looked like over a velvet cushion, in the assurance that the sight
would be a strange and interesting one, at any rate. Five years
afterwards, however, the case was different. The public then had
already had one set of sermons, and had discovered that the humorous
Mr. Sterne was not a very different man in the pulpit from the dullest
and most decorous of his brethren. Such discoveries as these are
instructive to make, but not attractive to dwell upon; and Sterne was
fully alive to the probability that there would be no great demand for
a volume of sermons which should only illustrate for the second time
the fact that he could be as commonplace as his neighbour. He saw that
in future the Rev. Mr. Yorick must a little more resemble the author
of _Tristram Shandy,_ and it is not improbable that from 1760 onwards
he composed his parochial sermons with especial attention to this mode
of qualifying them for republication. There is, at any rate, no slight
critical difficulty in believing that the bulk of the sermons of 1766
can be assigned to the same literary period as the sermons of 1761.
The one set seems as manifestly to belong to the post-Shandian as
the other does to the pre-Shandian era; and in some, indeed, of
the apparently later productions the daring quaintness of style and
illustration is carried so far that, except for the fact that Sterne
had no time to spare for the composition of sermons not intended for
professional use, one would have been disposed to believe that they
neither were nor were meant to be delivered from the pulpit at all.[1]
Throughout all of them, however, Sterne's new-found literary power
displays itself in a vigour of expression and vivacity of illustration
which at least serve to make the sermons of 1766 considerably more
entertaining reading than those of 1761. In the first of the latter
series, for instance--the sermon on Shimei--a discourse in which there
are no very noticeable sallies of unclerical humour, the quality of
liveliness is very conspicuously present. The preacher's view of the