It is about an hour and a half's tolerable good reading since my uncle Toby rung the bell, when Obadiah was ordered to saddle a horse, and go for Dr.
Slop, the man-midwife;--so that no one can say, with reason, that I have not allowed Obadiah time enough, poetically speaking, and considering the emergency too, both to go and come;--though, morally and truly speaking, the man perhaps has scarce had time to get on his boots.
If the hypercritick will go upon this; and is resolved after all to take a pendulum, and measure the true distance betwixt the ringing of the bell, and the rap at the door;--and, after finding it to be no more than two minutes, thirteen seconds, and three-fifths,--should take upon him to insult over me for such a breach in the unity, or rather probability of time;--I would remind him, that the idea of duration, and of its simple modes, is got merely from the train and succession of our ideas--and is the true scholastic pendulum,--and by which, as a scholar, I will be tried in this matter,--abjuring and detesting the jurisdiction of all other pendulums whatever.
I would therefore desire him to consider that it is but poor eight miles from Shandy-Hall to Dr. Slop, the man-midwife's house:--and that whilst Obadiah has been going those said miles and back, I have brought my uncle Toby from Namur, quite across all Flanders, into England:--That I have had him ill upon my hands near four years;--and have since travelled him and Corporal Trim in a chariot-and-four, a journey of near two hundred miles down into Yorkshire.--all which put together, must have prepared the reader's imagination for the entrance of Dr. Slop upon the stage,--as much, at least (I hope) as a dance, a song, or a concerto between the acts.
If my hypercritick is intractable, alledging, that two minutes and thirteen seconds are no more than two minutes and thirteen seconds,--when I have said all I can about them; and that this plea, though it might save me dramatically, will damn me biographically, rendering my book from this very moment, a professed Romance, which, before, was a book apocryphal:--If I am thus pressed--I then put an end to the whole objection and controversy about it all at once,--by acquainting him, that Obadiah had not got above threescore yards from the stable-yard, before he met with Dr. Slop;--and indeed he gave a dirty proof that he had met with him, and was within an ace of giving a tragical one too.
Imagine to yourself;--but this had better begin a new chapter.
