nose; 'get thee gone. Why should I hurt thee? This world surely
is big enough to hold both thee and me.'"

But here Mr. Whibley's notorious hatred of sentiment leads him into
confusion. That the passage has been over-quoted is no fault of
Sterne's. Of My Uncle Toby, if of any man, it might have been
predicted that he would not hurt a fly. To me this trivial action of
his is more than merely sentimental. But, be this as it may, I am sure
it is honestly characteristic.

Still, on the whole Mr. Whibley has justice. Sterne _is_ a
sentimentalist. Sterne _is_ indecent by reason of his reticence--more
indecent than Rabelais, because he uses a hint where Rabelais would
have said what he meant, and prints a dash where Rabelais would have
plumped out with a coarse word and a laugh. Sterne _is_ a convicted
thief. On a famous occasion Charles Reade drew a line between plagiary
and justifiable borrowing. To draw material from a heterogeneous
work--to found, for instance, the play of _Coriolanus_ upon Plutarch's
_Life_--is justifiable: to take from a homogeneous work--to enrich
your drama from another man's drama--is plagiary. But even on this
interpretation of the law Sterne must be condemned; for in decking out
_Tristram_ with feathers from the history of Gargantua he was
pillaging a homogeneous work. Nor can it be pleaded in extenuation
that he improved upon his originals--though it can, I think, be
pleaded that he made his borrowings his own. I do not think much of
Mr. Whibley's instance of Servius Sulpicius' letter. No doubt Sterne
took his translation of it from Burton; but the letter is a very well
known one, and Burton's translation happened to be uncommonly good,
and the borrowing of a good rendering without acknowledgment was not,
as far as I know, then forbidden by custom. In any case, the whole