This is the best account I am determined to give of the slow progress
my father made in his Tristra-paedia; at which (as I said) he was three
years, and something more, indefatigably at work, and, at last, had
scarce completed, by this own reckoning, one half of his undertaking:
the misfortune was, that I was all that time totally neglected and
abandoned to my mother; and what was almost as bad, by the very delay,
the first part of the work, upon which my father had spent the most
of his pains, was rendered entirely useless,--every day a page or two
became of no consequence.--

--Certainly it was ordained as a scourge upon the pride of human wisdom,
That the wisest of us all should thus outwit ourselves, and eternally
forego our purposes in the intemperate act of pursuing them.

In short my father was so long in all his acts of resistance,--or in
other words,--he advan