father’s bookshelf, where were “Roderick Random,” “Peregrine Pickle” and “Humphrey Clinker,” along with “Tom Jones,” “The Vicar of Wakefield,” “Gil Blas” and “Robinson Crusoe”—­“a glorious host,” says he, “to keep me company.  They kept alive my fancy and my hope of something beyond that time and place.”  And of Smollett’s characters, who seem to have charmed him more than Fielding’s, he declares:  “I have seen Tom Pipes go clambering up the church-steeple:  I have watched Strap with the knapsack on his back stopping to rest himself upon the wicket gate:  and I know that Commodore Trunnion held that Club with Mr. Pickle in the parlor of our little village ale house.”  Children are shrewd critics, in their way, and what an embryo Charles Dickens likes in fiction is not to be slighted.  But as we have seen, Smollett can base his claims to our sufferance not by indirection through Dickens, but upon his worth; many besides the later and greater novelist have a liking for this racy writer of adventure, and creator of English types, who was recognized by Walter Scott as of kin to the great in fiction.

II

In the fast-developing fiction of the late eighteenth century, the possible ramifications of the Novel from the parent tree of Richardson enriched it with the work of Sterne, Swift and Goldsmith.  They added imaginative narratives of one sort or another, which increased the content of the form by famous things and exercised some influence in shaping it.  The remark has in mind “Tristram Shandy,” “Gulliver’s Travels” and “The Vicar of Wakefield.”  And yet, no one of the three was a Novel in the sense in which the evolution of the word has been traced, nor yet are the authors strictly novelists.

Laurence Sterne, at once man of the world and clergyman, with Rabelais as a model, and himself a master of prose, possessing command of humor and pathos, skilled in character sketch and essay-philosophy, is not a novelist at all.  His aim Is not to depict the traits or events of contemporary society, but to put forth the views of the Reverend Laurence Sterne, Yorkshire parson, with many a quaint turn and whimsical situation under a thin disguise of story-form.  Of his two books, “Tristram Shandy” and “The Sentimental Journey,” unquestionable classics, both, in their field, there is no thought of plot or growth or objective realization:  the former is a delightful tour de force in which a born essayist deals with the imaginary fortunes of a person he makes as interesting before his birth as after it, and in passing, sketches some characters dear to posterity:  first and foremost, Uncle Toby and Corporal Trim.  It is all pure play of wit, fancy and wisdom, beneath the comic mask—­a very frolic of the mind.  In the second book the framework is that of the travel-sketch and the treatment more objective:  a fact which, along with its dubious propriety, may account for its greater popularity.  But much of the charm comes, as before, from the writer’s touch, his gift of style and ability to unloose in the essay manner a unique individuality.