3 Books By Laurence Sterne - Laurence Sterne

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      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,--could be capable of entertaining a notion in his head, so out of the common track,--that I fear the reader, when I come to mention it to him, if he is the least of a cholerick temper, will immediately throw the book by; if mercurial, he will laugh most heartily at it;--and if he is of a grave and saturnine cast, he will, at first sight, absolutely condemn as fanciful and extravagant; and that was in respect to the choice and imposition of christian names, on which he thought a great deal more depended than what superficial minds were capable of conceiving.

      His opinion, in this matter, was, That there was a strange kind of magick bias, which good or bad names, as he called them, irresistibly impressed upon our characters and conduct.

      The hero of Cervantes argued not the point with more seriousness,--nor had he more faith,--or more to say on the powers of necromancy in dishonouring his deeds,--or on Dulcinea's name, in shedding lustre upon them, than my father had on those of Trismegistus or Archimedes, on the one hand--or of Nyky and Simkin on the other. How many Caesars and Pompeys, he would say, by mere inspiration of the names, have been rendered worthy of them? And how many, he would add, are there, who might have done exceeding well in the world, had not their characters and spirits been totally depressed and Nicodemus'd into nothing?

      I see plainly, Sir, by your looks, (or as the case happened) my father would say--that you do not heartily subscribe to this opinion of mine,--which, to those, he would add, who have not carefully sifted it to the bottom,--I own has an air more of fancy than of solid reasoning in it;--and yet, my dear Sir, if I may presume to know your character, I am morally assured, I should hazard little in stating a case to you, not as a party in the dispute,--but as a judge, and trusting my appeal upon it to your own good sense and candid disquisition in this matter;--you are a person free from as many narrow prejudices of education as most men;--and, if I may presume to penetrate farther into you,--of a liberality of genius above bearing down an opinion, merely because it wants friends. Your son,--your dear son,--from whose sweet and open temper you have so much to expect.--Your Billy, Sir!--would you, for the world, have called him Judas?--Would you, my dear Sir, he would say, laying his hand upon your breast, with the genteelest address,--and in that soft and irresistible piano of voice, which the nature of the argumentum ad hominem absolutely requires,--Would you, Sir, if a Jew of a godfather had proposed the name for your child, and offered you his purse along with it, would you have consented to such a desecration of him?--O my God! he would say, looking up, if I know your temper right, Sir,--you are incapable of it;--you would have trampled upon the offer;--you would have thrown the temptation at the tempter's head with abhorrence.

      Your greatness of mind in this action, which I admire, with that generous contempt of money, which you shew me in the whole transaction, is really noble;--and what renders it more so, is the principle of it;--the workings of a parent's love upon the truth and conviction of this very hypothesis, namely, That was your son called Judas,--the forbid and treacherous idea, so inseparable from the name, would have accompanied him through life like his shadow, and, in the end, made a miser and a rascal of him, in spite, Sir, of your example.

      I never knew a man able to answer this argument.--But, indeed, to speak of my father as he was;--he was certainly irresistible;--both in his orations and disputations;--he was born an orator;--(Greek).--Persuasion hung upon his lips, and the elements of Logick and Rhetorick were so blended up in him,--and, withal, he had so shrewd a guess at the weaknesses and passions of his respondent,--that Nature might have stood up and said,--'This man is eloquent.'--In short, whether he was on the weak or the strong side of the question, 'twas hazardous in either case to attack him.--And yet, 'tis strange, he had never read Cicero, nor Quintilian de Oratore, nor Isocrates, nor Aristotle, nor Longinus, amongst the antients;--nor Vossius, nor Skioppius, nor Ramus, nor Farnaby, amongst the moderns;--and what is more astonishing, he had never in his whole life the least light or spark of subtilty struck into his mind, by one single lecture upon Crackenthorp or Burgersdicius or any Dutch logician or commentator;--he knew not so much as in what the difference of an argument ad ignorantiam, and an argument ad hominem consisted; so that I well remember, when he went up along with me to enter my name at Jesus College in...,--it was a matter of just wonder with my worthy tutor, and two or three fellows of that learned society,--that a man who knew not so much as the names of his tools, should be able to work after that fashion with them.

      To work with them in the best manner he could, was what my father was, however, perpetually forced upon;--for he had a thousand little sceptical notions of the comick kind to defend--most of which notions, I verily believe, at first entered upon the footing of mere whims, and of a vive la Bagatelle; and as such he would make merry with them for half an hour or so, and having sharpened his wit upon them, dismiss them till another day.

      I mention this, not only as matter of hypothesis or conjecture upon the progress and establishment of my father's many odd opinions,--but as a warning to the learned reader against the indiscreet reception of such guests, who, after a free and undisturbed entrance, for some years, into our brains,--at length claim a kind of settlement there,--working sometimes like yeast;--but more generally after the manner of the gentle passion, beginning in jest,--but ending in downright earnest.

      Whether this was the case of the singularity of my father's notions--or that his judgment, at length, became the dupe of his wit;--or how far, in many of his notions, he might, though odd, be absolutely right;--the reader, as he comes at them, shall decide. All that I maintain here, is, that in this one, of the influence of christian names, however it gained footing, he was serious;--he was all uniformity;--he was systematical, and, like all systematic reasoners, he would move both heaven and earth, and twist and torture every thing in nature to support his hypothesis. In a word I repeat it over again;--he was serious;--and, in consequence of it, he would lose all kind of patience whenever he saw people, especially of condition, who should have known better,--as careless and as indifferent about the name they imposed upon their child,--or more so, than in the choice of Ponto or Cupid for their puppy-dog.

      This, he would say, look'd ill;--and had, moreover, this particular aggravation in it, viz. That when once a vile name was wrongfully or injudiciously given, 'twas not like the case of a man's character, which, when wrong'd, might hereafter be cleared;--and, possibly, some time or other, if not in the man's life, at least after his death,--be, somehow or other, set to rights with the world: But the injury of this, he would say, could never be undone;--nay, he doubted even whether an act of parliament could reach it:--He knew as well as you, that the legislature assumed a power over surnames;--but for very strong reasons, which he could give, it had never yet adventured, he would say, to go a step farther.

      It was observable, that tho' my father, in consequence of this opinion, had, as I have told you, the strongest likings and dislikings towards certain names;--that there were still numbers of names which hung so equally in the balance before him, that they were absolutely indifferent to him. Jack, Dick, and Tom were of this class: These my father called neutral names;--affirming of them, without a satire, That there had been as many knaves and fools, at least, as wise and good men, since the world began, who had indifferently borne them;--so that, like equal forces acting against each other in contrary directions, he thought they mutually destroyed each other's effects; for which reason, he would often declare, He would not give a cherry-stone to choose amongst them. Bob, which was my brother's name, was another of these neutral kinds of christian names, which operated very little either way; and as my father happen'd to be at Epsom, when it was given him,--he would oft-times thank Heaven it was no worse. Andrew was something like a negative quantity in Algebra with him;--'twas worse, he said, than nothing.--William stood pretty high:--Numps again was low with him:--and Nick, he said, was the Devil.

      But of all names in the universe he had the most unconquerable aversion for Tristram;--he had the lowest and most contemptible opinion of it of any thing in the world,--thinking it could possibly produce nothing in rerum natura, but what was extremely mean and pitiful: So that in the midst of a dispute on the subject, in which, by the

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