Before going on with his story, Tristram looks back at the five volumes already completed. The critics (called "Jack Asses") "view'd and review'd" the earlier volumes, and "good God! what a braying did they all set up together!" Tristram feels that he and his reader ("dear Sir") were lucky to get away with their lives.
Closing his Tristra-paedia, Walter chats with Yorick about famous men who were child prodigies. There were "Grotius, Scioppius, Heinsius, Politian, Pascal, Joseph Scaliger, Ferdinand de Cordouè, and others — ." Yorick reminds him of the "great Lipsius, . . . who composed a work the day he was born." Uncle Toby, always literal-minded, remarks: "They should have wiped it up . . . and said no more about it."
Back in the nursery, Dr. Slop and Susannah are arguing: she is bashful about holding the candle as the doctor works on the child, and he accuses her of false modesty and of worse things. Holding the candle with her eyes averted, Susannah accidentally sets fire to Dr. Slop's wig. Recriminations and name-calling follow, and they douse each other with the "cataplasm" intended for Tristram's cure. Then, since that treatment had failed, they "retired into the kitchen to prepare a fomentation" for him.
Walter thinks that it is time to get Tristram a tutor: "You see 'tis high time, said my father, addressing himself equally to my uncle Toby and Yorick, to take this young creature out of these women's hands, and put him into those of a private governor." He outlines the many necessary good qualities of the ideal tutor, and Uncle Toby asks him to give the post to "poor Le Fever's son. Tristram regrets having lost the opportunity earlier of having Trim tell the story of Le Fever: " — fool that I was! nor can I recollect, (nor perhaps you) without turning back to the place, what it was that hindered me from letting the corporal tell it in his own words; — but the occasion is lost, — I must tell it now in my own."
