I am far from controverting, continued my uncle Toby , what historians agree in, that in the year of our Lord 1380, under the reign of Wencelaus , son of Charles the Fourth⸺a certain priest, whose name was Schwartz , show’d the use of powder to the Venetians , in their wars against the Genoese ; but ’tis certain he was not the first; because if we are to believe Don Pedro , the bishop of Leon —How came priests and bishops, an’ please your honour, to trouble their heads so much about gunpowder? God knows, said my uncle Toby ⸺his providence brings good out of everything—and he avers, in his chronicle of King Alphonsus , who reduced Toledo , That in the year 1343, which was full thirty-seven years before that time, the secret of powder was well known, and employed with success, both by Moors and Christians, not only in their sea-combats, at that period, but in many of their most memorable sieges in Spain and Barbary —And all the world knows, that Friar Bacon had wrote expressly about it, and had generously given the world a receipt to make it by, above a hundred and fifty years before even Schwartz was born—And that the Chinese , added my uncle Toby , embarrass us, and all accounts of it, still more, by boasting of the invention some hundreds of years even before him⸺
—They are a pack of liars, I believe, cried Trim ⸺
⸺They are somehow or other deceived, said my uncle Toby , in this matter, as is plain to me from the present miserable state of military architecture amongst them; which consists of nothing more than a fossé with a brick wall without flanks—and for what they gave us as a bastion at each angle of it, ’tis so barbarously constructed, that it looks for all the world⸻⸻Like one of my seven castles, an’ please your honour, quoth Trim .