hopes from his Dedication than I have from this of mine; for it is written in a bye-corner of the kingdom, and in a retir'd thatch'd house, where I live in a constant endeavour to fence against the infirmities of ill health, and other evils of life, by Mirth; being firmly persuaded, that every time a man smiles,—but much more so when he laughs,-it adds something to this Fragment of Life. I humbly beg, Sir, that you will honour this Book by taking it (not under your Protection, -it must protect itself, but)-into the country with you; where, if I am ever told it has made you smile, or can conceive it has beguiled you of one moment's pain, -I shall think myself as happy as a Minister of State; perhaps, much happier than any one (one only excepted) that I have read or heard of.

I am, great sir,

(and, what is more to your honour) I am, good sir,

Your Well-wisher, and most humble Fellow-subject.

THE AUTHOR.

-STERNE, LAURENCE, 1760, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gent., Dedication.

At present nothing is talked of, nothing admired, but what I cannot help calling a very insipid and tedious performance: it is a kind of novel, called "The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy;" the great humour of which consists in the whole narration always going backward. . It makes one smile two or three times at the beginning, but in recompense makes one yawn for two hours. The characters are tolerably kept up, but the humour is for ever attempted and missed. WALPOLE, HORACE, 1760, To Sir David Dalrymple, April 4; Letters, ed. Cunningham, vol. III, p. 298.

There is much good fun in it, and humour sometimes hit and sometimes missed.-GRAY, THOMAS, 1760, Letter to Thomas Wharton, July; Works, ed. Gosse, vol. III, p. 53.

However, I pride myself in having warmly recommended "Tristram Shandy" to all the best company in town, except that of Arthur's. I was charged in a very grave assembly, as Doctor Newton can tell him, for a particular patronizer of the work, and how I acquitted myself of the imputation, the said Doctor can tell him.

If Mr. Sterne will take me with all my infirmities I shall be glad of the honour of being well known to him; and he has the additional recommendation of being your friend.-WARBURTON, WILLIAM, 1760, Letter to David Garrick, March 7.

"Bless me,"cries the man of industry, "now you speak of an epic poem, you shall see an excellent farce. Here it is; dip into it where you will, it will be found replete with true modern humour. Strokes, Sir: it is filled with strokes of wit and satire in every line." Do you call all these dashes of the pen strokes, repiled I, for I must confess I can see no other? "And pray, Sir," returned he, "what do you call them? Do you see anything good now-a-days that is not filled with strokes and dashes?--Sir, a well-placed dash makes half the wit of our writers of modern humour. I bought the last season a piece that had no other merit upon earth than nine hundred and ninety-five breaks, seventy-two ha ha's, three good things and a garter. And yet it played off, and bounced, and cracked, and made more sport than a fire-work." There

are several very dull fellows, who, by a few mechanical helps, sometimes learn to become extremely brilliant and pleasing; with a little dexterity in the management of the eyebrows, fingers, and nose. By imitating a cat, a sow and pigs; by a loud laugh, and a slap on the shoulder, the most ignorant are furnished out for conversation. But the writer finds it impossible to throw his winks, his shrugs, or his attitudes, upon paper; he may borrow some assistance, indeed, by printing his face at the title page; but without wit to pass for a man of ingenuity, no other mechanical help but downright obscenity will suffice. By speaking to some peculiar sensations, we are always sure of exciting laughter, for the jest does not lie in the writer, but in the subject.-GOLDSMITH, OLIVER, 1762, A Citizen of the World.

Nothing odd will do long. "Tristram Shandy" did not last.-JOHNSON, SAMUEL, 1776, Life by Boswell, ed. Hill, vol. II, p. 521.

From beginning to end a piece of buffoonery after the style of Scarron.-VOLTAIRE, FRANÇOIS MARIE AROUET, 1777, Journal de politique et de littérature, Apr. 25.

Voltaire has compared the merits of Rabelais and Sterne as satirists of the abuse of learning, and I think has done neither of them justice. This great distinction is obvious: that Rabelais derided absurdities then existing in full force, and intermingled much sterling sense with the grossest parts of his book; Sterne, on the contrary, laughs at many exploded opinions and forsaken fooleries, and contrives to degrade some of his most solemn passages by a vicious levity. Rabelais flew a higher pitch, too, than Sterne. Great part of the voyage to the Pays de Lanternois, which so severely stigmatizes the vices of the Romish clergy of that age, was performed in more hazard of fire than water.-FERRIAR, JOHN, 1798-1812, lustrations of Sterne, with other Essays.

