e the
pretended story, such as Eugenius and Yorick, besides a few discourses
which drop the slightest pretension of being Shandean or Tristramic and
are plainly and simply the author's. In the _Journey_ there is more
unity; but it is, quite frankly, the unity of the temperament of that
author himself. The incidents--sentimental, whimsical, fie-fie--have no
other connection or tendency than the fact that they occur to the
"gentleman in the black silk smalls" and furnish him with figures as it
were for his performance. Yet you are _held_ in a way in which nothing
but the romance or the novel ever does hold you. The thing is a [Greek:
mythos hamythos]--story without story-end, without story-beginning,
without story-connection or middle: but a story for all that. A
dangerous precedent, perhaps; but a great accomplishment: and, even as
a precedent, the leader of a very remarkable company. In not a few
noteworthy later books--in a very much greater number of parts of later
books--as we take our hats off to the success we are saluting not a new
but an old friend, and that friend Sterne.

On the second great count--character--Sterne's record is still more
distinguished: and here there is no legerdemain about the matter. There
is a consensus of all sound opinion to the effect that my Uncle Toby is
an absolute triumph--even among those who think that, as in the case of
Colonel Newcome later, it would have been possible to achieve that
triumph without letting his simplicity run so near to something less
attractive. It is not the sentiment that is here to blame, because
Sterne has luckily not forgotten (as he has in the case of his dead
donkeys and his live Marias) that humour is the only thing that will
keep such sentiment from turning mawkish, if not even rancid; and that
the antiseptic effect will not be achieved by keeping your humour and
your sentiment in separate boxes. Trim is even better: he is indeed next
to Sancho--and perhaps Sam Weller--the greatest of all "followers" in
the novel: he supplies the only class-figure in which Sterne perhaps
beats Fielding himself. About Walter Shandy there is more room for
difference: and it is possible to contend that, great as he is, he is
not complete--that he is something of a "humour" in the old one-sided
and over-emphasised Jonsonian sense. Nothing that he does or says
misbecomes him: but a good deal that he does not do and say might be
added with advantage, in order to give us the