The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman

The first thing which entered my father's head, after affairs were a little settled in the family, and Susannah had got possession of my mother's green sattin nightgown, -- was to sit down coolly, after the example of Xenophon, and write a Tristra-pedia, or system of education for me; collecting first for that purpose his own scattered thoughts, counsels, and notions; and binding them together, so as to form an institute for the government of my childhood and adolescence. I was my father's last stake -- he had lost my brother Bobby entirely, -- he had lost, by his own computation, full three-fourths of me -- that is, he had been unfortunate in his three first great casts for me -- my geniture, nose, and name, -- there was but this one left; and accordingly my father gave himself up to it with as much devotion as ever my uncle Toby had done to his doctrine of projectils.

-- The difference between them was, that my uncle Toby drew his whole knowledge of projectils from Nicholas Tartaglia -- My father spun his, every thread of it, out of his own brain, -- or reeled and cross-twisted what all other spinners and spinsters had spun before him, that 'twas pretty near the same torture to him.