When Dolly has indited her epistle to Robin, and has thruft her arm into the bottom of her pocket hanging by her right-fide;- -take that opportunity to recollect that the organs and faculties of perception, can, by nothing in this world, be fo aptly typified and explained as by that one thing which Dolly's hand is in search of.-Your organs are not fo dull that I fhould inform you,-'tis an inch, Sir, of red feal-wax. When this is melted and dropped upon the letter, if Dolly fumbles too long for her thimble, till the wax is over harden'd, it will not receive the mark of her thim ble from the ufual impulfe which was wont to imprint it. Very well: If Dolly's wax, for want of better, is bees-wax, or of a temper too foft,-tho' it may receive, it will not hold the impreffion, -- how how hard foever Dolly thrufts against it; and laft of all, fuppofing the wax good, and eke the thimble, but applied thereto in careless hafte, 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 brassjack. Now you muft understand that not one of these was the true cause of the confufion in my uncle Toby's difcourfe; and it is for that very reafon I enlarge upon them fo long, after the manner of great phyfiologifts,-to fhew the world what it did not arise from. What it did arise from, I have hinted above, and a fertile fource of obfcurity it is, and ever will be,-and that is the unfteady uses of words which have perplexed VOL. II. B plexed the clearest and most exalted understandings. It is ten to one (at Arthur's) whether you have ever read the literary histories of paft ages;-if you have,—what terrible battles, 'yclept logomachies, have they occafioned and perpetuated with fo much gall and ink-fhed,-that a good natured man cannot read the accounts of them without tears in his eyes. Gentle critick! when thou haft weigh'd all this, and confider'd within thyself how much of thy own knowledge, discourse, and converfation has been pestered and disordered, at one time or other, by this, and this only:What a pudder and racket in. CoUNCILS about ria and VπO5s; and in the SCHOOLS of the learned about power and about fpirit ;-about effences, effences, and about quinteffences; about fubftances, and about space. What confufion in greater THEATRES from words of little meaning, and as indeterininate a fenfe ;-when thou confiders this, thou wilt not wonder at my uncle Toby's perplexities,-thou wilt drop a tear of pity upon his fcarp and his counterfcarp; his glacis and his coveredway; his ravelin and his half-moon: 'Twas not by ideas,-- by heaven! his life was put in jeopardy by words. CHA P. III. 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 paffions and affections of his mind, it behoved him to take the niceft care to make himself so far master of his fubject, as to be able to talk upon it without emotion. - In a fortnight's clofe and painful application, which, by the bye, did my uncle Toby's wound, upon his groin, no good, he was enabled, by the help of fome marginal documents at the feet of the elephant, together with Gobefius's military architecture and pyroballogy, tranflated from the Flemish, to form his discourse with paffable perfpicuity; and before he was two full months gone,he was right eloquent upon it, and could make not only the attack of the advan cad |