case of Sterne:  the obscure period of his life so greatly exceeded in duration the brief season of his fame, and its obscurity was so exceptionally profound.  He was forty-seven years of age when, at a bound, he achieved celebrity; he was not five-and-fifty when he died.  And though it might be too much to say that the artist sprang, like the reputation, full-grown into being, it is nevertheless true that there are no marks of positive immaturity to be detected even in the earliest public displays of his art.  His work grows, indeed, most marvellously in vividness and symmetry as he proceeds, but there are no visible signs of growth in the workman’s skill.  Even when the highest point of finish is attained we cannot say that the hand is any more cunning than it was from the first.  As well might we say that the last light touches of the sculptor’s chisel upon the perfected statue are more skilful than its first vigorous strokes upon the shapeless block.

It is certain, however, that Sterne must have been storing up his material of observation, secreting his reflections on life and character, and consciously or unconsciously maturing his powers of expression, during the whole of those silent twenty years which have now to be passed under brief review.  With one exception, to be noted presently, the only known writings of his which belong to this period are sermons, and these—­a mere “scratch” collection of pulpit discourses, which, as soon as he had gained the public ear, he hastened in characteristic fashion to rummage from his desk and carry to the book-market—­throw no light upon the problem before us.  There are sermons of Sterne which alike in manner and matter disclose the author of Tristram Shandy; but they are not among those which he preached or wrote before that work was given to the world.  They are not its ancestors but its descendants.  They belong to the post-Shandian period, and are in obvious imitation of the Shandian style; while in none of the earlier ones—­not even in that famous homily on a Good Conscience, which did not succeed till Corporal Trim preached it before the brothers Shandy and Dr. Slop—­can we trace either the trick of style or the turn of thought that give piquancy to the novel.  Yet the peculiar qualities of mind, and the special faculty of workmanship of which this turn of thought and trick of style were the product, must of course have been potentially present from the beginning.  Men do not blossom forth as wits, humourists, masterly delineators of character, and skilful performers on a highly-strung and carefully-tuned sentimental instrument all at once, after entering their “forties;” and the only wonder is that a possessor of these powers—­some of them of the kind which, as a rule, and in most men, seeks almost as irresistibly for exercise as even the poetic instinct itself—­should have been held so long unemployed.  There is, however, one very common stimulus to literary exertions which in