ail, if he be but in the mood; nor does it shame him to dangle
before the public gaze those poor shreds of sensibility he calls
his feelings. Though he seldom deceives the reader into sympathy,
none will turn from his choicest agony without a thrill of
disgust. The _Sentimental Journey_, despite its interludes of
tacit humour and excellent narrative, is the last extravagance of
irrelevant grief.... Genuine sentiment was as strange to Sterne
the writer as to Sterne the man; and he conjures up no tragic
figure that is not stuffed with sawdust and tricked out in the
rags of the green-room. Fortunately, there is scant opportunity
for idle tears in _Tristram Shandy_.... Yet no occasion is
lost.... Yorick's death is false alike to nature and art. The
vapid emotion is properly matched with commonness of expression,
and the bad taste is none the more readily excused by the
suggestion of self-defence. Even the humour of My Uncle Toby is
something: degraded by the oft-quoted platitude: 'Go, poor
devil,' says he, to an overgrown fly which had buzzed about his
nose; 'get thee gone. Why should I hurt thee? This world surely
is big enough to hold both thee and me.'"

But here Mr. Whibley's notorious hatred of sentiment leads him into
confusion. That the passage has been over-quoted is no fault of
Sterne's. Of My Uncle Toby, if of any man, it might have been
predicted that he would not hurt a fly. To me this trivial action of
his is more than merely sentimental. But, be this as it may, I am sure
it is honestly characteristic.

Still, on the whole Mr. Whibley has justice. Sterne _is_ a
sentimentalist. Sterne _is_ indecent by reason of his reticence--more
indecent than Rabelais, because he uses a hint where Rabelais would
have said what he meant, and prints a dash where Rabelais would have
plumped out with a coarse word and a laugh. Sterne _is_ a convicted
thief. On a famous occasion Charles Reade drew a line between plagiary
and justifiable borrowing. To draw material from a heterogeneous
work--to found, for instance, the play of _Coriolanus_ upon Plutarch's
_Life_--is justifiable: to take from a homogeneous work--to enrich
your drama from another man's drama--is plagiary. But even on this
interpretation of the law Sterne must be condemned; for in decking out
_Tristram_ with feathers from the history of Gargantua he was
pillaging a homogeneous w