pon the tower,
who, I suppose, are all centinels there,--are more, an' please your
Honour, than were necessary;--and, to go on at that rate, would harrass
a regiment all to pieces, which a commanding officer, who loves his
men, will never do, if he can help it, because two centinels, added
the Corporal, are as good as twenty.--I have been a commanding officer
myself in the Corps de Garde a hundred times, continued Trim, rising
an inch higher in his figure, as he spoke,--and all the time I had
the honour to serve his Majesty King William, in relieving the most
considerable posts, I never left more than two in my life.--Very right,
Trim, quoth my uncle Toby,--but you do not consider, Trim, that the
towers, in Solomon's days, were not such things as our bastions,
flanked and defended by other works;--this, Trim, was an invention since
Solomon's death; nor had they horn-works, or ravelins before the curtin,
in his time;--or such a fosse as we make with a cuvette in the middle
of it, and with covered ways and counterscarps pallisadoed along it, to
guard against a Coup de main:--So that the seven men upon the tower were
a party, I dare say, from the Corps de Garde, set there, not only to
look out, but to defend it.--They could be no more, an' please your
Honour, than a Corporal's Guard.--My father smiled inwardly, but not
outwardly--the subject being rather too serious, considering what had
happened, to make a jest of.--So putting his pipe into his mouth, which
he had just lighted,--he contented himself with ordering Trim to read
on. He read on as follows:

'To have the fear of God before our eyes, and, in our mutual dealings
with each other, to govern our actions by the eternal measures of
right and wrong:--The first of these will comprehend the duties of
religion;--the second, those of morality, which are so inseparably
connected together, that you cannot divide these two tables, even
in imagination, (tho' the attempt is often made in practice) without
breaking and mutually destroying them both.

I said the attempt is often made; and so it is;--there being nothing
more common than to see a man who has no sense at all of religion, and
indeed has so much honesty as to pretend to none, who would take it as
the bitterest affront, should you but hint at a suspicion of his moral
character,--or imagine he was not conscientiously just and scrupulous to
the uttermost mite.

'When there is some appearance that it is so,--tho' one