of those who have gazed upon it; and it is, after all, I think, the one figure of Captain Tobias Shandy which has graven itself indelibly on the memory of mankind.  To have made this single addition to the imperishable types of human character embodied in the world’s literature may seem, as has been said, but a light matter to those who talk with light exaggeration of the achievements of the literary artist; but if we exclude that one creative prodigy among men, who has peopled a whole gallery with imaginary beings more real than those of flesh and blood, we shall find that very few archetypal creations have sprung from any single hand.  Now, My Uncle Toby is as much the archetype of guileless good nature, of affectionate simplicity, as Hamlet is of irresolution, or Iago of cunning, or Shylock of race-hatred; and he contrives to preserve all the characteristics of an ideal type amid surroundings of intensely prosaic realism, with which he himself, moreover, considered as an individual character in a specific story, is in complete, accord.  If any one be disposed to underrate the creative and dramatic power to which this testifies, let him consider how it has commonly fared with those writers of prose fiction who have attempted to personify a virtue in a man.  Take the work of another famous English humourist and sentimentalist, and compare Uncle Toby’s manly and dignified gentleness of heart with the unreal “gush” of the Brothers Cheeryble, or the fatuous benevolence of Mr. Pickwick.  We do not believe in the former, and we cannot but despise the latter.  But Captain Shandy is reality itself, within and without; and though we smile at his naivete, and may even laugh outright at his boyish enthusiasm for his military hobby, we never cease to respect him for a moment.  There is no shirking or softening of the comic aspects of his character; there could not be, of course, for Sterne needed him more, and used him more, for his purposes as a humourist than for his purposes as a sentimentalist.  Nay, it is on the rare occasions when he deliberately sentimentalizes with Captain Shandy that the Captain is the least delightful; it is then that the hand loses its cunning, and the stroke strays; it is then, and only then, that the benevolence of the good soldier seems to verge, though ever so little, upon affectation.  It is a pity, for instance, that Sterne should, in illustration of Captain Shandy’s kindness of heart, have plagiarized (as he is said to have done) the incident of the tormenting fly, caught and put out of the window with the words “Get thee gone, poor devil!  Why should I harm thee?  The world is surely large enough for thee and me.”  There is something too much of self-conscious virtue in the apostrophe.  This, we feel, is not the real Uncle Toby of Sterne’s objective mood; it is the Uncle Toby of the subjectifying sentimentalist, surveying his character through the false medium of his own hypertrophied sensibilities.  These lapses, however, are, fortunately, rare.  As a rule we