—This is the reason, may it please your reverences, that some of the lowest and flattest compositions pass off very well—(as Yorick told my uncle Toby one night) by siege.—My uncle Toby looked brisk at the sound of the word siege, but could make neither head or tail of it.

I’m to preach at court next Sunday, said Homenas—run over my notes—so I humm’d over doctor Homenas’s notes—the modulation’s very well—’twill do, Homenas, if it holds on at this rate—so on I humm’d—and a tolerable tune I thought it was; and to this hour, may it please your reverences, had never found out how low, how flat, how spiritless and jejune it was, but that all of a sudden, up started an air in the middle of it, so fine, so rich, so heavenly,—it carried my soul up with it into the other world; now had I (as Montaigne complained in a parallel accident)—had I found the declivity easy, or the ascent accessible—certes I had been outwitted.— Your notes, Homenas, I should have said, are good notes;—but it was so perpendicular a precipice—so wholly cut off from the rest of the work, that by the first note I humm’d I found myself flying into the other world, and from thence discovered the vale from whence I came, so deep, so low, and dismal, that I shall never have the heart to descend into it again.

> A dwarf who brings a standard along with him to measure his own size— take my word, is a dwarf in more articles than one.—And so much for tearing out of chapters.