her two great writers as regards the quality of their
respective transgressions. There can be no denying, I mean, that
Sterne is of all writers the most permeated and penetrated with
impurity of thought and suggestion; that in no other writer is its
latent presence more constantly felt, even if there be any in whom
it is more often openly obtruded. The unclean spirit pursues him
everywhere, disfiguring his scenes of humour, demoralizing his
passages of serious reflection, debasing even his sentimental
interludes. His coarseness is very often as great a blot on his art as
on his morality--a thing which can very rarely be said of either Swift
or Rabelais; and it is sometimes so distinctly fatal a blemish from
the purely literary point of view, that one is amazed at the critical
faculty which could have tolerated its presence.

But when all this has been said of Sterne's humour it still remains
true that, in another sense of the words "purity" and "delicacy,"
he possesses humour more pure and delicate than, perhaps, any other
writer in the world can show. For if that humour is the purest and
most delicate which is the freest from any admixture of farce,
and produces its effects with the lightest touch, and the least
obligations to ridiculous incident, or what may be called the
"physical grotesque," in any shape--then one can point to passages
from Sterne's pen which, for fulfilment of these conditions, it would
be difficult to match elsewhere. Strange as it may seem to say this
of the literary Gilray who drew the portrait of Dr. Slop, and of the
literary Grimaldi who tormented Phutatorius with the hot chestnut,
it is nevertheless the fact that scene after scene may be cited from
_Tristram Shandy_, and those the most delightful in the book, which
are not only free from even the momentary intrusion of either the
clown or the caricaturist, but even from the presence of "comic
properties" (as actors would call them) of any kind: scenes of which
the external setting is of the simplest possible character, while the
humour is of that deepest and most penetrative kind which springs
from the eternal incongruities of human nature, the ever-recurring
cross-purposes of human lives.

Carlyle classes Sterne with Cervantes among the great humourists of
the world; and from one, and that the most important, point of view
the praise is not extravagant. By no other writer besides Sterne,
perhaps, since the days of the Spanish humourist, ha