" two years before the birth of his second son, "he
was at the pains of writing an express dissertation simply upon the
word Tristram, showing the world with great candour and modesty the
grounds of his great abhorrence to the name." And with this idea
Sterne continues to amuse himself at intervals till the end of the
chapter.

That he does not so persistently amuse the reader it is, of course,
scarcely necessary to say. The jest has not substance enough--few of
Sterne's jests have--to stand the process of continual attrition to
which he subjects it. But the mere historic gravity with which the
various turns of this monomania are recorded--to say nothing of the
seldom failing charm of the easy, gossiping style--prevents the thing
from ever becoming utterly tiresome. On the whole, however, one begins
to grow impatient for more of the same sort as the three admirable
chapters on the Rev. Mr. Yorick, and is not sorry to get to the
opening of the second volume, with its half-tender, half-humorous, and
wholly delightful account of Uncle Toby's difficulties in describing
the siege operations before Namur, and of the happy chance by which
these difficulties made him ultimately the fortunate possessor of a
"hobby."

Throughout this volume there are manifest signs of Sterne's unceasing
interest in his own creations, and of his increasing consciousness of
creative power. Captain Toby Shandy is but just lightly sketched-in
the first volume, while Corporal Trim has not made his appearance on
the scene at all; but before the end of the second we know both of
them thoroughly, within and without. Indeed, one might almost say
that in the first half-dozen chapters which so excellently recount
the origin of the corporal's fortification scheme, and the wounded
officer's delighted acceptance of it, every trait in the simple
characters--alike yet so different in their simplicity--of master and
of man becomes definitely fixed in the reader's mind. And the total
difference between the second and the first volume in point of
fulness, variety, and colour is most marked. The artist, the inventor,
the master of dialogue, the comic dramatist, in fact, as distinct from
the humorous essayist, would almost seem to have started into being
as we pass from the one volume to the other. There is nothing in the
drolleries of the first volume--in the broad jests upon Mr. Shandy's
crotchets, or even in the subtler humour of the intellectual collision
betw