and too miscellaneous learning had brought within a step or two of
madness." Sterne's conception seems to me a little more subtle and
less commonplace than that. Mr. Shandy, I imagine, is designed to
personify not "crack-brained learning" so much as "theory run mad." He
is possessed by a sort of Demon of the Deductive, ever impelling him
to push his premises to new conclusions without ever allowing him time
to compare them with the facts. No doubt we are meant to regard him as
a learned man; but his son gives us to understand distinctly and very
early in the book that his crotchets were by no means those of a weak
receptive mind, overladen with more knowledge than it could digest,
but rather those of an over-active intelligence, far more deeply and
constantly concerned with its own processes than with the thoughts
of others. Tristram, indeed, dwells pointedly on the fact that his
father's dialectical skill was not the result of training, and that he
owed nothing to the logic of the schools. "He was certainly," says his
son, "irresistible both in his orations and disputations," but
that was because "he was born an orator _([Greek: Theodidaktos])_.
Persuasion hung upon his lips, and the elements of logic and rhetoric
were so blended in him, and withal he had so shrewd a guess at the
weaknesses and passions of his respondent, that Nature might have
stood up and said, 'This man is eloquent.' And yet," continues the
filial panegyric,

"He had never read Cicero nor Quintilian de Oratore, nor Aristotle,
nor Longinus among the ancients, nor Vossius, nor Skioppius, nor
Ramus, nor Farnaby among the moderns: and what is more astonishing
he had never in his whole life the least light or spark of subtilty
struck into his mind by one single lecture upon Crackenthorpe or
Burgersdicius or any Dutch commentator: he knew not so much as
in what the difference of an argument _ad ignorantiam_ and an argument