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Updated: May 10, 2025
It is not my business to dip my pen in this controversy much undoubtedly may be wrote on both sides of the question all that concerns me as an historian, is to represent the matter of fact, and render it credible to the reader, that the hiatus in Phutatorius's breeches was sufficiently wide to receive the chesnut; and that the chesnut, somehow or other, did fall perpendicularly, and piping hot into it, without Phutatorius's perceiving it, or any one else at that time.
Yorick, I said, picked up the chesnut which Phutatorius's wrath had flung down the action was trifling I am ashamed to account for it he did it, for no reason, but that he thought the chesnut not a jot worse for the adventure and that he held a good chesnut worth stooping for.
The genial warmth which the chesnut imparted, was not undelectable for the first twenty or five-and-twenty seconds and did no more than gently solicit Phutatorius's attention towards the part: But the heat gradually increasing, and in a few seconds more getting beyond the point of all sober pleasure, and then advancing with all speed into the regions of pain, the soul of Phutatorius, together with all his ideas, his thoughts, his attention, his imagination, judgment, resolution, deliberation, ratiocination, memory, fancy, with ten battalions of animal spirits, all tumultuously crowded down, through different defiles and circuits, to the place of danger, leaving all his upper regions, as you may imagine, as empty as my purse.
About two minutes before the time that my uncle Toby interrupted Yorick's harangue Gastripheres's chesnuts were brought in and as Phutatorius's fondness for 'em was uppermost in the waiter's head, he laid them directly before Phutatorius, wrapt up hot in a clean damask napkin.
It was well known that Yorick had never a good opinion of the treatise which Phutatorius had wrote de Concubinis retinendis, as a thing which he feared had done hurt in the world and 'twas easily found out, that there was a mystical meaning in Yorick's prank and that his chucking the chesnut hot into Phutatorius's... ..., was a sarcastical fling at his book the doctrines of which, they said, had enflamed many an honest man in the same place.
How finely we argue upon mistaken facts! There was not a soul busied in all these various reasonings upon the monosyllable which Phutatorius uttered who did not take this for granted, proceeding upon it as from an axiom, namely, that Phutatorius's mind was intent upon the subject of debate which was arising between Didius and Yorick; and indeed as he looked first towards the one and then towards the other, with the air of a man listening to what was going forwards who would not have thought the same?
Others, and especially one or two who sat next him, looked upon it on the contrary as a real and substantial oath, propensly formed against Yorick, to whom he was known to bear no good liking which said oath, as my father philosophized upon it, actually lay fretting and fuming at that very time in the upper regions of Phutatorius's purtenance; and so was naturally, and according to the due course of things, first squeezed out by the sudden influx of blood which was driven into the right ventricle of Phutatorius's heart, by the stroke of surprize which so strange a theory of preaching had excited.
But the truth was, that Phutatorius knew not one word or one syllable of what was passing but his whole thoughts and attention were taken up with a transaction which was going forwards at that very instant within the precincts of his own Galligaskins, and in a part of them, where of all others he stood most interested to watch accidents: So that notwithstanding he looked with all the attention in the world, and had gradually skrewed up every nerve and muscle in his face, to the utmost pitch the instrument would bear, in order, as it was thought, to give a sharp reply to Yorick, who sat over-against him yet, I say, was Yorick never once in any one domicile of Phutatorius's brain but the true cause of his exclamation lay at least a yard below.
But this incident, trifling as it was, wrought differently in Phutatorius's head: He considered this act of Yorick's in getting off his chair and picking up the chesnut, as a plain acknowledgment in him, that the chesnut was originally his and in course, that it must have been the owner of the chesnut, and no one else, who could have played him such a prank with it: What greatly confirmed him in this opinion, was this, that the table being parallelogramical and very narrow, it afforded a fair opportunity for Yorick, who sat directly over against Phutatorius, of slipping the chesnut in and consequently that he did it.
There is nothing in these two later volumes to compare, for instance, with that most wearisome exercise in double entendre, Slawkenbergius's Tale; nothing to match that painfully elaborate piece of low comedy, the consultation of philosophers and its episode of Phutatorius's mishap with the hot chestnut; no such persistent resort, in short, to those mechanical methods of mirth-making upon which Sterne, throughout a great part of the fourth volume, almost exclusively relies.
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