I can never look at that portrait of Sterne by Sir Joshua Reynolds, with the head thrown forward and the index finger of the right hand laid upon the forehead, but an extraordinary fantasy enters my mind. I seem to see one of those pictures of the Renaissance, in which the face of the Almighty beams benevolently out of the sky, but as I gaze, the features gradually change into those of Yorick. The mouth assumes the sly smile, and the eyes twinkle with conscious merriment, as if they were saying, "We know, you and I, but we won't tell!" Possibly it is something in the pose of Sir Joshua's picture which lends itself to this transformation, helped by a feeling that the Shandean world, over which Sterne presides, is at times as real as the actualities that surround us. That portrait at the head of his works is, so to speak, an image of His Sacred Majesty, Chance, whom a witty Frenchman reverenced as the genius of this world. It may be that we do not always in our impatience recognise how artfully the caprices of Sterne's manner are adapted to creating this atmosphere of illusion. Now and then his trick of reaching a point by the longest way round, his wanton interruptions, the absurdity of his blank pages, and other cheap devices to appear original, grow a trifle wearisome, and we call the author a mountebank for his pains. Yet was there ever a great book without its tedious flats? They would seem to be necessary to procure the proper perspective. Certainly all these whimsicalities of Sterne's manner fall in admirably with the central theme of _Tristram Shandy_, which is nothing else but an exposition of the way in which the blind goddess Chance, whose hobby-horse is this world itself, makes her plaything of the lesser caprices of mankind. "I have been the continual sport of what the world calls Fortune," cries Tristram at the beginning of his narrative, and indeed that deity laid her designs early against our hero, whose troubles date from the very day of conception. "I see it plainly," says Mr. Shandy, in his chapter of Lamentation, when calamity had succeeded calamity--"I see it plainly, that either for my own sins, brother _Toby_, or the sins and follies of the _Shandy_ family, Heaven has thought fit to draw forth the heaviest of its artillery against me; and the prosperity of my child is the point upon which the whole force of it is directed to play."--"Such a thing would batter the whole universe about our ears," replies my Uncle Toby, thinking no doubt of the terrible work of the artillery in Flanders. Mr. Shandy was a man of ideas, and Tristram was to be the embodiment of a theory. But alas,--"with all my precautions how was my system turned topside-turvy in the womb with my child!" There is something inimitably droll in this combat between the solemn, pedantic notions of Mr. Shandy and the blunders of Chance. The interrupted conception of poor Tristram, his unfortunate birth, the crushing of his nose, the grotesque mistake in