 ordinary writers: but when a personage of venerable character and high
station, either in church or state, once turned author, - he maintained, that
from the very moment he took pen in hand - all the devils in hell broke out of
their holes to cajole him. - 'Twas Term-time with them, - every thought, first
and last, was captious; - how specious and good soever, - 'twas all one; - in
whatever form or colour it presented itself to the imagination, - 'twas still a
stroke of one or other of 'em levelled at him, and was to be fenced off. - So
that the life of a writer, whatever he might fancy to the contrary, was not so
much a state of composition, as a state of warfare; and his probation in it,
precisely that of any other man militant upon earth, - both depending alike, not
half so much upon the degrees of his WIT - as his RESISTANCE.
    My father was hugely pleased with this theory of John de la Casse,
archbishop of Benevento; and (had it not cramped him a little in his creed) I
believe would have given ten of the best acres in the Shandy estate, to have
been the broacher of it. - How far my father actually believed in the devil,
will be seen, when I come to speak of my father's religious notions, in the
progress of this work: 'tis enough to say here, as he could not have the honour
of it, in the literal sense of the doctrine - he took up with the allegory of
it; - and would often say, especially when his pen was a little retrograde,
there was as much good meaning, truth, and knowledge, couched under the veil of
John de la Casse's parabolical representation, - as was to be found in any one
poetic fiction, or mystick record of antiquity. - Prejudice of education, he
would say, is the devil, - and the multitudes of them which we suck in with our
mother's milk - are the devil and all. -- We are haunted with them, brother
Toby, in all our lucubrations and researches; and was a man fool enough to
submit tamely to what they obtruded upon him, - what would his book be? Nothing,
- he would add, throwing his pen away with a vengeance, - nothing but a farrago
of the clack of nurses, and of the nonsense of the old women (of both sexes)
throughout the kingdom.
    This is the best account I am
