dangerous marches; harassed, perhaps, in his rear today; harassing others to-morrow; detached here; countermanded there; resting this night out upon his arms; beat up in his shirt the next; benumbed in his joints; perhaps without straw in his tent to kneel on, [he] must say his prayers how and when he can.  I believe, said I—­for I was piqued, quoth the Corporal, for the reputation of the army—­I believe, an’t please your reverence, said I, that when a soldier gets time to pray, he prays as heartily as a parson—­though not with all his fuss and hypocrisy.  Thou shouldst not have said that, Trim, said my Uncle Toby; for God only knows who is a hypocrite and who is not.  At the great and general review of us all, corporal, at the day of judgment (and not till then) it will be seen who have done their duties in this world and who have not, and we shall be advanced, Trim, accordingly.  I hope we shall, said Trim.  It is in the Scripture, said my Uncle Toby, and I will show it thee in the morning.  In the meantime, we may depend upon it, Trim, for our comfort, said my Uncle Toby, that God Almighty is so good and just a governor of the world, that if we have but done our duties in it, it will never be inquired into whether we have done them in a red coat or a black one.  I hope not, said the Corporal.  But go on, said my Uncle Toby, with thy story.”

We might almost fancy ourselves listening to that noble prose colloquy between the disguised king and his soldiers on the night before Agincourt, in Henry V. And though Sterne does not, of course, often reach this level of dramatic dignity, there are passages in abundance in which his dialogue assumes, through sheer force of individualized character, if not all the dignity, at any rate all the impressive force and simplicity, of the “grand style.”

Taken altogether, however, his place in English letters is hard to fix, and his tenure in human memory hard to determine.  Hitherto he has held his own, with the great writers of his era, but it has been in virtue, as I have attempted to show, of a contribution to the literary possessions of mankind which is as uniquely limited in amount as it is exceptionally perfect in quality.  One cannot but feel that, as regards the sum of his titles to recollection, his name stands far below either of those other two which in the course of the last century added themselves to the highest rank among the classics of English humour.  Sterne has not the abounding life and the varied human interest of Fielding; and, to say nothing of his vast intellectual inferiority to Swift, he never so much as approaches those problems of everlasting concernment to man which Swift handles with so terrible a fascination.  Certainly no enthusiastic Gibbon of the future is ever likely to say of Sterne’s “pictures of human manners” that they will outlive the palace of the Escurial and the Imperial Eagle of the House of Austria.  Assuredly no one will ever find in