It would be tedious to point out every parallel passage, between Sterne, and an author whose book is in every one's hands. One of the conversations in Tristram Shandy, is borrowed completely from the Frenchman. -- “Now Ambrose Paræus convinced my father, that the true and efficient cause of what had engaged so much the attention of the world, and upon which Prignitz and Scroderus had wasted so much learning and fine parts-was neither this nor that but that the length and goodness of the nose, was owing simply to the softness and flaccidity of the nurse's breast-as the flatness and shortness of puisne noses was, to the firmness and elastic repulsion of the same organ of nutrition in the heal and lively -which, though happy for the woman, was the undoing of the child, inasmuch as his nose was so snubbed, so rubbed, so rebated, and so refrigerated thereby, as never to arrive ad mensuram suam legitimam ;-but that in case of the flaccidity and softness of the nurse or mother's breast by sinking into it, quoth Paræus, as into so much butter, the nose was comforted, nourished, &c."* "the causes of short and long noses. There is no cause but one, replied my uncle Toby,-why one man's nose is longer than another's, but because that God pleases to have it so. That is Grangousier's solution, said my Father. 'Tis he, continued my uncle Toby, looking up, and not regarding my Father's interruption, who makes us all, and frames and puts us together, in such forms and proportions, and for such ends, as is agreeable to his infinite wisdom."† 66 Pourquoy, dit Gargantua, est ce que frere Jean á si beau nez? Par ce (repondit Grangousier) qu' ainsi Dieu l' á voulu, lequel nous fait en telle forme, & telle fin, * Tristram Shandy, vol. iii. chap. xxxviii. selon son divin arbitre, que fait un potier ses vaisseaux. Par ce (dit Ponocrates) qu'il fut des premiers á la foire des nez. Il print de plus beaux & des plus grands. Trut avant (dit le moine) selon la vraye Philosophie Monastique, c' est, par ce que ma Nourrice avoit les tetins molets, en l'allaictant, mon nez y enfrondroit comme en beurre, et la s' eslevoit et croissoit comme la paste dedans la mets. Les durs tetins des Nourrices font les enfans camus. Mais gay, gay, ad formam nasi cognoscitur ad te levavi.”* Sterne even condescended to adopt some of those lively extravagancies, which (as Rabelais declares that he wrote "en mangeant & buvant") would tempt us to believe that the Gallic wit, like Dr. King, sometimes "Drank till he could not speak, and then he writ." "Bon jour! good morrow!-so you have got your cloak on betimes! but * Liv. 1. chap. xli. 't is a cold morning, and you judge the matter rightly—'t is better to be well mounted than go o' foot-and obstructions in the glands are dangerous-And how goes it with thy concubine thy wife-and thy little ones o' both sides? and when did you hear from the old gentleman and lady, &c.* "Gens de bien," says Rabelais, "Dieu vous sauve et gard. Ou estes vous? je ne peux vous voir. Attendez que je chausse mes lunettes. Ha, ha, bien & beau s'én va Quaresme, je vous voy. Et doncques? Vous avez eu bonne vinee, á ce que m’ á dit. Vous, vos femmes, enfans, parens et familles estes en santè desiree. Cela va bien, cela est bon, cela me plaist" &c. l' on BEROALDE, Sieur de VERVILLE, a canon of the cathedral of Tours, considered his reputation as a wit, more than as a clergyman, in his Moyen de Parvenir, Tristram Shandy, vol. viii, chap. iii. published in 1599; a book disgusting by its grossness, but extremely curious, from the striking pictures which it offers, of the manners and knowledge of the age. From him, I suspect, Sterne took Mr. Shandy's repartee to Obadiah. My father had a little favourite mare, which he had consigned over to a most beautiful Arabian horse, in order to have a pad out of her for his own riding: he was sanguine in all his projects; so talked about his pad every day with as absolute a security, as if it had been reared, broke, bridled and saddled at his door ready for mounting. By some neglect or other in Obadiah, it so fell out, that my father's expectations were answered with nothing better than a mule, and as ugly a beast of the kind as ever was produced. "My mother and my uncle Toby expected my father would be the death of Obadiah, and that there never would be an end of the disaster.-See here! you rascal, cried my father, pointing to (1 |