ished the first two volumes of "Tristram Shandy," a
singular and brilliant medley of wit, sentiment, indecency, and study
of character. Laurence Sterne was a profligate clergyman, a dishonest
author, and an unfaithful husband. He wrote "Tristram Shandy," and he
wrote a great many sermons. He descended to the indulgence of low
tastes, and rose to an elevated strain of thought, with equal facility.
He was a man who knew the better and followed the worse. His talents
made him a welcome guest at great men's tables, where he paid for his
dinner by amusing the company with a brilliant succession of witticisms
and indecent anecdotes, which, to his hearers, derived an additional
piquancy from the fact that they proceeded from the mouth of a divine.
But although the man was in many respects contemptible, although he
disgraced his priestly character by his profligacy, and his literary
character by a shameless plagiarism,[189] he possessed in a high degree
a quality which must give him a distinguished place in English fiction.
His borrowed plumage and his imitation of Rabelais' style apart, Sterne
had originality, a gift at all times rare, and always, perhaps,
becoming rarer. As a humorist, he is to be classed with Fielding and
Smollett, but as a novelist, his position in the history of fiction is
separate and unique.

"Tristram Shandy" has all the elements of a novel except the plot. The
author has no story to tell. His aim is to amuse the reader by odd and
whimsical remarks on every subject and on every personage whose
peculiarities promise material for humor and satire. Sterne is
perpetually digressing, moralizing commenting on every trivial topic
which enters into his story, until the story itself is completely lost,
if, indeed, it can be said ever to have been begun. The absence of
arrangement is so marked that it is very difficult to turn to a passage
which in a previous perusal has struck the eye. The eccentricity and
whimsicality of the book contributed greatly to its immediate
popularity. But the same characteristics which seem brilliant when
novel, soon become dull when familiar, and although "Tristram Shandy"
will always afford single passages of lasting interest to the lover of
literature, the work as a whole is not a little tedious when read
continuously from cover to cover.

In the course of his literary medley, Sterne introduces his reader to a
group of characters amongst the most odd and original in fiction. Mr.