nce. We
will begin with the outworks both towards the sea and the land, and
particularly with fort Louis, the most distant of them all, and demolish
it first,--and the rest, one by one, both on our right and left, as we
retreat towards the town;--then we'll demolish the mole,--next fill up
the harbour,--then retire into the citadel, and blow it up into the air:
and having done that, corporal, we'll embark for England.--We are there,
quoth the corporal, recollecting himself--Very true, said my uncle
Toby--looking at the church.

Chapter 3.LXXVIII.

A delusive, delicious consultation or two of this kind, betwixt my uncle
Toby and Trim, upon the demolition of Dunkirk,--for a moment rallied
back the ideas of those pleasures, which were slipping from under
him:--still--still all went on heavily--the magic left the mind the
weaker--Stillness, with Silence at her back, entered the solitary
parlour, and drew their gauzy mantle over my uncle Toby's head;--and
Listlessness, with her lax fibre and undirected eye, sat quietly
down beside him in his arm-chair.--No longer Amberg and Rhinberg, and
Limbourg, and Huy, and Bonn, in one year,--and the prospect of Landen,
and Trerebach, and Drusen, and Dendermond, the next,--hurried on the
blood:--No longer did saps, and mines, and blinds, and gabions, and
palisadoes, keep out this fair enemy of man's repose:--No more could my
uncle Toby, after passing the French lines, as he eat his egg at supper,
from thence break into the heart of France,--cross over the Oyes, and
with all Picardie open behind him, march up to the gates of Paris, and
fall asleep with nothing but ideas of glory:--No more was he to dream,
he had fixed the royal standard upon the tower of the Bastile, and awake
with it streaming in his head.

--Softer visions,--gentler vibrations stole sweetly in upon his
slumbers;--the trumpet of war fell out of his hands,--he took up the
lute, sweet instrument! of all others the most delicate! the most
difficult!--how wilt thou touch it, my dear uncle Toby?

Chapter 3.LXXIX.

Now, because I have once or twice said, in my inconsiderate way of
talking, That I was confident the following memoirs of my uncle Toby's
courtship of widow Wadman, whenever I got time to write them, would
turn out one of the most complete systems, both of the elementary and
practical part of love and love-making, that ever was addressed to
the world--are you to imagine from thence, that I shall set ou