Page:The life and opinions of Tristram Shandy (Volume 6).pdf/109

 tion with the accounts of them, that he had infallibly shot away all his estate.

therefore was wanting, as a succedaneum, especially in one or two of the more violent paroxysms of the siege, to keep up something like a continual firing in the imagination,—and this something, the corporal, whose principal strength lay in invention, supplied by an entire new system of battering of his own,—without which, this had been objected to by military critics to the end of the world, as one of the great desiderata of my uncle Toby's apparatus.

This will not be explained the worse, for setting off, as I generally do, at a little distance from the subject.