e humours of Mr. Shandy
and his brother is, perhaps, not very difficult to understand. Time
was simply doing its usual wholesome work in sifting the false from
the true--in ridding Sterne's audience of its contingent of sham
admirers. This is not to say, of course, that there might not have
been other and better grounds for a partial withdrawal of popular
favour. A writer who systematically employs Sterne's peculiar methods
must lay his account with undeserved loss as well as with unmerited
gain. The fifth and sixth volumes deal quite largely enough in mere
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
qu