With all this extravagance, however, there was combined an admirable affectation of sobriety.  Mr. Shandy would have us believe that he was no blind slave to his theory.  He was quite willing to admit the existence of names which could not affect the character either for good or evil—­Jack, Dick, and Tom, for instance; and such the philosopher styled “neutral names,” affirming of them, “without a satire, that there had been as many knaves and fools at least as wise and good men since the world began, who had indifferently borne them, so that, like equal forces acting against each other in contrary directions, he thought they mutually destroyed each other’s effects; for which reason he would often declare he would not give a cherry-stone to choose among them.  Bob, which was my brother’s name, was another of these neutral kinds of Christian names which operated very little either way; and as my father happened to be at Epsom when it was given him, he would ofttimes thank Heaven it was no worse.”  Forewarned of this peculiarity of Mr.

Shandy’s, the reader is, of course, prepared to hear that of all the names in the universe the philosopher had the most unconquerable aversion for Tristram, “the lowest and most contemptible opinion of it of anything in the world.”  He would break off in the midst of one of his frequent disputes on the subject of names, and “in a spirited epiphonema, or rather erotesis,” demand of his antagonist “whether he would take upon him to say he had ever remembered, whether he had ever read, or whether he had ever heard tell of a man called Tristram performing anything great or worth recording.  No, he would say.  Tristram! the thing is impossible.”  It only remained that he should have published a book in defence of the belief, and sure enough “in the year sixteen,” two years before the birth of his second son, “he was at the pains of writing an express dissertation simply upon the word Tristram, showing the world with great candour and modesty the grounds of his great abhorrence to the name.”  And with this idea Sterne continues to amuse himself at intervals till the end of the chapter.

That he does not so persistently amuse the reader it is, of course, scarcely necessary to say.  The jest has not substance enough—­few of Sterne’s jests have—­to stand the process of continual attrition to which he subjects it.  But the mere historic gravity with which the various turns of this monomania are recorded—­to say nothing of the seldom failing charm of the easy, gossiping style—­prevents the thing from ever becoming utterly tiresome.  On the whole, however, one begins to grow impatient for more of the same sort as the three admirable chapters on the Rev. Mr. Yorick, and is not sorry to get to the opening of the second volume, with its half-tender, half-humorous, and wholly delightful account of Uncle Toby’s difficulties in describing the siege operations before Namur, and of the happy chance by which these difficulties made him ultimately the fortunate possessor of a “hobby.”