If we consider Sterne's reputation as chiefly founded on "Tristram Shandy," he must be regarded as liable to two severe charges: those, namely, of indecency, and of affectation. Upon the first accusation Sterne was himself peculiarly sore, and used to justify the licentiousness of his humour by representing it as a mere breach of decorum, which had no perilous consequence to morals. The following

Sir Charles

that ever existed. Grandison is not to be compared to him. Mr. Shandy, an admirably-drawn character also, is cleverer than Uncle Toby; but "My Uncle" is the wisest man. —LESLIE, CHARLES ROBERT, 1840, Autobiographical Recollections, p. 318.

If I were requested to name the book of all others which combined wit and humour under their highest appearance of levity with the profoundest wisdom, it would be "Tristram Shandy."-HUNT, LEIGH, 1846, Wit and Hnmour.

One of the most fascinating, witty, and dangerous works that has ever been penned in the English language. It is fascinating from its nature and truth. Its wit is like no other man's wit. It is dangerous because, interwoven with an apparent simplicity of narrative is an insidious indelicacy, which it almost requires a commentary to point out; an indelicacy which never sullied one page of Goldsmith, and from which our great Scott would have shrunk in disgust. Take away this taint, if it be possible to do so, and "Tristram Shandy" is full of exquisite home scenes, and of touching incidents, and noble sentiments.-THOMSON, KATHERINE (GRACE WHARTON), 1862, The Literature of Society, vol. II, p. 290.

a

Even Jean Paul, the greatest of German humorous authors, and never surpassed in comic conception or in the pathetic quality of humor, is not to be named with his master, Sterne, as creative humorist. What are Siebenkäs, Fixlein, Schmelzle, and Fibel, (a single lay-figure to be draped at will with whimsical sentiment and reflection, and put in various attitudes), compared with the living reality of Walter Shandy and his brother Toby, characters which we do not see merely as puppets in the author's mind, but poetically projected from it in an independent being of their own?LOWELL, JAMES RUSSELL, 1866-90, Lessing; Prose Works, Riverside ed., vol. II, p. 170.

Figure to yourself a man who goes on a journey, wearing on his eyes a pair of marvellously magnifying spectacles. A hair on his hand, a speck on a tablecloth, a fold of a moving garment, will interest him at this rate he will not go very far; he will go six steps in a day, and will not

quit his room. So Sterne writes four volumes to record the birth of his hero. He perceives the infinitely little, and describes the imperceptible. A man parts his hair on one side this, according to Sterne, depends on his whole character, which is a piece with that of his father, his mother, his uncle, and his whole ancestry; it depends on the structure of his brain, which depends on the circumstance of his conception and his birth, and these on the fancies of his parents, the humour of the moment, the talk of the preceding hour, the contrarieties of the last curate, a cut thumb, twenty knots made on a bag; I know not how many things besides.

His book is like a great storehouse of articles of virtu, where the curiosities of all ages, kinds, and countries lie jumbled in a heap; texts of excommunication, medical consultations, passages of unknown or imaginary authors, scraps of scholastic erudition, strings of absurd histories, dissertations, addresses to the reader. His pen leads him; he has neither sequence nor plan; nay, when he lights upon anything orderly, he purposely contorts it; with a kick he sends the pile of folios next to him over the history he has commenced, and dances on the top of them.-TAINE, H. A., 1871, History of English Literature, tr. Van Laun, vol. II, bk. iii, ch. vi, pp. 179, 180.

It is to be hoped that Sterne made a judicious choice of the passages his daughter was to copy, and which his wife was to hear read. His admonition, when he sends to his Lydia, when far away from him, the Spectator and Metastassio, would tend to show that he would not expose her to the influence of the indelicate parts: and the virtuous and sedate character of his wife would not be likely to relish the innuendos and double entendres of his too prurient imagination; for she was not one of those fashionable ladies, who, he says, would read Tristram in the closet, though not in the drawingroom. Indeed his allusion to uncle Toby's character, only, would imply that he had kept out of their view those offensive passages, which outraged decency, even at a time when manners were not so remarkable for moral refinement as happily they are at the present day.-BROWNE, JAMES P., 1873, ed., The Works of Laurence Sterne, Preface, vol. I, p. viii.

