So, too, the entire theological cast of Tristram Shandy is that of the sixteenth century;—­questions before the Sorbonne, the use of excommunication, and the like.  Dr. Slop, the Roman Catholic surgeon of the family, is but a weak mouthpiece of his Church in the polemics of the story; for Sterne was a violent opponent of the Church of Rome in story as well as in sermon; and Obadiah, the stupid man-servant, is the lay figure who receives the curses which Dr. Slop reads,—­“cursed in house and stable, garden and field and highway, in path or in wood, in the water or in the church.”  Whether the doctor was in earnest or not, Obadiah paid him fully by upsetting him and his pony with the coach-horse.

But in spite of the resemblance to Rabelais and a former age, it must be allowed that Tristram Shandy contains many of the richest pictures and fairest characters of the age in which it was written.  Rural England is truthfully presented, and the political cast of the day is shown in his references to the war in Flanders.  Among the sterling original portraits are those of Mr. Shandy, the country gentleman, controversial and consequential; Mrs. Shandy, the nonentity,—­the Amelia Osborne and Mrs. Nickleby of her day; Yorick, the lukewarm, time-serving priest—­Sterne himself:  and these are only supplementary characters.

The sieges of towns in the Low Countries, then going on, are pleasantly connected with that most exquisite of characters, my Uncle Toby, who has a fortification in his garden,—­sentry-box, cannon, and all,—­and who follows the great movement on this petty scale from day to day, as the bulletins come in from the seat of war.

The Widow Wadman, with her artless wiles, and the “something in her eye,” makes my Uncle Toby—­who protests he can see nothing in the white—­look, not without peril, “with might and main into the pupil.”  Ah, that sentry-box and the widow’s tactics might have conquered many a more wary man than my Uncle Toby! and yet my Uncle Toby escaped.

Now, all these are real English characters, sketched from life by the hand of genius, and they become our friends and acquaintances forever.  It seems as though Sterne, after a long and close study of Rabelais and Burton, had fancied that, with their aid, he might write a money-making book; but his own genius, rising superior to the plagiarism, took the project out of his venal hands; and from the antique learning and the incongruities which he had heaped together, bright and beautiful forms sprang forth like genii from the mine, to subsidize the tears and laughter of all future time.  What an exquisite creation is my Uncle Toby!—­a soldier in the van of battle, a man of honor and high tone in every-day life, a kind brother, a good master to Corporal Trim, simple as a child, benevolent as an angel.  “Go, poor devil,” quoth he to the fly which buzzed about his nose all dinner-time, “get thee gone; why should I hurt thee?  This world is surely wide enough to hold both thee and me!”