ator was to have licence to drink a bottle of wine with my father
and my uncle Toby Shandy in the back parlour,--for which he was to be
paid five guineas.

I must beg leave, before I finish this chapter, to enter a caveat in the
breast of my fair reader;--and it is this,--Not to take it absolutely
for granted, from an unguarded word or two which I have dropp'd in
it,--'That I am a married man.'--I own, the tender appellation of
my dear, dear Jenny,--with some other strokes of conjugal knowledge,
interspersed here and there, might, naturally enough, have misled
the most candid judge in the world into such a determination against
me.--All I plead for, in this case, Madam, is strict justice, and that
you do so much of it, to me as well as to yourself,--as not to prejudge,
or receive such an impression of me, till you have better evidence,
than, I am positive, at present can be produced against me.--Not that I
can be so vain or unreasonable, Madam, as to desire you should therefore
think, that my dear, dear Jenny is my kept mistress;--no,--that would
be flattering my character in the other extreme, and giving it an air of
freedom, which, perhaps, it has no kind of right to. All I contend for,
is the utter impossibility, for some volumes, that you, or the most
penetrating spirit upon earth, should know how this matter really
stands.--It is not impossible, but that my dear, dear Jenny! tender as
the appellation is, may be my child.--Consider,--I was born in the
year eighteen.--Nor is there any thing unnatural or extravagant in
the supposition, that my dear Jenny may be my friend.--Friend!--My
friend.--Surely, Madam, a friendship between the two sexes may subsist,
and be supported without--Fy! Mr. Shandy:--Without any thing, Madam,
but that tender and delicious sentiment which ever mixes in friendship,
where there is a difference of sex. Let me intreat you to study the
pure and sentimental parts of the best French Romances;--it will really,
Madam, astonish you to see with what a variety of chaste expressions
this delicious sentiment, which I have the honour to speak of, is
dress'd out.

Chapter 1.XIX.

I would sooner undertake to explain the hardest problem in geometry,
than pretend to account for it, that a gentleman of my father's great
good sense,--knowing, as the reader must have observed him, and curious
too in philosophy,--wise also in political reasoning,--and in polemical
(as he will find) no way ignorant,--coul