Carlyle classes Sterne with Cervantes among the great humourists of the world; and from one, and that the most important, point of view the praise is not extravagant.  By no other writer besides Sterne, perhaps, since the days of the Spanish humourist, have the vast incongruities of human character been set forth with so masterly a hand.  It is in virtue of the new insight which his humour opens to us of the immensity and variety of man’s life that Cervantes makes us feel that he is great:  not delightful merely—­not even eternally delightful only, and secure of immortality through the perennial human need of joy—­but great, but immortal, in right of that which makes Shakspeare and the Greek dramatists immortal, namely, the power, not alone over the pleasure-loving part of man’s nature, but over that equally universal but more enduring element in it, his emotions of wonder and of awe.  It is to this greater power—­this control over a greater instinct than the human love of joy, that Cervantes owes his greatness; and it will be found, though it may seem at first a hard saying, that Sterne shares this power with Cervantes.  To pass from Quixote and Sancho to Walter and Toby Shandy involves, of course, a startling change of dramatic key—­a notable lowering of dramatic tone.  It is almost like passing from poetry to prose:  it is certainly passing from the poetic in spirit and surroundings to the profoundly prosaic in fundamental conception and in every individual detail.  But those who do not allow accidental and external dissimilarities to obscure for them the inward and essential resemblances of things, must often, I think, have experienced from one of the Shandy dialogues the same sort of impression that they derive from some of the most nobly humorous colloquies between the knight and his squire, and must have been conscious through all outward differences of key and tone of a common element in each.  It is, of course, a resemblance of relations and not of personalities; for though there is something of the Knight of La Mancha in Mr. Shandy, there is nothing of Sancho about his brother.  But the serio-comic game of cross-purposes is the same between both couples; and what one may call the irony of human intercourse is equally profound, and pointed with equal subtlety, in each.  In the Spanish romance, of course, it is not likely to be missed.  It is enough in itself that the deranged brain which takes windmills for giants, and carriers for knights, and Rosinante for a Bucephalus, has fixed upon Sancho Panza—­the crowning proof of its mania—­as the fitting squire of a knight-errant.  To him—­to this compound of somnolence, shrewdness, and good nature—­to this creature with no more tincture of romantic idealism than a wine-skin, the knight addresses, without misgiving, his lofty dissertations on the glories and the duties of chivalry—­the squire responding after his fashion.  And thus these two hold converse, contentedly incomprehensible