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.]

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 dwa