Page:The life and opinions of Tristram Shandy (Volume 2).pdf/22

 plexed 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 logomach'ies, 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 weigh'd all this, and consider'd 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 about  and ; and in the  of the learned about power and about spirit;—about