Page:The life and opinions of Tristram Shandy (Volume 4).pdf/174

 —Accident, I call it, in compliance to a received mode of speaking,—but in no opposition to the opinion either of Acrites or Mythogeras in this matter; I know they were both prepossessed and fully persuaded of it—and are so to this hour, That there was nothing of accident in the whole event—but that the chesnut's taking that particular course, and in a manner of its accord—and then falling with all its heat directly into that one particular place, and no other—was a real judgment upon Phutatorius, for that filthy and obscene treatise de Concubinis retinendis, which Phutatorius had published about twenty years ago—and was that identical week going to give the world a second edition of.

It is not my business to dip my pen in this controversy—much undoubtedly