CHAPTER II

When my father had danced his white bear backwards and forwards through half a dozen pages, he closed the book for good an’ all, --and in a kind of triumph redelivered it into _Trim’s_ hand, with a nod to lay it upon the ’scrutoire, where he found it. ----_Tristram_, said he, shall be made to conjugate every word in the dictionary, backwards and forwards the same way; ----every word, _Yorick_, by this means, you see, is converted into a thesis or an hypothesis; --every thesis and hypothesis have an offspring of propositions; --and each proposition has its own consequences and conclusions; every one of which leads the mind on again, into fresh tracks of enquiries and doubtings. ----The force of this engine, added my father, is incredible in opening a child’s head. ----’Tis enough, brother _Shandy_, cried my uncle _Toby_, to burst it into a thousand splinters.----

I presume, said _Yorick_, smiling, --it must be owing to this, ----(for let logicians say what they will, it is not to be accounted for sufficiently from the bare use of the ten predicaments) ----That the famous _Vincent Quirino_, amongst the many other astonishing feats of his childhood, of which the Cardinal _Bembo_ has given the world so exact a story, --should be able to paste up in the public schools at _Rome_, so early as in the eighth year of his age, no less than four thousand five hundred and fifty different theses, upon the most abstruse points of the most abstruse theology; --and to defend and maintain them in such sort, as to cramp and dumbfound his opponents. ----What is that, cried my father, to what is told us of _Alphonsus Tostatus_, who, almost in his nurse’s arms, learned all the sciences and liberal arts without being taught any one of them? ----What shall we say of the great _Piereskius?_ --That’s the very man, cried my uncle _Toby_, I once told you of, brother _Shandy_, who walked a matter of five hundred miles, reckoning from _Paris_ to _Shevling_, and from _Shevling_ back again, merely to see _Stevinus’s_ flying chariot. ----He was a very great man! added my uncle _Toby_ (meaning _Stevinus_) --He was so, brother _Toby_, said my father (meaning _Piereskius_)----and had multiplied his ideas so fast, and increased his knowledge to such a prodigious stock, that, if we may give credit to an anecdote concerning him, which we cannot withhold here, without shaking the authority of all anecdotes whatever--at seven years of age, his father committed entirely to his care the education of his younger brother, a boy of five years old, --with the sole management of all his concerns. --Was the father as wise as the son? quoth my uncle _Toby_: --I should think not, said _Yorick_: --But what are these, continued my father--(breaking out in a kind of enthusiasm)--what are these, to those prodigies of childhood in _Grotius_, _Scioppius_, _Heinsius_, _Politian_, _Pascal_, _Joseph Scaliger_, _Ferdinand de Cordouè_, and others--some of which left off their _substantial forms_ at nine years old, or sooner, and went on reasoning without them; --others went through their classics at seven; --wrote tragedies at eight; --_Ferdinand de Cordouè_ was so wise at nine, --’twas thought the Devil was in him; --and at _Venice_ gave such proofs of his knowledge and goodness, that the monks imagined he was _Antichrist_, or nothing. ----Others were masters of fourteen languages at ten, --finished the course of their rhetoric, poetry, logic, and ethics, at eleven, --put forth their commentaries upon _Servius_ and _Martianus Capella_ at twelve, --and at thirteen received their degrees in philosophy, laws, and divinity: ----But you forget the great _Lipsius_, quoth _Yorick_, who composed a work[6.2] the day he was born: ----They should have wiped it up, said my uncle _Toby_, and said no more about it.

[Footnote 6.2: Nous aurions quelque interêt, says _Baillet_, de montrer qu’il n’a rien de ridicule s’il étoit veritable, au moins dans le sens énigmatique que _Nicius Erythræus_ a tâché de lui donner. Cet auteur dit que pour comprendre comme _Lipse_, il a pû composer un ouvrage le premier jour de sa vie, il faut s’imaginer, que ce premier jour n’est pas celui de sa naissance charnelle, mais celui au quel il a commencé d’user de la raison; il veut que ç’ait été à l’âge de _neuf_ ans; et il nous veut persuader que ce fut en cet âge, que _Lipse_ fit un poëme. ----Le tour est ingénieux, &c. &c.]

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