I do not suppose for a moment that Thackeray consciously defamed these
men. The weaknesses, the pettinesses of humanity interested him, and
he treated them with gusto, even as he spares us nothing of that
horrible scene between Mrs. Mackenzie and Colonel Newcome. And of
course poor Sterne was the easiest victim. The fellow was so full of
his confounded sentiments. You ring a choice few of these on the
counter and prove them base metal. You assume that the rest of the bag
is of equal value. You "go one better" than Sir Peter Teazle and damn
all sentiment, and lo! the fellow is no better than a smirking jester,
whose antics you can expose till men and women, who had foolishly
laughed and wept as he moved them, turn from him, loathing him as a
swindler. So it is that although _Tristram Shandy_ continues one of
the most popular classics in the language, nobody dares to confess his
debt to Sterne except in discreet terms of apology.

But the fellow wrote the book. You can't deny _that_, though
Thackeray may tempt you to forget it. (What proportion does my Uncle
Toby hold in that amiable Lecture?) The truth is that the elemental
simplicity of Captain Shandy and Corporal Trim did not appeal to the
author of _The Book of Snobs_ in the same degree as the pettiness of
the man Sterne appealed to him: and his business in Willis's Rooms was
to talk, not of Captain Shandy, but of the man Sterne, to whom his
hearers were to feel themselves superior as members of society. I
submit that this was not a worthy task for a man of letters who was
also a man of genius. I submit that it was an inversion of the true
critical method to wreck Sterne's _Sentimental Journey_ at the outset
by picking Sterne's life to pieces, holding up the shreds and warning
the reader that any nobility apparent in his book will be nothing
better than a sham. Sterne is scarcely arrived at Calais and in