ention of going. He did not
merely not shun occasions of being irrelevant, but he sought them out
and eagerly cultivated them. Remember that a whole chapter of _Tristram_
is devoted to the _attitude_ of Corporal Trim as he prepared himself to
read the Sermon. Sterne kept a stable of prancing, plump little
hobby-horses, and he trotted them out upon every occasion. But this is
what makes his books the best conversational writing in the English
language. He writes for all the world exactly as though he were talking
at his ease, and we listen enchanted to the careless, frolicking, idle,
penetrating speaker who builds up for us so nonchalantly, with
persistent but unobtrusive touch upon touch, the immortal figures of Mr.
Shandy, my Uncle Toby, Trim, Yorick, the Widow Wadman, and so many more.

This, I am inclined to think, in drawing this brief sketch to an end, is
Sterne's main interest for ourselves. He broke up the rhetorical manner
of composition, or, rather, he produced an alternative manner which was
gradually accepted and is in partial favour still. I would ask you to
read for yourselves the scene of the ass who blocked the way for
Tristram at Lyons, and to consider how completely new that method of
describing, of facing a literary problem, was in 1765. I speak here to
an audience of experts, to a company of authors who are accustomed to a
close consideration of the workmanship of their _metier_. I ask them
where, at all events in English, anything like that scene had been found
before the days of Sterne. Since those days we have never been without
it.

To trace the Shandean influence down English literature for the last
century and a half would take me much too long for your patience. In
Dickens, in Carlyle, even in Ruskin, the Shandean element is often
present and not rarely predominant. None of those great men would have
expressed himself exactly as he does but for Laurence Sterne. And coming
down to our own time, I see the influence of Sterne everywhere. The
pathos of Sir James Barrie is intimately related to that of the creator
of Uncle Toby and Maria of Moulines, while I am not sure that of all the
books which Stevenson read it was not the _Sentimental Journey_ which
made the deepest impression upon him.

[Footnote 5: Address delivered to the Authors' Club, November 24th,
1913]

THE CENTENARY OF EDGAR ALLAN POE

In the announcements of the approaching celebration of the centenary of
Poe in this cou