we listen to the
Porter in _Macbeth_, to the Grave-digger in _Hamlet_, to the Fool in
_Lear_--it is of these that we think when we think of Shakspeare in
any other but his purely poetic mood. Whenever, that is to say, we
think of him as anything but a poet, we think of him, not as a wit,
but as a humourist. So, too, it is not the dagger-thrusts of the
_Drapier's Letters_, but the broad ridicule of the _Voyage to Laputa_,
the savage irony of the _Voyage to the Houyhnhnms_, that we associate
with the name of Swift. And, conversely, it is the cold, epigrammatic
glitter of Congreve's dialogue, the fizz and crackle of the fireworks
which Sheridan serves out with undiscriminating hand to the most
insignificant of his characters--it is this which stamps the work of
these dramatists with characteristics far more marked than any which
belong to them in right of humorous portraiture of human foibles or
ingenious invention of comic incident.

The place of Sterne is unmistakably among writers of the former class.
It is by his humour--his humour of character, his dramatic as distinct
from his critical descriptive _personal_ humour--though, of course,
he possesses this also, as all humourists must--that he lives and
will live. In _Tristram Shandy_, as in the _Sermons_, there is a
sufficiency of wit, and considerably more than a sufficiency of
humorous reflection, innuendo, and persiflage; but it is the actors
in his almost plotless drama who have established their creator in his
niche in the Temple of Fame. We cannot, indeed, be sure that what has
given him his hold upon posterity is what gave him his popularity with
his contemporaries. On the contrary, it is, perhaps, more probable
that he owed his first success with the public of his day to
those eccentricities which are for us a little too consciously
eccentric--those artifices which fail a little too conspicuously in
the _ars celandi artem_. But however these tricks may have pleased in
days when such tricks were new, they much more often weary than divert
us now; and I suspect that many a man whose delight in the Corporal
and his master, in Bridget and her mistress, is as fresh as ever,
declines to accompany their creator in those perpetual digressions
into nonsense or semi-nonsense the fashion of which Sterne borrowed
from Rabelais, without Rabelais's excuse for adopting it. To us of
this day the real charm and distinction of the book is due to the
marvellous combination of vi