he would very likely have been telling him no more than the truth. The
_Sentimental Journey_ certainly acquired what _Tristram Shandy_ never
did--a European reputation. It has been translated into Italian,
German, Dutch, and even Polish; and into French again and again.
The French, indeed, have no doubt whatever of its being Sterne's
_chef-d'oeuvre_; and one has only to compare a French translation of
it with a rendering of _Tristram Shandy_ into the same language to
understand, and from our neighbours' point of view even to admit, the
justice of their preference. The charms of the _Journey_, its grace,
wit, and urbanity, are thoroughly congenial to that most graceful of
languages, and reproduce themselves readily enough therein; while,
on the other hand, the fantastic digressions, the elaborate
mystifications, the farcical interludes of the earlier work, appear
intolerably awkward and _bizzare_ in their French dress; and, what
is much more strange, even the point of the _double entendres_ is
sometimes unaccountably lost. Were it not that the genuine humour of
_Tristram Shandy_ in a great measure evaporates in translation, one
would be forced to admit that the work which is the more catholic
in its appeal to appreciation is the better of the two. But, having
regard to this disappearance of genuine and unquestionable excellences
in the process of translation, I see no good reason why those
Englishmen--the great majority, I imagine--who prefer _Tristram
Shandy_ to the _Sentimental Journey_ should feel any misgivings as to
the soundness of their taste. The humour which goes the deepest
down beneath the surface of things is the most likely to become
inextricably interwoven with those deeper fibres of associations which
lie at the roots of a language; and it may well happen, therefore,
though from the cosmopolitan point of view it is a melancholy
reflection, that the merit of a book, to those who use the language
in which it is written, bears a direct ratio to the persistence of its