his contemporaries. On the contrary, it is, perhaps, more probable
that he owed his first success with the public of his day to
those eccentricities which are for us a little too consciously
eccentric--those artifices which fail a little too conspicuously in
the _ars celandi artem_. But however these tricks may have pleased in
days when such tricks were new, they much more often weary than divert
us now; and I suspect that many a man whose delight in the Corporal
and his master, in Bridget and her mistress, is as fresh as ever,
declines to accompany their creator in those perpetual digressions
into nonsense or semi-nonsense the fashion of which Sterne borrowed
from Rabelais, without Rabelais's excuse for adopting it. To us of
this day the real charm and distinction of the book is due to the
marvellous combination of vigour and subtlety in its portrayal of
character, and in the purity and delicacy of its humour. Those last
two apparently paradoxical substantives are chosen advisedly, and
employed as the most convenient way of introducing that disagreeable
question which no commentator on Sterne can possibly shirk, but which
every admirer of Sterne must approach with reluctance. There is, of
course, a sense in which Sterne's humour--if, indeed, we may bestow
that name on the form of jocularity to which I refer--is the very
reverse of pure and delicate: a sense in which it is impure and
indelicate in the highest degree. On this it is necessary, however
briefly, to touch; and to the weighty and many-counted indictment
which may be framed against Sterne on this head there is, of course,
but one possible plea--the plea of guilty. Nay, the plea must go
further than a mere admission of the offence; it must include an
admission of the worst motive, the worst spirit as animating the
offender. It is not necessary to my purpose, nor doubtless congenial
to the taste of the reader, that I should enter upon any critical
analysis of this quality in the author's work, or compare him in this