THE WORKS OF LAURENCE STERNE, IN FOUR VOLUMES, WITH A LIFE OF THE AUTHOR, WRITTEN BY HIMSELF. A NEW EDITION, WITH APPENDIX, CONTAINING SEVERAL UNPUBLISHED EDITED BY JAMES P. BROWNE, M.D. VOL.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. 1873. 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 |