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How the communication was conveyed into Slawkenbergius's sensorium so that Slawkenbergius should know whose finger touch'd the key and whose hand it was that blew the bellows as Hafen Slawkenbergius has been dead and laid in his grave above fourscore and ten years we can only raise conjectures.
Tell me, Slawkenbergius! what secret impulse was it? what intonation of voice? whence came it? how did it sound in thy ears? art thou sure thou heard'st it? which first cried out to thee go go, Slawkenbergius! dedicate the labours of thy life neglect thy pastimes call forth all the powers and faculties of thy nature macerate thyself in the service of mankind, and write a grand Folio for them, upon the subject of their noses.
Slawkenbergius in every page of him was a rich treasure of inexhaustible knowledge to my father he could not open him amiss; and he would often say in closing the book, that if all the arts and sciences in the world, with the books which treated of them, were lost should the wisdom and policies of governments, he would say, through disuse, ever happen to be forgot, and all that statesmen had wrote or caused to be written, upon the strong or the weak sides of courts and kingdoms, should they be forgot also and Slawkenbergius only left there would be enough in him in all conscience, he would say, to set the world a-going again.
'Tis a pity, cried my father one winter's night, after a three hours painful translation of Slawkenbergius 'tis a pity, cried my father, putting my mother's threadpaper into the book for a mark, as he spoke that truth, brother Toby, should shut herself up in such impregnable fastnesses, and be so obstinate as not to surrender herself sometimes up upon the closest siege.
For in the account which Hafen Slawkenbergius gives the world of his motives and occasions for writing, and spending so many years of his life upon this one work towards the end of his prolegomena, which by-the-bye should have come first but the bookbinder has most injudiciously placed it betwixt the analytical contents of the book, and the book itself he informs his reader, that ever since he had arrived at the age of discernment, and was able to sit down cooly, and consider within himself the true state and condition of man, and distinguish the main end and design of his being; or to shorten my translation, for Slawkenbergius's book is in Latin, and not a little prolix in this passage ever since I understood, quoth Slawkenbergius, any thing or rather what was what and could perceive that the point of long noses had been too loosely handled by all who had gone before; have I Slawkenbergius, felt a strong impulse, with a mighty and unresistible call within me, to gird up myself to this undertaking.
Take notice, I go no farther with the simile my father's eye was greater than his appetite his zeal greater than his knowledge he cool'd his affections became divided he got hold of Prignitz purchased Scroderus, Andrea Paraeus, Bouchet's Evening Conferences, and above all, the great and learned Hafen Slawkenbergius; of which, as I shall have much to say by-and-bye I will say nothing now.
Alas! alas! cries Slawkenbergius, making an exclamation it is not the first and I fear will not be the last fortress that has been either won or lost by Noses. The End of Slawkenbergius's Tale.
Of what? for the love of Christ! I am determined, answered Slawkenbergius, that all the powers upon earth shall never wring that secret from my breast.
Slawkenbergius was play'd upon, for aught I know, like one of Whitefield's disciples that is, with such a distinct intelligence, Sir, of which of the two masters it was that had been practising upon his instrument as to make all reasoning upon it needless.
Now it happened then, as indeed it had often done before, that my uncle Toby's fancy, during the time of my father's explanation of Prignitz to him having nothing to stay it there, had taken a short flight to the bowling-green; his body might as well have taken a turn there too so that with all the semblance of a deep school-man intent upon the medius terminus my uncle Toby was in fact as ignorant of the whole lecture, and all its pros and cons, as if my father had been translating Hafen Slawkenbergius from the Latin tongue into the Cherokee.
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