Throughout this volume there are manifest signs of Sterne’s unceasing interest in his own creations, and of his increasing consciousness of creative power.  Captain Toby Shandy is but just lightly sketched-in the first volume, while Corporal Trim has not made his appearance on the scene at all; but before the end of the second we know both of them thoroughly, within and without.  Indeed, one might almost say that in the first half-dozen chapters which so excellently recount the origin of the corporal’s fortification scheme, and the wounded officer’s delighted acceptance of it, every trait in the simple characters—­alike yet so different in their simplicity—­of master and of man becomes definitely fixed in the reader’s mind.  And the total difference between the second and the first volume in point of fulness, variety, and colour is most marked.  The artist, the inventor, the master of dialogue, the comic dramatist, in fact, as distinct from the humorous essayist, would almost seem to have started into being as we pass from the one volume to the other.  There is nothing in the drolleries of the first volume—­in the broad jests upon Mr. Shandy’s crotchets, or even in the subtler humour of the intellectual collision between these crotchets and his brother’s plain sense—­to indicate the kind of power displayed in that remarkable colloquy a quatre, which begins with the arrival of Dr. Slop and ends with Corporal Trim’s recital of the Sermon on Conscience.  Wit, humour, irony, quaint learning, shrewd judgment of men and things, of these Sterne had displayed abundance already; but it is not in the earlier but in the later half of the first instalment of Tristram Shandy that we first become conscious that he is something more than the possessor of all these things; that he is gifted with the genius of creation, and has sent forth new beings into that world of immortal shadows which to many of us is more real than our own.

CHAPTER V.

LONDON TRIUMPHS.—­FIRST SET OF SERMONS.—­“TRISTRAM SHANDY,” VOLS.  III.  AND IV.—­COXWOLD.—­VOLS.  V. AND VI.—­FIRST VISIT TO THE CONTINENT.—­PARIS.—­TOULOUSE.

(1760-1762.)

Sterne alighted from the York mail, just as Byron “awoke one morning,” to “find himself famous.”  Seldom indeed has any lion so suddenly discovered been pursued so eagerly and by such a distinguished crowd of hunters.  The chase was remarkable enough to have left a lasting impression on the spectators; for it was several years after (in 1773) that Dr. Johnson, by way of fortifying his very just remark that “any man who has a name or who has the power of pleasing will be generally invited in London,” observed gruffly that “the man Sterne,” he was told, “had had engagements for three months.”  And truly it would appear from abundant evidence that “the man Sterne” gained such a social triumph as might well have turned a stronger head than his.  Within twenty-four hours after his arrival his lodgings in Pall Mall were besieged by a crowd of fashionable visitors; and in a few weeks he had probably made the acquaintance of “everybody who was anybody” in the London society of that day.