eccentricity to justify the distaste of any reader upon whom mere
eccentricity had begun to pall. But if this were the sole explanation
of the book's declining popularity, we should have to admit that the
adverse judgment of the public had been delayed too long for justice,
and had passed over the worst to light upon the less heinous offences.
For the third volume, though its earlier pages contain some good
touches, drifts away into mere dull, uncleanly equivoque in its
concluding chapters; and the fifth and sixth volumes may, at any rate,
quite safely challenge favourable comparison with the fourth--the
poorest, I venture to think, of the whole series. There is nothing
in these two later volumes to compare, for instance, with that most
wearisome exercise in _double entendre_, Slawkenbergius's Tale;
nothing to match that painfully elaborate piece of low comedy, the
consultation of philosophers and its episode of Phutatorius's mishap
with the hot chestnut; no such persistent resort, in short, to those
mechanical methods of mirth-making upon which Sterne, throughout a
great part of the fourth volume, almost exclusively relies. The humour
of the fifth is, to a far larger extent, of the creative and dramatic
order; the ever-delightful collision of intellectual incongruities in
the persons of the two brothers Shandy gives animation to the volume
almost from beginning to end. The arrival of the news of Bobby
Shandy's death, and the contrast of its reception by the philosophic
father and the simple-minded uncle, form a scene of inimitable
absurdity, and the "Tristrapaedia," with its ingenious project for
opening up innumerable "tracks of inquiry" before the mind of the
pupil by sheer skill in the manipulation of the auxiliary verbs, is
in the author's happiest vein. The sixth volume, again, which contains
the irresistible dialogue between Mr. and Mrs. Shandy on the great
question of the "breeching of Tristram," and the much-admired, if not
wholly admirable, episode of Le Fevre's death, is fully entitled to