Shorter in length than any of the preceding instalments, and filled out as it was, even so, by a process of what would now be called “book-making,” this issue will yet bear comparison, I think, with the best of its predecessors.  Its sketches of travel, though destined to be surpassed in vigour and freedom of draftsmanship by the Sentimental Journey, are yet excellent, and their very obvious want of connexion with the story—­if story it can be called—­is so little felt that we almost resent the head-and-ears introduction of Mr. Shandy and his brother, and the Corporal, in apparent concession to the popular prejudice in favour of some sort of coherence between the various parts of a narrative.  The first seventeen chapters are, perhaps, as freshly delightful reading as anything in Sterne.  They are literally filled and brimming over with the exhilaration of travel:  written, or at least prepared for writing, we can clearly see, under the full intoxicant effect which a bewildering succession of new sights and sounds will produce, in a certain measure, upon the coolest of us, and which would set a head like Sterne’s in an absolute whirl.  The contagion of his high spirits is, however, irresistible; and, putting aside all other and more solid qualities in them, these chapters are, for mere fun—­for that kind of clever nonsense which only wins by perfect spontaneity, and which so promptly makes ashamed the moment spontaneity fails—­unsurpassed by anything of the same kind from the same hand.  How strange, then, that, with so keen an eye for the humorous, so sound and true a judgment in the highest qualities of humour, Sterne should think it possible for any one who has outgrown what may be called the dirty stage of boyhood to smile at the story which begins a few chapters afterwards—­that of the Abbess and Novice of the Convent of Andouillets!  The adult male person is not so much shocked at the coarseness of this story as astounded at the bathos of its introduction.  It is as though some matchless connoisseur in wine, after having a hundred times demonstrated the unerring discrimination of his palate for the finest brands, should then produce some vile and loaded compound, and invite us to drink it with all the relish with which he seems to be swallowing it himself.  This story of the Abbess and Novice almost impels us to turn back to certain earlier chapters, or former volumes, and re-examine some of the subtler passages of humour to be found there—­in downright apprehension lest we should turn out to have read these “good things,” not “in,” but “into,” our author.  The bad wine is so very bad, that we catch ourselves wondering whether the finer brands were genuine, when we see the same palate equally satisfied with both.  But one should, of course, add that it is only in respect of its supposed humour that this story shakes its readers’ faith in the gifts of the narrator.  As a mere piece of story-telling, and even as a study in landscape and figure-painting, it is quite perversely