ll play to his simious humour, startle more
hideously than ever his straighter-laced neighbours, defiantly defend
his own character, and caricature whatever eccentric figure in the
society around him might offer the most tempting butt for ridicule?

[Footnote 1: "I was once such a puppy myself," he writes to a certain
baronet whom he is attempting to discourage from speculative farming
of this sort, "and had my labour for my pains and two hundred pounds
out of pocket. Curse on farming! (I said). Let us see if the pen will
not succeed better than the spade."]

[Footnote 2: He himself, indeed, makes a particular point of this in
explaining his literary venture. "Now for your desire," he writes to
a correspondent in 1759, "of knowing the reason of my turning author?
why, truly I am tired of employing my brains for other people's
advantage. 'Tis a foolish sacrifice I have made for some years for an
ungrateful person."--_Letters_, i. 82.]

All the world knows how far he ultimately advanced beyond the
simplicity of the conception, and into what far higher regions of art
its execution led him. But I find no convincing reason for believing
that _Tristram Shandy_ had at the outset any more seriously artistic
purpose than this; and much indirect evidence that this, in fact, it
was.

The humorous figure of Mr. Shandy is, of course, the Cervantic centre
of the whole; and it was out of him and his crotchets that Sterne,
no doubt, intended from the first to draw the materials of that often
unsavoury fun which was to amuse the light-minded and scandalize the
demure. But it can hardly escape notice that the two most elaborate
portraits in Vol. I.--the admirable but very flatteringly idealized
sketch of the author himself in Yorick, and the Gilrayesque caricature
of Dr. Slop--are drawn with a distinctly polemical purpose, defensive
in the former case and offensive in the latter. On the other hand,
with the disappearance of Dr. Slop caricature of living persons
disappears also; while, after the famous description of Yorick's
death-bed, we meet with no more attempts at self-vindication. It
seems probable, therefore, that long before the first two volumes
were completed Sterne had discovered the artistic possibilities of
"My Uncle Toby" and "Corporal Trim," and had realized the full
potentialities of humour contained in the contrast between the
two brothers Shandy. The very work of sharpening and deepening the
outlines of this humorou