In going over the list, a short list in any case, of the immortal characters in fiction, there is hardly any one in our literature who would be entitled to take precedence of him. To find a distinctly superior type, we must go back to Cervantes, whom Sterne idolised and professed to take for his model. But to speak of a character as in some sort comparable to Don Quixote, though without any thoughts of placing him on the same level, is to admire that he is a triumph of art. Indeed, if we take the other creator of types, of whom it is only permitted to speak with bated breath, we must agree that it would be difficult to find a figure even in the Shakespearean gallery more admirable in its way. Of course, the creation of a Hamlet, an Iago, or a Falstaff implies an intellectual intensity and reach of imaginative sympathy altogether different from anything which his warmest admirers would attribute to Sterne. I only say that there is no single character in Shakespeare whom we see more vividly and love more heartily than Mr. Shandy's uncle.-STEPHEN, LESLIE, 1880, Hours in a Library, The Cornhill Magazine, vol. 42, p. 88.

As to its morality, I know good people who love the book; but to me, when you sum it all up, its teaching is that a man may spend his life in low, brutish, inane pursuits and may have good many little private sins on his conscience, but will nevertheless be perfectly sure of heaven if he can have retained the ability to weep a maudlin tear over a tale of distress; or, in short, that a somwehat irritable state of the lachrymal glands will be cheerfully accepted by the Deity as a substitute for saving grace or a life of self-sacrifice.LANIER, SIDNEY, 1881, The English Novel, p. 187.

A singular and brilliant medley of wit, sentiment, indecency, and study of character. . . His borrowed plumage and his imitation of Rabelais' style apart, Sterne had originality, a gift at all times rare, and always, perhaps, becoming rarer. As a humorist, he is to be classed with Fielding and Smollett, but as a novelist, his position in the history of fiction is separate and unique. The combina

tion of sentiment, pathos, and humour which Sterne sometimes reached with remarkable success, is particularly apparent

in every incident which concerns the celebrated Captain Toby Shandy, for the creation of which character this author may most easily be forgiven his indecencies and his literary thefts.-TUCKERMAN, BAYARD, 1882, A History of English Prose Fiction, pp. 231, 233.

Sterne carried the humorous novel to its furthest extreme. The humorous novel, in its narrowest sense, stood chiefly under the influence of Sterne's "Tristram Shandy." Sterne's want of form, his endless digressions, his witty, learned fascinating reflections crammed full of allusions and quotations, his mixture of the pathetic and the comic, -all this attracted writers like Hippel and Jean Paul, and incited them to imitation. SCHERER, WILHELM, 1883-86, A History of German Literature, tr. Conybeare, vol. II, pp. 288, 289.

Genuine sentiment was as strange to Sterne the writer as to Sterne the man; and he conjures up no tragic figure that is not stuffed with sawdust and tricked out in the rags of the greenroom. Fortunately, there is scant opportunity for idle tears in "Tristram Shandy."-WHIBLEY, CHARLES, 1894, Introduction to the Life and Adventures of Tristram Shandy.

I should have said, with hesitation, that it was one of the most popular books in the language. Go where you will amongst men-old and young, undergraduates at the Universities, readers in our great cities, old fellows in the country, judges, doctors, barristers-if they have any tincture of literature about them, they all know their "Shandy" at least as well as their "Pickwick." What more can be expected? "True Shandeism," its author declares, "think what you will against it, opens the heart and lungs." I will be bound to say Sterne made more people laugh in 1891 than in any previous year; and, what is more, he will go on doing it— "that is, if it please God,' said my Uncle Toby." BIRRELL, AUGUSTINE, 1894, Essays about Men, Women and Books, p. 38.

Whose Toby Shandy is one of the finest compliments ever paid to human nature. -LOCKER-LAMPSON, FREDERICK, 1896, My Confidences, p. 336.

The story of "Tristram Shandy" wanders like a man in a labyrinth, and the

humor is as labyrinthine as the story. It is carefully invented, and whimsically subtle; and the sentiment is sometimes true, but mostly affected. But a certain unity is given to the book by the admirable consistency of the characters.-BROOKE, STOPFORD A., 1896, English Literature, p. 202.

"Tristram Shandy," like Charles the Second, has been an unconscionably long time in dying. It would be an exaggeration to say that Mr. Disraeli was the last man who read "Rasselas, "or that no man living has read "Irene." But references to these classical compositions would in the best educated company fall exceedingly flat, whereas Uncle Toby's sayings are as well known as Falstaff's, and the "sub-acid humour" of Mr. Shandy plays, like the wit of Horace, round the cockles of the heart. It is now a pure curiosity of literature that men have lived who imputed dulness to "Tristram Shandy.

