ts way in) "the blowing of noses, and the wiping
away of tears with the bottoms of curtains in a sick man's bed-room;"
and with one more theft from Burton, after Seneca: "Consider, brother
Toby, when we are, death is not; and when death is, we are not," this
extraordinary cento of plagiarisms concludes.

Not that this is Sterne's only raid upon the quaint old writer of whom
he has here made such free use. Several other instances of word
for word appropriation might be quoted from this and the succeeding
volumes of _Tristram Shandy_. The apostrophe to "blessed health,"
in c. xxxiii. of vol. v. is taken direct from the _Anatomy of
Melancholy_; so is the phrase, "He has a gourd for his head and a
pippin for his heart," in c. ix.; so is the jest about Franciscus
Ribera's computation of the amount of cubic space required by the
souls of the lost; so is Hilarion the hermit's comparison of his body
with its unruly passions to a kicking ass. And there is a passage in
the _Sentimental Journey_, the "Fragment in the Abderitans," which
shows, Dr. Ferriar thinks--though it does not seem to me to show
conclusively--that Sterne was unaware that what he was taking from
Burton had been previously taken by Burton from Lucian.

There is more excuse, in the opinion of the author of the
_Illustrations_, for the literary thefts of the preacher than for
those of the novelist; since in sermons, Dr. Ferriar observes drily,
"the principal matter must consist of repetitions."

But it can hardly, I think, be admitted that the kind of "repetitions"
to which Sterne had recourse in the pulpit--or, at any rate,
in compositions ostensibly prepared for the pulpit--are quite
justifiable. Professor Jebb has pointed out, in a recent volume of
this series, that the description of the tortures of the Inquisition,
which so deeply moved Corporal Trim in the famous Sermon on
Conscience, was really the work of Bentley; but Sterne has pilfered
more freely from a divine more famous as a preacher than the great
scholar whose words he appropriated on that occasion. "Then shame and
grief go with her," he exclaims in his singular sermon on "The Levite
and his Concubine;" "and wherever she seeks a shelter may the hand of
Justice shut the door against her!" an exclamation which is taken,
as, no doubt, indeed, was the whole suggestion of the somewhat strange
subject, from the _Contemplations_ of Bishop Hall. And so, again, we
find in Sterne's sermon the following: