the town" in the first instance was, that quality of the book which
was strangest at its first appearance. The mass of the public read,
and enjoyed, or thought they enjoyed, when they were really
only puzzled and perplexed. The wild digressions, the audacious
impertinences, the burlesque philosophizing, the broad jests, the
air of recondite learning, all combined to make the book a nine
days' wonder; and a majority of its readers would probably have been
prepared to pronounce _Tristram Shandy_ a work as original in scheme
and conception as it was eccentric. Some there were, no doubt, who
perceived the influence of Rabelais in the incessant digressions and
the burlesque of philosophy; others, it may be, found a reminder of
Burton in the parade of learning; and yet a few others, the scattered
students of French facetiae of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries,
may have read the broad jests with a feeling that they had "seen
something like it before." But no single reader, no single critic of
the time, appears to have combined the knowledge necessary for tracing
these three characteristics of the novel to their respective sources;
and none certainly had any suspicion of the extent to which the
books and authors from whom they were imitated had been laid under
contribution. No one suspected that Sterne, not content with borrowing
his trick of rambling from Rabelais, and his airs of erudition from
Burton, and his fooleries from Bruscambille, had coolly transferred
whole passages from the second of these writers, not only without
acknowledgment, but with the intention, obviously indicated by his
mode of procedure, of passing them off as his own. Nay, it was not
till full fifty years afterwards that these daring robberies were
detected, or, at any rate, revealed to the world; and, with an irony
which Sterne himself would have appreciated, it was reserved for a
sincere admirer of the humourist to play the part of detective. In
1812 Dr. John Ferriar published his _Illustrations of Sterne_, and