Those who do not feel the charm of the book cannot be taught it, and those who feel it resent being told what it is. It is impalpable and indefinable, like one of those combinations of colour at sunset for which there are no words in the language and no ideas in the mind. There have been few greater masters of conversation than Sterne, and in what may be called the art of interruption no one has ever approached him. He is one of the makers of colloquial English, and thousands who never heard of Shandy Hall repeat the phrases of the Shandy brothers. Of all English humourists except Shakespeare, Sterne is still the greatest force, and that the influence of Parson Yorick is not extinct may be seen in almost every page of the "Dolly Dialogues."-PAUL, HERBERT, 1896, Sterne, The Nineteenth Century, vol. 40, pp. 995, 1009.

It is indeed a strange book, certainly not everybody's book. To start with, it is often tedious, sometimes silly, not seldom downright nasty. It does not begin at the end, because it has no end to begin at; but it does begin very nearly as far on as it ever gets, and goes back great distances in between. If anything at all happens and it is possible to disentangle two or three events-it happens quite out of its right order; if the vehicle moves at all, it is with the cart before the horse; it is purposely so mixed up that a page

of uninterrupted narrative is hardly to be found in it. It is a mass of tricks and affectations, some amusing, and some very wearisome. To say that it has no plot is nothing; it takes the utmost pains to persuade you that it has not a plan. It is sometimes obviously and laboriously imitative. Its pathos, sometimes superb, is sometimes horribly maudlin. We must not ask for good taste, and can by no means rely on decency; there is even a preserve 'spirit of impropriety which seizes occasions and topics apparently quite innocent. This is not a complete catalogue of its sins; these are only a few points which occur to an old friend, a few characteristics which it is well to mention, lest those who do not know the book should suffer too severe a shock on making its acquaintance. For the difficulty with it is in the beginning; to read it the first time is almost hard; every reading after that goes more easily. Nevertheless, although there are, I believe, fanatic admirers who read all of it every time, I am not of those. I think I have earned the right to skip, and I exercise it freely, without qualms of conscience. What's the use of being on intimate terms with a book if you cannot have that liberty?-HAWKINS, ANTHONY HOPE, 1897, My Favorite Novelist and His Best Book, Munsey's Magazine, vol. 18, p. 352.

THE SERMONS OF MR. YORICK

1760-69

Have you read his sermons (with his own comic figure at the head of them)? they are in the style, I think, most proper for the pulpit, and shew a very strong imagination and a sensible heart, but you see him often tottering on the verge of laughter, and ready to throw his periwig in the face of his audience.-GRAY, THOMAS, 1760, Letter to Thomas Wharton, July; Works, ed. Gosse, vol. III, p. 53.

An excellent writer. His sermons will bear a comparison with any in the English language. SCOT, DAVID, 1825, Dis

indeed. And there is in them a triumphant answer to those charges of plagiarism which have been so often swung from hoarse and jangling critical bells.FITZGERALD, PERCY, 1864, The Life of Laurence Sterne, vol. I, p. 210. Sterne was a pagan. He went into the Church; but Mr. Thackeray-no bad judge said most justly that his sermons "have not a single Christian sentiment." They are well expressed, vigorous moral essays; but they are no more. . There is not much of heaven and hell in Sterne's sermons; and what there is, seems a rhetorical emphasis which is not essential to the argument, and which might perhaps as well be left out.-BAGEHOT, WALTER, 1864, Sterne and Thackeray, Works, ed. Morgan, vol. II, p. 159.

The critics who find wit, eccentricity, flashes of Shandyism, and what not else of the same sort in these discourses, must be able or so it seems to me to discover these phenomena anywhere. To the best of my own judgment the Sermons are with but few and partial exceptions-of the most commonplace character; platitudinous with the platitudes of a thousand pulpits, and insipid with the crambe repe

tita of a hundred thousand homilies.— of Letters), p. 55. TRAILL, H. D., 1882, Sterne (English Men

Sterne's sermons are as a rule professional efforts on common-sense lines, and mainly interest the literary critic by the perspicuity, orderliness, and restrained eloquence of which they prove his literary style to be capable.-LEE, SIDNEY, 1898, Dictionary of National Biography, vol. LIV, p. 219.

SENTIMENTAL JOURNEY

1768

Sterne has published two little volumes, called "Sentimental Travels." They are very pleasing, though too much dilated, and infinitely preferable to his tiresome "Tristram Shandy," of which I never could get through three volumes. In these there is great good-nature and strokes of delicacy.-WALPOLE, HORACE, 1768, To George Montagu, March 12; Letters, ed. Cunningham, vol. v, p. 91

I am now going to charm myself for the third time with poor Sterne's "Sentimental Journey."-BURNEY, FRANCES, 1769, Early Diary, ed. Ellis, vol. 1, p. 45.