see the worthy Captain only as he appeared to his creator’s keen dramatic eye, and as he is set before us in a thousand exquisite touches of dialogue—­the man of simple mind and soul, profoundly unimaginative and unphilosophical, but lacking not in a certain shrewd common-sense; exquisitely naif, and delightfully mal-a-propos in his observations, but always pardonably, never foolishly, so; inexhaustibly amiable, but with no weak amiability; homely in his ways, but a perfect gentleman withal; in a word, the most winning and lovable personality that is to be met with, surely, in the whole range of fiction.

It is, in fact, with Sterne’s general delineations of character as it is, I have attempted to show, with his particular passages of sentiment.  He is never at his best and truest—­as, indeed, no writer of fiction ever is or can be—­save when he is allowing his dramatic imagination to play the most freely upon his characters, and thinking least about himself.  This is curiously illustrated in his handling of what is, perhaps, the next most successful of the uncaricatured portraits in the Shandy gallery—­the presentment of the Rev. Mr. Yorick.  Nothing can be more perfect in its way than the picture of the “lively, witty, sensitive, and heedless parson,” in chapter x. of the first volume of Tristram Shandy.  We seem to see the thin, melancholy figure on the rawboned horse—­the apparition which could “never present itself in the village but it caught the attention of old and young,” so that “labour stood still as he passed, the bucket hung suspended in the middle of the well, the spinning-wheel forgot its round; even chuck-farthing and shuffle-cap themselves stood gaping till he was out of sight.”  Throughout this chapter Sterne, though describing himself, is projecting his personality to a distance, as it were, and contemplating it dramatically; and the result is excellent.  When in the next chapter he becomes “lyrical,” so to speak; when the reflection upon his (largely imaginary) wrongs impels him to look inward, the invariable consequence follows; and though Yorick’s much bepraised death-scene, with Eugenius at his bed-side, is redeemed from entire failure by an admixture of the humorous with its attempted pathos, we ask ourselves with some wonder what the unhappiness—­or the death itself, for that matter—­is “all about.”  The wrongs which were supposed to have broken Yorick’s heart are most imperfectly specified (a comic proof, by the way, of Sterne’s entire absorption in himself, to the confusion of his own personal knowledge with that of the reader), and the first conditions of enlisting the reader’s sympathies are left unfulfilled.