Sterne

The diminished appetite of the public for the humours of Mr. Shandy and his brother is, perhaps, not very difficult to understand. Time was simply doing its usual wholesome work...

Sterne alighted from the York mail, just as Byron "awoke one morning," to "find himself famous." Seldom indeed has any lion so suddenly discovered been pursued so eagerly and by...

To talk of "the style" of Sterne is almost to play one of those tricks with language of which he himself was so fond. For there is hardly any definition of the word which can ma...

Hitherto we have had to construct our conception of Sterne out of materials of more or less plausible conjecture. We are now at last approaching the region of positive evidence,...

In the first week of October, 1765, or a few days later, Sterne set out on what was afterwards to become famous as the "Sentimental Journey through France and Italy." Not, of co...

Great writers who spring late and suddenly from obscurity into fame and yet die early, must always form more or less perplexing subjects of literary biography. The processes of...

Everyday experience suffices to show that the qualities which win enduring fame for books and for their authors are not always those to which they owe their first popularity. It...

Subtle as is Sterne's humour, and true as, in its proper moods, is his pathos, it is not to these but to the parent gift from which they sprang, and perhaps to only one special...

Towards the close of the month of November, 1713, one of the last of the English regiments which had been detained in Flanders to supervise the execution of the treaty of Utrech...

The end was now fast approaching. Months before, Sterne had written doubtfully of his being able to stand another winter in England, and his doubts were to be fatally justified....

It was not--as we have seen from the Memoir--till the autumn of 1723, "or the spring of the following year," that Roger Sterne obtained leave of his colonel to "fix" his son at...