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 οὐσία and ὑπόστασις; 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 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 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 emotion. In a fortnight’s close 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 some marginal documents at the feet of the elephant, together with _Gobesius’s_ military architecture and pyroballogy, translated from the _Flemish_, to form his discourse with passable perspicuity; and before he was two full months gone, --he was right eloquent upon it, and could make not only the attack of the advanced counterscarp with great order; ----but having, by that time, gone much deeper into the art, than what his first motive made necessary, my uncle _Toby_ was able to cross the _Maes_ and _Sambre_; make diversions as far as _Vauban’s_ line, the abbey of _Salsines_, etc., and give his visitors as distinct a history of each of their attacks, as of that of the gate of _St. Nicolas_, where he had the honour to receive his wound. But desire of knowledge, like the thirst of riches, increases ever with the acquisition of it. The more my uncle _Toby_ pored over his map, the more he took a liking to it! --by the same process and electrical assimilation, as I told you, through which I ween the souls of connoisseurs themselves, by long friction and incumbition, have the happiness, at length, to get all be-virtu’d--be-pictured, --be-butterflied, and befiddled.