A NEW EDITION, WITH APPENDIX, CONTAINING SEVERAL UNPUBLISHED EDITED BY JAMES P. BROWNE, M.D. VOL. I. LONDON: BICKERS AND SON, 1, LEICESTER SQUARE, W.C. PREFACE. "To friendship and to feeling dear, The jest of jollity and laughter." Thus, in his poem, descriptive of the most distinguished worthies of Ireland, has the late Charles Phillips pourtrayed what struck him as the characteristic features of the mind 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, the 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.' So strikingly characteristic are these phases of Sterne's genius, that a single rapid perusal of Tristram Shandy will hardly enable any one to unravel the clue to the hidden meanings with which the spirit of his narrative is sometimes imbued. He, no doubt, adopted this style of composition, because his intimate knowledge of the human mind taught him that it was calculated to arrest VOL. I. b the attention, and call forth the discriminating powers of the reader, whose pleasure is enhanced by a reperusal, that brings palpably to light that which before was screened from his mental vision; and it tends, also, to engender in the reader a pleasurable sense of his own intellectual perspicacity. But yet it was owing, probably, to this peculiarity of style, that passages in his writings were often misunderstood and misinterpreted, to the detriment of his character: and that Sterne felt this sorely, is shown in his letter to Doctor Eustace, in America, in which he thanks that great admirer of Tristram Shandy for a curious walking-stick which the doctor had sent to him. 'Your walking-stick is in no เ 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 sensi'bility.' Here he bitterly exclaims,—‘There is so little เ 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.' And, after consoling himself with the fact, of the people of genius being to a man on its 'side,' he says, somewhat spitefully,A few hypo'crites 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 begin'ning: 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 enter 'tainment along with him; his own ideas are only called 'forth by what he reads; and the vibrations within him เ 6 |