tesque romance was also shared by Cardinal Duprat,
who is said to have always carried a copy of it with him, as if it was his
breviary. The anecdote of the priest who obtained promotion from a
knowledge of his works is given in the "Curiosities of Literature," vol.
ii. p. 10.--ED.]

In my youth the world doted on Sterne! Martin Sherlock ranks him among
"the luminaries of the century." Forty years ago, young men in their most
facetious humours never failed to find the archetypes of society in the
Shandy family--every good-natured soul was uncle Toby, every humorist was
old Shandy, every child of Nature was Corporal Trim! It may now be doubted
whether Sterne's natural dispositions were the humorous or the pathetic:
the pathetic has survived!

There is nothing of a more ambiguous nature than strong humour, and Sterne
found it to be so; and latterly, in despair, he asserted that "the taste
for humour is the gift of heaven!" I have frequently observed how humour,
like the taste for olives, is even repugnant to some palates, and have
witnessed the epicure of humour lose it all by discovering how some have
utterly rejected his favourite relish! Even men of wit may not taste
humour! The celebrated Dr. Cheyne, who was not himself deficient in
originality of thinking with great learning and knowledge, once entrusted
to a friend a remarkable literary confession. Dr. Cheyne assured him that
"he could not read 'Don Quixote' with any pleasure, nor had any taste for
'Hudibras' or 'Gulliver;' and that what we call _wit_ and _humour_ in
these authors he considered as false ornaments, and never to be found in
those compositions of the ancients which we most admire and esteem."[A]
Cheyne seems to have held Aristophanes and Lucian monstrously cheap! The
ancients, indeed, appear not to have possessed that comic quality that
we understand as _humour_, nor can I discover a word which exactly
corresponds with our term _humour_ in any language, ancient or modern.
Cervantes excels in that sly satire which hides itself under the cloak of
gravity, but this is not the sort of humour which so beautifully plays
about the delicacy of Addison's page; and both are distinct from the
broader and stronger humour of Sterne.

[Footnote A: This friend, it now appears, was Dr. King, of Oxford, whose
anecdotes have recently been published. This curious fact is given in a
strange hodge-podge, entitled "The Dreamer;" a remarkable instance where a
writer of lear