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No, indeed, said my father you may go with my aunt Dinah to a visitation with a bend-sinister, if you think fit My poor uncle Toby blush'd. My father was vexed at himself.
The devotees get to think that all human knowledge centres in their peculiar science and the cognate mysteries and exquisite scientific manipulations of heraldry, and they may be heard talking with compassionate contempt of some one so grossly ignorant as not to know a bar-dexter from a bend-sinister, or who asks what is meant by a cross potent quadrate party per pale.
We'll go o'horseback, said my father, turning to Yorick Of all things in the world, except politicks, the clergy know the least of heraldry, said Yorick. No matter for that, cried my father I should be sorry to appear with a blot in my escutcheon before them. Never mind the bend-sinister, said my uncle Toby, putting on his tye-wig.
One of these intellectual tyrants, a man of great ability, when he quarrelled with any one, used to threaten to "bastardise" him, or to find the bend-sinister somewhere in his ancestry; and his experience in long genealogies made him feel assured, in the general case, of finding what he sought if he went far enough back for it.
Does he make a slip in decorum, which Milton declares to be the principal thing? His proud crest and armorial bearings support him: no bend-sinister slurs his poetical escutcheon! Is he dull, or does he put of some trashy production on the public? It is not charged to his account, as a deficiency which he must make good at the peril of his admirers.
'Tis scarce credible that the mind of so wise a man as my father was, could be so much incommoded with so small a matter. Has the bend-sinister been brush'd out, I say? said my father. There has been nothing brush'd out, Sir, answered Obadiah, but the lining.
Athwart the picture of my Lady, over the great chimney- piece, it throws a broad bend-sinister of light that strikes down crookedly into the hearth and seems to rend it.
It would have made my story much better to have begun with telling you, that at the time my mother's arms were added to the Shandy's, when the coach was re-painted upon my father's marriage, it had so fallen out that the coach-painter, whether by performing all his works with the left hand, like Turpilius the Roman, or Hans Holbein of Basil or whether 'twas more from the blunder of his head than hand or whether, lastly, it was from the sinister turn which every thing relating to our family was apt to take it so fell out, however, to our reproach, that instead of the bend-dexter, which since Harry the Eighth's reign was honestly our due a bend-sinister, by some of these fatalities, had been drawn quite across the field of the Shandy arms.
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