afterwards, that "he wrote not to be fed, but to be
famous." But the context of the passage shows that he only meant to
deny any absolute compulsion to write for mere subsistence. Between
this sort of constraint and that gentler form of pressure which arises
from the wish to increase an income sufficient for one's needs, but
inadequate to one's desires, there is a considerable difference; and
to repudiate the one is not to disclaim the other. It is, at any
rate, certain that Sterne engaged at one time of his life in a rather
speculative sort of farming, and we have it from himself in a passage
in one of his letters, which may be jest, but reads more like
earnest, that it was his losses in this business that first turned his
attention to literature.[1] His thoughts once set in that direction,
his peculiar choice of subject and method of treatment are easily
comprehensible. Pantagruelic burlesque came to him, if not naturally,
at any rate by "second nature." He had a strong and sedulously
cultivated taste for Rabelaisian humour; his head was crammed with all
sorts of out-of-the-way learning constantly tickling his comic sense
by its very uselessness; he relished more keenly than any man the
solemn futilities of mediaeval doctors, and the pedantic indecencies
of casuist fathers; and, along with all these temptations to an
enterprise of the kind upon which he entered, he had been experiencing
a steady relaxation of deterrent restraints. He had fallen out with
his uncle some years since,[2] and the quarrel had freed him from at
least one influence making for clerical propriety of behaviour. His
incorrigible levities had probably lost him the countenance of most of
his more serious acquaintances; his satirical humour had as probably
gained him personal enemies not a few, and it may be that he had
gradually contracted something of that "naughty-boy" temper, as we
may call it, for which the deliberate and ostentatious repetition of
offences has an inexplicable charm. It seems clear, too, that, growth
for growth with this spirit of bravado, there had sprung up--in
somewhat incongruous companionship, perhaps--a certain sense of wrong.
Along with the impulse to give an additional shock to the prejudices
he had already offended, Sterne felt impelled to vindicate what he
considered the genuine moral worth underlying the indiscretions of the
offender. What, then, could better suit him than to compose a novel
in which he might give fu