imagine, considering what the droll foible was; and Dr. Mead,
continues Sterne, great man as he was, had, after all, not fared worse
than "a man of twice his wisdom"--to wit Solomon, of whom the same
remark had been made, that "they were both great men, and, like all
mortal men, had each their ruling passion."

The mixture of banter and sound reasoning in this reply is, no doubt,
very skilful. But, unfortunately, neither the reasoning nor the
banter happens to meet the case of this particular defiance of the
"De mortuis" maxim, and as a serious defence against a serious charge
(which was what the occasion required) Sterne's answer is altogether
futile. For the plea of "the good of the living," upon which, after
all, the whole defence, considered seriously, rests, was quite
inapplicable as an excuse for the incriminated passage. The only
living persons who could possibly be affected by it, for good or
evil, were those surviving friends of the dead man, to whom Sterne's
allusion to what he called Dr. Mead's "droll foible" was calculated to
cause the deepest pain and shame.

The other matter of offence to Sterne's Yorkshire readers was of a
much more elaborate kind. In the person of Dr. Slop, the grotesque
man-midwife, who was to have assisted, but missed assisting, at
Tristram's entry into the world, the good people of York were not slow
to recognize the physical peculiarities and professional antecedents
of Dr. Burton, the local accoucheur, whom Archdeacon Sterne had
arrested as a Jacobite. That the portrait was faithful to anything
but the external traits of the original, or was intended to reproduce
anything more than these, Sterne afterwards denied; and we have
certainly no ground for thinking that Burton had invited ridicule on
any other than the somewhat unworthy ground of the curious ugliness