naming him,--all are scenes in this ludicrous and prolonged warfare. Nor is my Uncle Toby any the less a subject of Fortune's sport. There is, to begin with, a comical inconsistency between the feminine tenderness of his heart and his absorption in the memories of war. His hobby of living through in miniature the campaign of the army in Flanders is one of the kindliest satires on human ambition ever penned. And it was inevitable that my Uncle Toby, with his "most extreme and unparalleled modesty of nature," should in the end have fallen a victim to the designs of a woman like the Widow Wadman. It is, as I have said, this underlying philosophy worked out in every detail of the book which makes of _Tristram Shandy_ something more than a mere comedy of manners. It shatters the whole world of convention before our eyes and rebuilds it according to the humour of a mad Yorkshire parson. And all of us at times, I think, may find our pleasure and a lesson of human frailty, too, by entering for a while into the concerns of that Shandean society. Sterne, on one side of his character, was a sentimentalist. That, and little more than that, we see in his letters and _Journal_. And in a form, subtilised no doubt to a kind of exquisite felicity, that is the essence of his _Sentimental Journey_, as the name implies. He was indeed the first author to use the word "sentimental" in its modern significance, and for one reason and another this was the trait of his writing that was able, as the French would say, to _faire école_. It flooded English literature with tearful trash like Mackenzie's _Man of Feeling_, and, in a happier manner, it influenced even Thackeray more than he would have been willing to admit. It is present in _Tristram Shandy_, but only as a milder and half-concealed flavour, subduing the satire of that travesty to the uses of a genial and sympathetic humour.