humbugging

Extract from a letter to Horace Walpole, written from Florence, in Horace Walpole's Correspondence with Sir Horace Mann, ed. W. S. Lewis, Warren Hunting Smith, and George L. Lam (1960), p. 446. […] You will laugh at me, I suppose, when I say I don't understand Tristram Shandy, because it was probably the intention of the author that nobody should. It seems to me humbugging, if I have a right notion of an art of talking or writing that has been invented since I left England.