Upon Beroalde, again, upon D’Aubigne, and upon Bouchet he has made no direct and verbatim depredations.  From Bruscambille he seems to have taken little or nothing but the not very valuable idea of the tedious buffoonery of vol. iii. c. 30, et sqq.; and to Scarron he, perhaps, owed the incident of the dwarf at the theatre in the Sentimental Journey, an incident which, it must be owned, he vastly improved in the taking.  All this, however, does not amount to very much, and it is only when we come to Dr. Ferriar’s collations of Tristram Shandy with the Anatomy of Melancholy that we begin to understand what feats Sterne was capable of as a plagiarist.  He must, to begin with, have relied with cynical confidence on the conviction that famous writers are talked about and not read, for he sets to work with the scissors upon Burton’s first page: 

“Man, the most excellent and noble creature of the world, the principal and mighty work of God; wonder of nature, as Zoroaster calls him; audacis naturae miraculum, the marvel of marvels, as Plato; the abridgment and epitome of the world, as Pliny,” &c.  Thus Burton; and, with a few additions of his own, and the substitution of Aristotle for Plato as the author of one of the descriptions, thus Sterne:  “Who made MAN with powers which dart him from heaven to earth in a moment—­that great, that most excellent and noble creature of the world, the miracle of nature, as Zoroaster, in his book [Greek:  peri phuseos], called him—­the Shekinah of the Divine Presence, as Chrysostom—­the image of God, as Moses—­the ray of Divinity, as Plato—­the marvel of marvels, as Aristotle,” &c.[1] And in the same chapter, in the “Fragment upon Whiskers,” Sterne relates how a “decayed kinsman” of the Lady Baussiere “ran begging, bareheaded, on one side of her palfrey, conjuring her by the former bonds of friendship, alliance, consanguinity, &c.—­cousin, aunt, sister, mother—­for virtue’s sake, for your own sake, for mine, for Christ’s sake, remember me! pity me!” And again he tells how a “devout, venerable, hoary-headed man” thus beseeched her:  “’I beg for the unfortunate.  Good my lady, ’tis for a prison—­for an hospital; ’tis for an old man—­a poor man undone by shipwreck, by suretyship, by fire.  I call God and all His angels to witness, ’tis to clothe the naked, to feed the hungry—­’tis to comfort the sick and the brokenhearted.’  The Lady Baussiere rode on.[2]”

[Footnote 1:  Tristram Shandy, vol. v.c. 1.]

[Footnote 2:  Ibid.]

But now compare this passage from the Anatomy of Melancholy: