LIFE IN THE SOUTH.—­RETURN TO ENGLAND.—­VOLS.  VII.  AND VIII.—­SECOND SET OF SERMONS.

(1762-1765.)

The diminished appetite of the public for the humours of Mr. Shandy and his brother is, perhaps, not very difficult to understand.  Time was simply doing its usual wholesome work in sifting the false from the true—­in ridding Sterne’s audience of its contingent of sham admirers.  This is not to say, of course, that there might not have been other and better grounds for a partial withdrawal of popular favour.  A writer who systematically employs Sterne’s peculiar methods must lay his account with undeserved loss as well as with unmerited gain.  The fifth and sixth volumes deal quite largely enough in mere eccentricity to justify the distaste of any reader upon whom mere eccentricity had begun to pall.  But if this were the sole explanation of the book’s declining popularity, we should have to admit that the adverse judgment of the public had been delayed too long for justice, and had passed over the worst to light upon the less heinous offences.  For the third volume, though its earlier pages contain some good touches, drifts away into mere dull, uncleanly equivoque in its concluding chapters; and the fifth and sixth volumes may, at any rate, quite safely challenge favourable comparison with the fourth—­the poorest, I venture to think, of the whole series.  There is nothing in these two later volumes to compare, for instance, with that most wearisome exercise in double entendre, Slawkenbergius’s Tale; nothing to match that painfully elaborate piece of low comedy, the consultation of philosophers and its episode of Phutatorius’s mishap with the hot chestnut; no such persistent resort, in short, to those mechanical methods of mirth-making upon which Sterne, throughout a great part of the fourth volume, almost exclusively relies.  The humour of the fifth is, to a far larger extent, of the creative and dramatic order; the ever-delightful collision of intellectual incongruities in the persons of the two brothers Shandy gives animation to the volume almost from beginning to end.  The arrival of the news of Bobby Shandy’s death, and the contrast of its reception by the philosophic father and the simple-minded uncle, form a scene of inimitable absurdity, and the “Tristrapaedia,” with its ingenious project for opening up innumerable “tracks of inquiry” before the mind of the pupil by sheer skill in the manipulation of the auxiliary verbs, is in the author’s happiest vein.  The sixth volume, again, which contains the irresistible dialogue between Mr. and Mrs. Shandy on the great question of the “breeching of Tristram,” and the much-admired, if not wholly admirable, episode of Le Fevre’s death, is fully entitled to rank beside its predecessors.  On the whole, therefore, it must be said that the colder reception accorded to this instalment of the novel, as compared with the previous one, can hardly be justified on sound