dramatic purposes, with better justification, many passages from Sterne in ‘Tristram Shandy: A Sentimental, Shandean Bagatelle in Two Acts;’ McNally dedicated it to Sterne's patron, Lord Fauconberg. In 1779 William Combe fathered on Sterne a spurious collection of ‘letters between Yorick and Eliza.’ ‘Letters from Eliza to Yorick’ (1775; printed for the editor) and ‘Original Letters of the late Rev. Laurence Sterne,’ 1788, came from similar manufactories of fraud.
But writers of position and ability have shown little less hesitation than the denizens of Grub Street in emulating Sterne. Travellers of literary genius like Heine and Robert Louis Stevenson have, as recorders of their impressions of travel, marched under Sterne's banner. On fiction dealing with domestic life his influence has been no less pronounced. Dickens often reflected his humour as distinctly as his sentimentality. Marryat in ‘Midshipman Easy,’ and more notably Lytton in the ‘Caxtons,’ levied ampler loans on Sterne's pictures of Mr. Shandy and his household than a stern sense of probity might justify. Conscious mimicry of Sterne's tricks of style—his use of ‘'tis’ and ‘'twas,’ his picturesque abruptness, his quaint paradoxes—is apparent in much modern essay writing. ‘That's another story’ fell originally—in the sense that Mr. Rudyard Kipling has made it his own—from the lips of Mr. Shandy in bk. ii. chap. xvii. of his son Tristram's ‘Life and Opinions’ (ed. Saintsbury, i. 141).
But the plagiarism of which Sterne has been the victim is retributive justice. Hundreds of writers of all ages and nations are quoted in ‘Tristram Shandy,’ and attest the width of Sterne's reading. ‘My dear Rabelais and dearer Cervantes’ were, with Montaigne, the authors he declared that he loved the best, and their influence is very obvious throughout ‘Tristram.’ In Shakespeare and Lucian he also avowed delight. But he did not always confess his debts to his predecessors, and his plagiarisms, although they fail to detract from the literary interest of his achievement, convict him of effrontery, if not of downright dishonesty. Many impressive phrases did he borrow direct and without acknowledgment from Burton's ‘Anatomy of Melancholy.’ Whole paragraphs in his ‘Sermons’ come from the published works of Bishop Hall and Wollaston. The story of the dwarf at the theatre in the ‘Sentimental Journey’ is largely a translation from a chapter of Scarron's ‘Roman Comique.’ Nor was the general scheme of ‘Tristram’ more original than many of its details. John Dunton's ‘A Voyage round the World, or Pocket Library divided into several volumes: the first of which contains the rare adventures of Don Kainophilus from his cradle to his fifteenth year,’ London [1720?], was beyond reasonable doubt the parent of ‘Tristram Shandy's Life and Opinions,’ with the whimsical and perverse digressions on which the author prided himself. The resemblance between Tristram's and Don Kainophilus's fortunes has been overlooked by later critics, but it led to the publication in 1762 of an adaptation of Dunton's novel under the title of ‘The Life, Travels, and Adventures of Christopher Wagstaffe, Gentleman, grandfather to Tristram Shandy, adapted by the editor’ (London, 8vo). He was clearly acquainted, too, with Arbuthnot's ‘Memoirs of Martin Scriblerus.’ Sterne told the Crofts that many of the ludicrous discussions of the brothers Shandy were due to the less brilliant conferences reported in Béroalde's ‘Moyen de Parvenir’ (1599). Others were clearly suggested by Bouchet's ‘Serées’ (Paris, 1608). Sterne's disquisition on noses was adapted from Bruscambille's ‘Pensées Facetieuses’ (1623). Copies of these three French books were in Sterne's library, and his copy of Béroalde, which bore the inscription ‘L. Sterne à Paris, viii livres,’ afterwards belonged to Heber. It is notable that his sentimental episodes owed on the whole less to his reading than his humorous episodes. But he knew thoroughly the so-called pathetic romance of ‘Le Doyen de Coleraine,’ and he assimilated some of the wearisome sentiment of Marivaux's ‘Le Paysan Parvenu’ which was popular in Mrs. Eliza Haywood's English translation (1735). Sterne's most widely known apophthegm, ‘God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb’ (Sentimental Journey), was a Languedoc proverb which had often been in print in France (cf. John Ferriar , Illustrations of Sterne, London, 1798; Warrington, 1812, 2 vols.). Doubt is admissible whether Uncle Toby owes much (as has been suggested) to the Commodore Trunnion of Smollett's ‘Peregrine Pickle’ (cf. Anna Seward, Letters, ii. 30 Oct. 1788). Another tradition represents Uncle Toby as a portrait of one Captain Hinde of Preston Castle, Hertfordshire, a neighbour of Lord Dacre, who occasionally entertained Sterne (Macmillan's Mag. July 1873, p. 238). But after all Sterne's thefts have been admitted, it is clear that his wealth alike of humour, sensibility, and dramatic instinct enabled him to steal material from all quarters without obscuring his individuality. His style was his own. At its best it is, in Hazlitt's words, ‘the most rapid,
