PREFACE. "To friendship and to feeling dear, The jest of jollity and laughter." HUS did Charles Phillips portray the mental characteristics of the famous author of "Tristram Shandy," a man pronounced by Sir Walter Scott to be "one of the most original geniuses that England has produced;" and of whom Mr. Elwyn, author of an admirable essay upon Sterne in the Quarterly Review for March 1854, says, "No novelist has surpassed Sterne in the vividness of his descriptions, none have eclipsed him in the art of selecting and grouping the details of his finished scenes. And yet, next to Shakespeare, he is the author who leaves the most to the imagination of the reader." These phases of Sterne's genius are so characteristic that a single rapid perusal of "Tristram Shandy" will hardly suffice to unravel the clue to the hidden meanings with which the spirit of his narrative is occasionally imbued. He adopted this style of composition, no doubt, because his intimate knowledge of the human mind taught him it was calculated to arrest the attention and call forth the discriminating powers of the reader, whose pleasure is enhanced by a reperusal, bringing palpably to light that which before VOL. I. was screened from his mental vision. It was owing, probably, to this peculiarity in style that passages in his writings were often misunderstood and misinterpreted, to the detriment of his character: and this Sterne felt sorely, as is shown by his letter to Doctor Eustace, in America, thanking that great admirer of "Tristram Shandy" for a curious walking-stick which the doctor had sent to him: "Your walking-stick is in no one sense more Shandaic than in its having more handles than one: the parallel breaks only in this, that, in using the stick, every one will take the handle which suits his convenience. In 'Tristram Shandy' the handle is taken which suits the passions, their ignorance, or their sensibility." He bitterly continues-"There is so little true feeling in the herd of the world, that I wish I could have got an Act of Parliament, when the books first appeared, that none but wise men should look into them. It is too much to write books and find heads to understand them." After consoling himself with the fact of the people of genius being to a man on its side," Sterne says, somewhat spitefully," A few hypocrites and Tartuffes, whose approbation could do it nothing but dishonour, remain unconverted." He concludes by saying,—“I am very proud, sir, to have had a man like you on my side from the beginning: but it is not in the power of every one to taste humour, however he may wish it; it is the gift of God; and besides, a true feeler always brings half the entertainment along with him; his own ideas are only called forth by what he reads; and the vibrations within him entirely correspond with those excited: 'tis like reading himself, and not the book." Such, no doubt, was his object in leaving so much to the imagination of the reader. But was the adoption of that artistic style of writing simply the result of a studied plan; or did it take its rise in the instinctive tendency of Sterne's intellect? To the latter source is its adoption in all likelihood to be attributed; for his attention to minuteness of detail does not seem to arise so much from statistical tendencies, as from a conviction that the adoption of such a |