The first thing which entered my father's head, after affairs were a little settled in the family, and Susanna had got possession of my mother's green sattin night-gown,--was to sit down coolly, after the example of Xenophon, and write a Tristra-paedia, or system of education for me; collecting first for that purpose his own scattered thoughts, counsels, and notions; and binding them together, so as to form an Institute for the government of my childhood and adolescence. I was my father's last stake--he had lost my brother Bobby entirely,--he had lost, by his own computation, full three-fourths of me--that is, he had been unfortunate in his three first great casts for me--my geniture, nose, and name,--there was but this one left;and accordingly my father gave himself up to it with as much devotion as ever my uncle Toby had done to his doctrine of projectils.--The difference between them was, that my uncle Toby drew his whole knowledge of projectils from Nicholas Tartaglia--My father spun his, every thread of it, out of his own brain,--or reeled and cross-twisted what all other spinners and spinsters had spun before him, that 'twas pretty near the same torture to him.
In about three years, or something more, my father had got advanced almost into the middle of his work.--Like all other writers, he met with disappointments.--He imagined he should be able to bring whatever he had to say, into so small a compass, that when it was finished and bound, it might be rolled up in my mother's hussive.--Matter grows under our hands.--Let no man say,--'Come--I'll write a duodecimo.'
My father gave himself up to it, however, with the most painful diligence, proceeding step by step in every line, with the same kind of caution and circumspection (though I cannot say upon quite so religious a principle) as was used by John de la Casse, the lord archbishop of Benevento, in compassing his Galatea; in which his Grace of Benevento spent near forty years of his life; and when the thing came out, it was not of above half the size or the thickness of a Rider's Almanack.--How the holy man managed the affair, unless he spent the greatest part of his time in combing his whiskers, or playing at primero with his chaplain,--would pose any mortal not let into the true secret;--and therefore 'tis worth explaining to the world, was it only for the encouragement of those few in it, who write not so much to be fed--as to be famous.
