I must beg leave, before I finish this chapter, to enter a caveat in the breast of my fair reader; --and it is this, ----Not to take it absolutely for granted, from an unguarded word or two which I have dropp’d in it, ----“That I am a married man.” --I own, the tender appellation of my dear, dear _Jenny_, --with some other strokes of conjugal knowledge, interspersed here and there, might, naturally enough, have misled the most candid judge in the world into such a determination against me. --All I plead for, in this case, Madam, is strict justice, and that you do so much of it, to me as well as to yourself, --as not to prejudge, or receive such an impression of me, till you have better evidence, than, I am positive, at present can be produced against me. --Not that I can be so vain or unreasonable, Madam, as to desire you should therefore think, that my dear, dear _Jenny_ is my kept mistress; --no, --that would be flattering my character in the other extreme, and giving it an air of freedom, which, perhaps, it has no kind of right to. All I contend for, is the utter impossibility, for some volumes, that you, or the most penetrating spirit upon earth, should know how this matter really stands. --It is not impossible, but that my dear, dear _Jenny!_ tender as the appellation is, may be my child. ----Consider, --I was born in the year eighteen. --Nor is there anything unnatural or extravagant in the supposition, that my dear _Jenny_ may be my friend. --Friend! --My friend. --Surely, Madam, a friendship between the two sexes may subsist, and be supported without ------Fy! Mr. _Shandy_: --Without anything, Madam, but that tender and delicious sentiment, which ever mixes in friendship, where there is a difference of sex. Let me intreat you to study the pure and sentimental parts of the best _French_ Romances; --it will really, Madam, astonish you to see with what a variety of chaste expressions this delicious sentiment, which I have the honour to speak of, is dress’d out. CHAPTER XIX I would sooner undertake to explain the hardest problem in geometry, than pretend to account for it, that a gentleman of my father’s great good sense, ----knowing, as the reader must have observed him, and curious too in philosophy, --wise also in political reasoning, --and in polemical (as he will find) no way ignorant, --could be capable of entertaining a notion in his head, so out of the common track, --that I fear the reader, when I come to mention it to him, if he is the least of a cholerick temper, will immediately throw the book by; if mercurial, he will laugh most heartily at it; --and if he is of a grave and saturnine cast, he will, at first sight, absolutely condemn as fanciful and extravagant; and that was in respect to the choice and imposition of christian names, on which he thought a great deal more depended than what superficial minds were capable of conceiving.