that, if some few of the author's chapters had been omitted, or at least retrenched, the book would have been the better for it - I say, the book - because, in this case, the printer, with all his cunning, could never have made two volumes of this business! This is one scrape among many that Mr. Tristram Shandy has led me into. - Did you never observe the mensal interstices at an ostentatious entertainment filled up with shavings of butter, half a dozen pickled mushrooms, and two or three cucumers? But for this contrivance, you must be sensible, you could not possibly have had two courses. - The artifice is the same, the principle different, with respect to a modern publication!

Dear Jack!
"You would have heard from me long before now had I not been employed in a comical sort of an affair,