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Updated: May 14, 2025
"I never forget this little incident," exclaims Smelfungus: "It is one of the few times I can get, after all my reading about that surprising Karl V., I do not say the least understanding or practical conception of him and his character and his affairs, but the least ocular view or imagination of him, as a fact among facts!" Which is unlucky for Smelfungus.
"What negotiating we have had, and shall have," exclaims Smelfungus, my sad foregoer, "fit rather to be omitted from a serious History, which intends to be read by human creatures! Bargaining, Promising, Non-performing. False in general as dicers' oaths; false on this side and on that, from beginning to end.
Meeting the latter at Turin, just as Smollett was about to turn his face homewards, in March 1765, Sterne wrote of him, in the famous Journey of 1768, thus: "The learned Smelfungus travelled from Boulogne to Paris, from Paris to Rome, and so on, but he set out with the spleen and jaundice, and every object he passed by was discoloured or distorted.
He wrote an account of them, but 'twas nothing but the account of his miserable feelings." "I met Smelfungus," he wrote later on, "in the grand portico of the Pantheon he was just coming out of it.
"What they have done?" growls Smelfungus, tired of the subject: "They have doubled their population every twenty years. They have begotten, with a rapidity beyond recorded example, Eighteen Millions of the greatest bores ever seen in this world before, that hitherto is their feat in History!"
Smelfungus indignantly calls it an immorality and a dishonor, "a playing with loaded dice;" which in good part it surely was. Nor can even Friedrich, who has many pleas for himself, obtain spoken acquittal; unspoken, accompanied with regrets and pity, is all even Friedrich can aspire to.
Smelfungus, retiring in a hurry, for the tails of his dressing gown and the gas retort of Dr. Skihi were in inconvenient proximity. Dr. Skihi vouchsafed not another word, but with an air of indescribable dignity adjusted the retort, took out a cork and but words fail me to describe the catastrophe! Before Dr.
I popp'd upon Smelfungus again at Turin, in his return home, and a sad tale of sorrowful adventures had he to tell, 'wherein he spoke of moving accidents by flood and field, and of the cannibals which each other eat, the Anthropophagi'; he had been flayed alive, and bedevil'd, and used worse than St. Bartholomew, at every stage he had come at.
The spleen with which he contemplated every object that presented itself to him, was ridiculed by Sterne, who gave him the name of Smelfungus. With this abatement, the narration has much to interest and amuse, and conveys some information by which a traveller might perhaps still profit.
Never, or seldom, were seen such suppers; such a life for a Supreme Man of Letters so fitted with the place due to him. Smelfungus says: "And so your Supreme of Literature has got into his due place at last, at the top of the world, namely; though, alas, but for moments or for months. The King's own Friend; he whom the King delights to honor. The most shining thing in Berlin, at this moment.
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