2017م - 1444هـ
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy



NEVER poor Wight of a Dedicator had less hopes from his

Dedication, than I have from this of mine; for it is written

in a bye corner of the kingdom, and in a retired thatch’d

house, where I live in a constant endeavour to fence against the

infirmities of ill health, and other evils of life, by mirth; being

firmly persuaded that every time a man smiles,—but much more

so, when he laughs, that it adds something to this Fragment of

Life.

I humbly beg, Sir, that you will honour this book by taking

it——–(not under your Protection,——–it must protect itself,

but)—into the country with you; where, if I am ever told, it has

made you smile, or can conceive it has beguiled you of one

moment’s pain——–I shall think myself as happy as a minister

of state;——–perhaps much happier than any one (one only

excepted) that I have ever read or heard of.

I Wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them,

as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded

what they were about when they begot me; had they duly

consider’d how much depended upon what they were then

doing;—that not only the production of a rational Being was

concern’d in it, but that possibly the happy formation and

temperature of his body, perhaps his genius and the very cast

of his mind;—and, for aught they knew to the contrary