mode of procedure, of passing them off as his own.  Nay, it was not till full fifty years afterwards that these daring robberies were detected, or, at any rate, revealed to the world; and, with an irony which Sterne himself would have appreciated, it was reserved for a sincere admirer of the humourist to play the part of detective.  In 1812 Dr. John Ferriar published his Illustrations of Sterne, and the prefatory sonnet, in which he solicits pardon for his too minute investigations, is sufficient proof of the curiously reverent spirit in which he set about his damaging task: 

  “Sterne, for whose sake I plod through miry ways
  Of antic wit, and quibbling mazes drear,
  Let not thy shade malignant censure fear,
  If aught of inward mirth my search betrays. 
  Long slept that mirth in dust of ancient days,
  Erewhile to Guise or wanton Valois dear,” &c.

Thus commences Dr. Ferriar’s apology, which, however, can hardly be held to cover his offence; for, as a matter of fact, Sterne’s borrowings extend to a good deal besides “mirth;” and some of the most unscrupulous of these forced loans are raised from passages of a perfectly serious import in the originals from which they are taken.

Here, however, is the list of authors to whom Dr. Ferriar holds Sterne to have been more or less indebted:  Rabelais, Beroalde de Verville, Bouchet, Bruscambille, Scarron, Swift, an author of the name or pseudonym of “Gabriel John,” Burton, Bacon, Blount, Montaigne, Bishop Hall.  The catalogue is a reasonably long one; but it is not, of course, to be supposed that Sterne helped himself equally freely from every author named in it.  His obligations to some of them are, as Dr. Ferriar admits, but slight.  From Rabelais, besides his vagaries of narrative, Sterne took, no doubt, the idea of the Tristra-paedia (by descent from the “education of Pantagruel,” through “Martinus Scriblerus"); but though he has appropriated bodily the passage in which Friar John attributes the beauty of his nose to the pectoral conformation of his nurse, he may be said to have constructively acknowledged the debt in a reference to one of the characters in the Rabelaisian dialogue.[1]

[Footnote 1:  “There is no cause but one,” said my Uncle Toby, “why one man’s nose is longer than another, but because that God pleases to have it so.”  “That is Grangousier’s solution,” said my father. “’Tis He,” continued my Uncle Toby, “who makes us all, and frames and puts us together in such forms ... and for such ends as is agreeable to His infinite wisdom.”—­Tristram Shandy, vol. iii. c. 41.  “Par ce, repondit Grangousier, qu’ainsi Dieu l’a voulu, lequel nous fait en cette forme et cette fin selon divin arbitre.”—­Rabelais, book i. c. 41.  In another place, however (vol. viii. c. 3), Sterne has borrowed a whole passage from this French humourist without any acknowledgment at all.]