lery--the presentment of the Rev. Mr.
Yorick. Nothing can be more perfect in its way than the picture of the
"lively, witty, sensitive, and heedless parson," in chapter x. of the
first volume of _Tristram Shandy_. We seem to see the thin, melancholy
figure on the rawboned horse--the apparition which could "never
present itself in the village but it caught the attention of old and
young," so that "labour stood still as he passed, the bucket hung
suspended in the middle of the well, the spinning-wheel forgot its
round; even chuck-farthing and shuffle-cap themselves stood gaping
till he was out of sight." Throughout this chapter Sterne, though
describing himself, is projecting his personality to a distance, as it
were, and contemplating it dramatically; and the result is excellent.
When in the next chapter he becomes "lyrical," so to speak; when the
reflection upon his (largely imaginary) wrongs impels him to look
inward, the invariable consequence follows; and though Yorick's much
bepraised death-scene, with Eugenius at his bed-side, is redeemed
from entire failure by an admixture of the humorous with its attempted
pathos, we ask ourselves with some wonder what the unhappiness--or the
death itself, for that matter--is "all about." The wrongs which were
supposed to have broken Yorick's heart are most imperfectly specified
(a comic proof, by the way, of Sterne's entire absorption in himself,
to the confusion of his own personal knowledge with that of the
reader), and the first conditions of enlisting the reader's sympathies
are left unfulfilled.

But it is comparatively seldom that this foible of Sterne obtrudes
itself upon the strictly narrative and dramatic parts of his work;
and, next to the abiding charm and interest of his principal figure,
it is by the admirable life and colour of his scenes that he exercises
his strongest powers of fascination over a reader. Perpetual as
are Sterne's affectations, and tiresome as is his eternal
self-consciousness when he is speaking in his own person, yet when
once the dramatic instinct fairly lays hold of him there is no writer
who ever makes us more completely forget him in the presence of his
characters--none who can bring them and their surroundings, their
looks and words, before us with such convincing force of reality.
One wonders sometimes whether Sterne himself was aware of the high
dramatic excellence of many of what actors would call his "carpenter's
scenes"--the mere inte