free-spoken age; and there was that in the book, moreover, which a
provincial society may be counted on to abominate, with a keener
if less disinterested abhorrence than any sins against decency. It
contained, or was supposed to contain, a broadly ludicrous caricature
of one well-known local physician; and an allusion, brief, indeed, and
covert, but highly scandalous, to a certain "droll foible" attributed
to another personage of much wider celebrity in the scientific
world. The victim in the latter case was no longer living; and this
circumstance brought upon Sterne a remonstrance from a correspondent,
to which he replied in a letter so characteristic in many respects as
to be worth quoting. His correspondent was a Dr. * * * * * (asterisks
for which it is now impossible to substitute letters); and the burden
of what seem to have been several communications in speech and writing
on the subject was the maxim, "De mortuis nil nisi bonum." With such
seriousness and severity had his correspondent dwelt upon this adage,
that "at length," writes Sterne, "you have made me as serious and as
severe as yourself; but, that the humours you have stirred up might
not work too potently within me, I have waited four days to cool
myself before I could set pen to paper to answer you." And thus he
sets forth the results of his four days' deliberation:

"'De mortuis nil nisi bonum.' I declare I have considered the wisdom
and foundation of it over and over again as dispassionately and
charitably as a good Christian can, and, after all, I can find nothing
in it, or make more of it than a nonsensical lullaby of some nurse,
put into Latin by some pedant, to be chanted by some hypocrite to the
end of the world for the consolation of departing lechers. 'Tis, I
own, Latin, and I think that is all the weight it has, for, in plain
English, 'tis a loose and futile position below a dispute. 'You are
not to speak anything of the dead but what is good.' Why so? Who