. 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.

Chapter 1.XXXIV.

Imagine to yourself a little squat, uncourtly figure of a Doctor Sl