The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne: something else to afflict it; and as afflictions are sent down for our
good, and that as this had never done the Shandy Family any good at all, it
might lie waiting till apt times and circumstances should give it an
opportunity to discharge its office.--Observe, I determine nothing upon
this.--My way is ever to point out to the curious, different tracts of
investigation, to come at the first springs of the events I tell;--not with
a pedantic Fescue,--or in the decisive manner or Tacitus, who outwits
himself and his reader;--but with the officious humility of a heart devoted
to the assistance merely of the inquisitive;--to them I write,--and by them
I shall be read,--if any such reading as this could be supposed to hold out
so long,--to the very end of the world.
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