THE CLONMEL EDITION DELUXE of which this is No. 217 Copyright, 1904, by PREFACE IN booksellers, among N 1780, a group of London printers and booksellers, among whom were Becket 66 and Dodsley, Sterne's friends and original publishers, issued in ten volumes "All the Works of Mr. Sterne, either made public in his lifetime or since his death." Besides Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey, the edition included forty-five Sermons, one hundred and thirty-two Letters, a Fragment in the manner of Rabelais, the History of a Good Warm Watch-Coat and the short autobiography called Memoirs of the Life and Family of the late Rev. Mr. Laurence Sterne. The sev eral works were printed so runs the Adver tisement" from the best and most correct copies, with no other alterations than what became necessary from the correction of literal errors." The Memoirs and the Letters were briefly annotated, and there were illustrations by Edwards and Hogarth. 43718 For Sterne's novels, and also for the miscellanies, so far as they had then been published, the edition of 1780 furnishes the best single text. It was founded, as the Advertisement says, upon the best London editions of the various pieces and collections; and it has the advantage of fairly uniform orthography and punctuation. At the time of its issue, the literary forger was selling travels, sketches, and letters under the name of Sterne. Such, for example, were the audacious Posthumous Works of a Late Celebrated Genius and an imaginary correspondence between Yorick and Eliza. The publishers of the edition of 1780 showed remarkably good sense in excluding most of this spurious material. Their plan seems to have been to admit only what bore the clear marks of authenticity. To an extent they have thus been an aid to the present editor. Their work, however, is not without errors. It has been known for a long time that to several important letters were assigned wrong dates. For example, one of the most famous-the one in dogLatin, wherein Sterne describes himself as fatigatus et ægrotus de meâ uxore - belongs not to 1767 but to 1758. Strangely enough a letter which had appeared in the collection pub |