have been unconsciously storing themselves in his mind in many an
amused hour passed by Sterne in the library of Skelton Castle.

But before finally quitting this part of my subject it may be as well,
perhaps, to deal somewhat at length with a matter which will doubtless
have to be many times incidentally referred to in the course of this
study, but which I now hope to relieve myself from the necessity of
doing more than touch upon hereafter. I refer of course to Sterne's
perpetually recurring flirtations. This is a matter almost as
impossible to omit from any biography of Sterne as it would be to omit
it from any biography of Goethe. The English humourist did not, it
is true, engage in the pastime in the serious, not to say scientific,
spirit of the German philosopher-poet; it was not deliberately made by
the former as by the latter to contribute to his artistic development;
but it is nevertheless hardly open to doubt that Sterne's philandering
propensities did exercise an influence upon his literary character and
work in more ways than one. That his marriage was an ill-assorted and
unhappy union was hardly so much the cause of his inconstancy as its
effect. It may well be, of course, that the "dear L.," whose moral and
mental graces her lover had celebrated in such superfine, sentimental
fashion, was a commonplace person enough. That she was really a woman
of the exquisite stolidity of Mrs. Shandy, and that her exasperating
feats as an _assentatrix_ did, as has been suggested, supply the model
for the irresistibly ludicrous colloquies between the philosopher
and his wife, there is no sufficient warrant for believing. But it
is quite possible that the daily companion of one of the most
indefatigable jesters that ever lived may have been unable to see
a joke; that she regarded her husband's wilder drolleries as mere
horse-collar grimacing, and that the point of his subtler humour
escaped her altogether. But even if it were so, it is, to say the