Everyday experience suffices to show that the qualities which win enduring fame for books and for their authors are not always those to which they owe their first popularity.  It may with the utmost probability be affirmed that this was the case with Tristram Shandy and with Sterne.  We cannot, it is true, altogether dissociate the permanent attractions of the novel from those characteristics of it which have long since ceased to attract at all; the two are united in a greater or less degree throughout the work; and this being so, it is, of course, impossible to prove to demonstration that it was the latter qualities, and not the former, which procured it its immediate vogue.  But, as it happens, it is possible to show that what may be called its spurious attractions varied directly, and its real merits inversely, as its popularity with the public of its day.  In the higher qualities of humour, in dramatic vigour, in skilful and subtle delineation of character, the novel showed no deterioration, but, in some instances, a marked improvement, as it proceeded; yet the second instalment was not more popular, and most of the succeeding ones were distinctly less popular, than the first.  They had gained in many qualities, while they had lost in only the single one of novelty; and we may infer, therefore, with approximate certainty, that what “took the town” in the first instance was, that quality of the book which was strangest at its first appearance.  The mass of the public read, and enjoyed, or thought they enjoyed, when they were really only puzzled and perplexed.  The wild digressions, the audacious impertinences, the burlesque philosophizing, the broad jests, the air of recondite learning, all combined to make the book a nine days’ wonder; and a majority of its readers would probably have been prepared to pronounce Tristram Shandy a work as original in scheme and conception as it was eccentric.  Some there were, no doubt, who perceived the influence of Rabelais in the incessant digressions and the burlesque of philosophy; others, it may be, found a reminder of Burton in the parade of learning; and yet a few others, the scattered students of French facetiae of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, may have read the broad jests with a feeling that they had “seen something like it before.”  But no single reader, no single critic of the time, appears to have combined the knowledge necessary for tracing these three characteristics of the novel to their respective sources; and none certainly had any suspicion of the extent to which the books and authors from whom they were imitated had been laid under contribution.  No one suspected that Sterne, not content with borrowing his trick of rambling from Rabelais, and his airs of erudition from Burton, and his fooleries from Bruscambille, had coolly transferred whole passages from the second of these writers, not only without acknowledgment, but with the intention, obviously indicated by his