l we forever make new books as
apothecaries make new mixtures, by pouring only out of one vessel into
another? Are we forever to be twisting and untwisting the same rope,
forever on the same track, forever at the same pace?" And this he
writes with the scissors actually opened in his hand for the almost
bodily abstraction of the passage beginning, "Man, the most excellent
and noble creature of the world!" Surely this denunciation of
plagiarism by a plagiarist on the point of setting to work could only
have been written by a man who looked upon plagiarism as a good joke.

Apart, however, from the moralities of the matter, it must in fairness
be admitted that in most cases Sterne is no servile copyist. He
appropriates other men's thoughts and phrases, and with them, of
course, the credit for the wit, the truth, the vigour, or the learning
which characterizes them; but he is seldom found, in _Tristram
Shandy_, at any rate, to have transferred them to his own pages out
of a mere indolent inclination to save himself the trouble of
composition. He takes them less as substitutes than as groundwork for
his own invention--as so much material for his own inventive powers
to work upon; and those powers do generally work upon them with
conspicuous skill of elaboration. The series of cuttings, for
instance, which he makes from Burton, on the occasion of Bobby
Shandy's death, are woven into the main tissue of the dialogue with
remarkable ingenuity and naturalness; and the bright strands of his
own unborrowed humour fly flashing across the fabric at every transit
of the shuttle. Or, to change the metaphor, we may say that in almost
every instance the jewels that so glitter in their stolen setting were
cut and set by Sterne himself. Let us allow that the most expert of
lapidaries is not justified in stealing his settings; but let us still
not forget that the _jewels_ are his, or permit our disapproval of his
laxity of principle to make us unjust to his consummate skill.

CHAPTER X.

STYLE AND GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS.--HUMOUR AND SENTIMENT.

To talk of "the style" of Sterne is almost to play one of those tricks
with language of which he himself was so fond. For there is hardly any
definition of the word which can make it possible to describe him as
having any style at all. It is not only that he manifestly recognized
no external canons whereto to conform the expression of his thoughts,
but he had, apparently, no inclination