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 show 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.