Of all the tracts my father was at the pains to procure and study in support of his hypothesis, there was not any one wherein he felt a more cruel disappointment at first, than in the celebrated dialogue between _Pamphagus_ and _Cocles_, written by the chaste pen of the great and venerable _Erasmus_, upon the various uses and seasonable applications of long noses. ------Now don’t let Satan, my dear girl, in this chapter, take advantage of any one spot of rising ground to get astride of your imagination, if you can any ways help it; or if he is so nimble as to slip on--let me beg of you, like an unback’d filly, _to frisk it, to squirt it, to jump it, to rear it, to bound it--and to kick it, with long kicks and short kicks_, till, like _Tickletoby’s_ mare, you break a strap or a crupper and throw his worship into the dirt. --You need not kill him.-- --And pray who was _Tickletoby’s_ mare? --’tis just as discreditable and unscholarlike a question, Sir, as to have asked what year (_ab. urb. con._) the second Punic war broke out. --Who was _Tickletoby’s_ mare? ----Read, read, read, read, my unlearned reader! read--or by the knowledge of the great saint _Paraleipomenon_ --I tell you before-hand, you had better throw down the book at once; for without _much reading_, by which your reverence knows I mean _much knowledge_, you will no more be able to penetrate the moral of the next marbled page (motly emblem of my work!) than the world with all its sagacity has been able to unravel the many opinions, transactions, and truths which still lie mystically hid under the dark veil of the black one. [Illustration] CHAPTER XXXVII “_Nihil me pœnitet hujus nasi_,” quoth _Pamphagus_; ----that is-- “My nose has been the making of me.” ----------“_Nec est cur pœniteat_,” replies _Cocles_; that is, “How the duce should such a nose fail?” The doctrine, you see, was laid down by _Erasmus_, as my father wished it, with the utmost plainness; but my father’s disappointment was, in finding nothing more from so able a pen, but the bare fact itself; without any of that speculative subtilty or ambidexterity of argumentation upon it, which Heaven had bestow’d upon man on purpose to investigate truth, and fight for her on all sides. ----My father pish’d and pugh’d at first most terribly------’tis worth something to have a good name. As the dialogue was of _Erasmus_, my father soon came to himself, and read it over and over again with great application, studying every word and every syllable of it thro’ and thro’ in its most strict and literal interpretation--he could still make nothing of it, that way. Mayhap there is more meant, than is said in it, quoth my father. ----Learned men, brother _Toby_, don’t write dialogues upon long noses for nothing. ------I’ll study the mystick and the allegorick sense----here is some room to turn a man’s self in, brother.