No less a critic than M. Scherer has given his sanction to the idea that in Sterne we have a special, if not even _the_ special, type of the humourist; and probably few people who have given no particular thought or attention to the matter, would refuse to agree with him. I am myself inclined rather to a demur, or, at any rate, to a distinction, though few better things have been written about humour itself than a passage in M. Scherer’s essay on our author. Sterne has no doubt in a very eminent degree the sense of contrast, which all the best critics admit to be the root of humour--the note of the humourist. But he has it partially, occasionally, and, I should even go as far as to say, not _greatly_. The _great_ English humourists, I take it, are Shakespeare, Swift, Fielding, Thackeray, and Carlyle. All these--even Fielding, whose eighteenth-century manner, the contemporary and counterpart of Sterne’s, cannot hide the truth--apply the humourist contrast, the humourist sense of the irony of existence, to the great things, the _prima et novissima_. They see, and feel, and show the simultaneous sense of Death and Life, of Love and Loss, of the Finite and the Infinite. Sterne stops a long way short of this; _les grands sujets lui sont défendus_ in another sense than La Bruyère’s. It is scarcely too much to say that his ostentatious preference for the _bagatelle_ was a real, and not in the least affected fact. Nowhere, not in the true pathos of the famous deathbed letter to Mrs. James, not in the, as it seems to me, by no means wholly true pathos of the Le Fever episode, does he pierce to “the accepted hells beneath.” He has an unmatched command of the lesser and lower varieties of the humorous contrast--over the odd, the petty, the queer, above all, over what the French untranslatably call the _saugrenu_. His forte is the foible; his _cheval de bataille_, the hobby-horse. If you want to soar into the heights, or plunge into the depths of humour, Sterne is not for you. But if you want what his own generation called a frisk on middle, _very_ middle-earth, a hunt in curiosity-shops (especially of the technically “curious” description), a peep into all manner of _coulisses_ and behind-scenes of human nature, a ride on a sort of intellectual switchback, a view of moral, mental, religious, sentimental dancing of all the kinds that have delighted man, from the rope to the skirt, then have with Sterne in any direction he pleases. He may sometimes a very little disgust you, but you will seldom have just cause to complain that he disappoints and deceives.