inclined to rely. From the midwife it is an easy
transition to her patron and protector, the incumbent of the parish,
and this, in its turn, suggests a long excursus on the character,
habits, appearance, home, friends, enemies, and finally death, burial,
and epitaph of the Rev. Mr. Yorick. Thence we return to Mr. and Mrs.
Shandy, and are made acquainted, in absurdly minute detail, with an
agreement entered into between them with reference to the place of
sojourn to be selected for the lady's accouchement, the burlesque
deed which records this compact being actually set out at full length.
Thence, again, we are beckoned away by the jester to join him in
elaborate and not very edifying ridicule of the Catholic doctrine
of ante-natal baptism; and thence--but it would be useless to follow
further the windings and doublings of this literary hare.

Yet though the book, as one thus summarizes it, may appear a mere
farrago of digressions, it nevertheless, after its peculiar fashion,
advances. Such definite purpose as underlies the tricks and grimaces
of its author is by degrees accomplished; and before we reach the end
of the first volume the highly humorous, if extravagantly idealized,
figure of Mr. Shandy takes bodily shape and consistency before our
eyes. It is a mistake, I think, of Sir Walter Scott's to regard the
portrait of this eccentric philosopher as intended for a satire upon
perverted and deranged erudition--as the study of a man "whom too much
and too miscellaneous learning had brought within a step or two of
madness." Sterne's conception seems to me a little more subtle and
less commonplace than that. Mr. Shandy, I imagine, is designed to
personify not "crack-brained learning" so much as "theory run mad." He
is possessed by a sort of Demon of the Deductive, ever impelling him
to push his premises to new conclusions without ever allowing him time
to compare them with the facts. No doubt we are meant to regard him as
a learned man; but his son gives us to understand distinctly and very
early in the book that his crotchets were by no means those of a weak
receptive mind, overladen with more knowledge than it could digest,
but rather those of an over-active intelligence, far more deeply and
constantly concerned with its own processes than with the thoughts
of others. Tristram, indeed, dwells pointedly on the fact that his
father's dialectical skill was not the result of training, and that he
owed nothing to the logic