than any one. If we compare him for a moment with
Richardson, who buttonholes the reader in a sermon; or with Smollett,
who snarls and bites like an angry beast; we feel at once that Sterne
could not breathe in the stuffiness of the one or in the tempest of the
other. Sympathy is the breath of his nostrils, and he cannot exist
except in a tender, merry relation with his readers. His own ideal,
surely, is that which he attributed to the fantastic and gentle Yorick,
who never could enter a village, but he caught the attention of old and
young. "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 had got
out of sight." Like Yorick, Sterne loved a jest in his heart.

There are, it seems to me, two distinct strains in the intellectual
development of Sterne, and I should like to dwell upon them for a
moment, because I think a lack of recognition of them has been apt to
darken critical counsel in the consideration of his writings. You will
remember that he was forty-six years of age before he took up the
business of literature seriously. Until that time he had been a country
parson in Yorkshire, carrying his body, that "cadaverous bale of goods,"
from Sutton to Stillington, and from Stillington to Skelton. He had
spent his life in riding, shooting, preaching, joking, and philandering
in company, and after a fashion, most truly reprehensible from a
clerical point of view, yet admirably fitted to prepare such an artist
for his destined labours as a painter of the oddities of average
Englishmen. But by the side of this indolent search after the enjoyment
of the hour, Sterne cultivated a formidable species of literature in
which he had so few competitors that, in after years, his indolence
prompted him to plagiarise freely from sources which, surely, no human
being would discover. He steeped himself in the cumbrous learning of
those writers of the Renaissance in whom congested Latin is found
tottering into colloquial French. He studied Rabelais perhaps more
deeply than any other Englishman of his time, and certainly Beroalde de
Verville, Bruscambille, and other absurdities of the sixteenth century
were familiar to him and to him alone in England.

Hence, when Sterne began to write, there were two streams flowing in his
brain, and these were, like everything else about him, inconsistent with
o