it. Very well. If Dolly's wax, for want of better, is bees-wax, or of a
temper too soft,--tho' it may receive,--it will not hold the impression,
how hard soever Dolly thrusts against it; and last of all, supposing the
wax good, and eke the thimble, but applied thereto in careless haste, as
her Mistress rings the bell;--in any one of these three cases the print
left by the thimble will be as unlike the prototype as a brass-jack.

Now you must understand that not one of these was the true cause of the
confusion in my uncle Toby's discourse; and it is for that very reason
I enlarge upon them so long, after the manner of great physiologists--to
shew the world, what it did not arise from.

What it did arise from, I have hinted above, and a fertile source of
obscurity it is,--and ever will be,--and that is the unsteady uses
of words, which have perplexed the clearest and most exalted
understandings.

It is ten to one (at Arthur's) whether you have ever read the literary
histories of past ages;--if you have, what terrible battles, 'yclept
logomachies, have they occasioned and perpetuated with so much gall
and ink-shed,--that a good-natured man cannot read the accounts of them
without tears in his eyes.

Gentle critick! when thou hast weighed all this, and considered within
thyself how much of thy own knowledge, discourse, and conversation has
been pestered and disordered, at one time or other, by this, and this
only:--What a pudder and racket in Councils about (Greek); and in the
Schools of the learned about power and about spirit;--about essences,
and about quintessences;--about substances, and about space.--What
confusion in greater Theatres from words of little meaning, and as
indeterminate a sense! when thou considerest this, thou wilt not wonder
at my uncle Toby's perplexities,--thou wilt drop a tear of pity upon
his scarp and his counterscarp;--his glacis and his covered way;--his
ravelin and his half-moon: 'Twas not by ideas,--by Heaven; his life was
put in jeopardy by words.

Chapter 1.XXVIII.

When my uncle Toby got his map of Namur to his mind, he began
immediately to apply himself, and with the utmost diligence, to the
study of it; for nothing being of more importance to him than his
recovery, and his recovery depending, as you have read, upon the
passions and affections of his mind, it behoved him to take the nicest
care to make himself so far master of his subject, as to be able to talk
upon it without