No, the highest mastery of Sterne does not lie in these anthological patches, but first of all in his power of creating characters. There are not many persons engaged in the little drama of Shandy Hall, and their range of action is narrow, but they are drawn with a skill and a memorable distinctness which have never been surpassed. Not the bustling people of Shakespeare's stage are more real and individual than Mr. Shandy, my Uncle Toby, Corporal Trim, and Dr. Slop. Even the minor characters of the servants' hall are sketched in with wonderful vividness; and if there is a single failure in all that gallery of portraits, it is Yorick himself, who was drawn from the author and is foisted upon the company somewhat unceremoniously, if truth be told. Nor is the secret of their lifelikeness hard to discern. One of the constant creeds of the age, handed down from the old comedy of humours, was the belief in the "ruling passion" as the source of all a man's acts. The persons who figure in most of the contemporary letters and novels are a succession of originals or grotesques, moved by a single motive. They are all mad in England, said Hamlet, and Walpole enforces the sentence with a thousand burlesque anecdotes. Now in Sterne this ruling passion, both in his own character and in that of his creations, was softened down to what may be called a whimsical egotism, which does not repel by its exaggeration, yet bestows a marvellous unity and relief. It is his _hobbyhorsical_ philosophy, as he calls it. At the head of all are Tristram's father and uncle, with their cunningly contrasted humours--Mr. Shandy, who would regulate all the affairs of life by abstract theorems of the mind, and my Uncle Toby, who is guided solely by the impulses of the heart. Between them Sterne would seem to have set over against each other the two divided sources of human activity; and the minor characters, each with his cherished hobby, are ranged under them in proper subordination. The art of the narrative--and in this Sterne is without master or rival--is to bring these characters into a group by some common motive, and then to show how each of them is thinking all the while of his own dear crotchet. Take, for example, the tremendous curse of Ernulphus in the third book. Mr. Shandy had "the greatest veneration in the world for that gentleman, who, in distrust of his own discretion in this point, sat down and composed (that is, at his leisure) fit forms of swearing suitable to all cases, from the lowest to the highest provocation which could possibly happen to him." That is Mr. Shandy's theorising hobby, and accordingly, when his man Obadiah is the cause of an annoying mishap, Mr. Shandy reaches down the formal curse of Bishop Ernulphus and hands it to Dr. Slop to read. It might seem tedious to have seven pages of excommunicative wrath thrust upon you, with the Latin text duly written out on the opposite page. On the contrary, this