trusting my appeal upon it to your good sense and candid disquisition
in this matter; you are a person free from as many narrow prejudices
of education as most men; and, if I may presume to penetrate farther
into you, of a liberality of genius above bearing down an opinion,
merely because it wants friends. Your son,--your dear son,--from whose
sweet and open temper you have so much to expect,--your Billy, Sir!--
would you, for the world, have called him JUDAS? Would you, my dear
Sir," he would say, laying his hand upon your breast, with the
genteelest address,--and in that soft and irresistible 'piano' of
voice which the nature of the 'argumentum ad hominem' absolutely
requires,--"Would you, Sir, if a 'Jew' of a godfather had proposed the
name for your child, and offered you his purse along with it, would
you have consented to such a desecration of him? O my God!" he would
say, looking up, "if I know your temper rightly, Sir, you are
incapable of it;--you would have trampled upon the offer;--you would
have thrown the temptation at the tempter's head with abhorrence. Your
greatness of mind in this action, which I admire, with that generous
contempt of money, which you show me in the whole transaction, is
really noble;--and what renders it more so, is the principle of
it;--the workings of a parent's love upon the truth and conviction of
this very hypothesis, namely, that were your son called Judas,--the
sordid and treacherous idea, so inseparable from the name, would have
accompanied him through life like his shadow, and in the end made a
miser and a rascal of him, in spite, Sir, of your example." (Vol. i.
c. 19.)


6. There is great physiognomic tact in Sterne. See it particularly
displayed in his description of Dr. Slop, accompanied with all that
happiest use of drapery and attitude, which at once give reality by