from Sutton to Stillington, and from Stillington to Skelton. He had
spent his life in riding, shooting, preaching, joking, and philandering
in company, and after a fashion, most truly reprehensible from a
clerical point of view, yet admirably fitted to prepare such an artist
for his destined labours as a painter of the oddities of average
Englishmen. But by the side of this indolent search after the enjoyment
of the hour, Sterne cultivated a formidable species of literature in
which he had so few competitors that, in after years, his indolence
prompted him to plagiarise freely from sources which, surely, no human
being would discover. He steeped himself in the cumbrous learning of
those writers of the Renaissance in whom congested Latin is found
tottering into colloquial French. He studied Rabelais perhaps more
deeply than any other Englishman of his time, and certainly Beroalde de
Verville, Bruscambille, and other absurdities of the sixteenth century
were familiar to him and to him alone in England.

Hence, when Sterne began to write, there were two streams flowing in his
brain, and these were, like everything else about him, inconsistent with
one another. The faithful tender colour of modern life competed with
the preposterous oddity of burlesque erudition. When he started the
annals of Tristram Shandy, the Rabelais vein was in the ascendant, and
there is plenty of evidence that it vastly dazzled and entertained
readers of that day. But it no longer entertains us very much, and it is
the source of considerable injustice done by modern criticism to the
real merits of Sterne. When so acute a writer as Bagehot condemns much
of _Tristram Shandy_ as "a sort of antediluvian fun, in which uncouth
saurian jokes play idly in an unintelligible world," he hits the nail on
the head of why so many readers nowadays turn with impatience from that
work. But they should persevere, for Sterne himself saw his error, and
gradually dropped the "uncouth saurian jokes" which he had filched out