sacristan, was a bishop. I thought so, by heaven! cried my father, interrupting him St. Optat! how should St. Optat fail?"* Unluckily for all this good raillery, the saint's name was Optatus, which is quite a different affair, unless the world should be disposed to admit the sincerity of the nolo episcopari, If Sterne had looked into Pasquier, he might have found other promising names, such as St. Opportune, St. Pretextat, and several others; Machiavel too informs us, that the first pope who altered his name was Ospurcus; he changed it to Sergius, from his dislike of the former; but indeed all these curiosities are, as Diogenes said on another subject, ráa baúμara uwpoîs, great marvels for fools. 1 In the present state of knowledge, it would be unpardonable to omit a remark, with which an author like Sterne would make himself very merry. It relates to + Tristram Shandy, vel. viii. chap. 27. sary, the passage, in which Mr. Shandy treats the name of TRISTRAM with such indignity, and demands of his supposed adver"Whether he had ever remembered,-whether he had ever read,—or whether he had ever heard tell of a man, called Tristram, performing any thing great or worth recording?-No, he would say,-TRISTRAM! The thing is impossible!" A student of the fashionable black letter erudition would have triumphed, in proclaiming the redoubted Sir Tristram, Knight of the Round-table, and one of the most famous Knightserrant upon record. Sterne might have replied: Non scribit, cujus Carmina nemo legit;* and indeed his pleasant hero has no resemblance to the preux chevalier. I have a few observations to add, which are quite unconnected with each Sterne truly resembled Shake other. *Martial, lib. ii. speare's Biron, in the extent of his depredations from other writers, for the supply of Tristram : His eye begot occasion for his wit: For ev'ry object that the one did catch, Burton furnished the grand magazine, but many other books, which fell incidentally into his hands, were laid under contribution. I am sorry to deprive Sterne of the following pretty figure, but justice must be done to every one. "In short, my father advanced so very slowly with his work, and I began to live and get forward at such a rate, that if an event had not happened -&c. I verily believe I had put by my father, and left him drawing a sun-dial, for no better purpose than to be buried under ground."* Tris: Shandy, vol. v. chap. 16. Donne concludes his poem entitled The Will, with this very thought: And all your graces no more use shall have I must also notice a remarkable plagiarism, in the character of Yorick, vol. i. chapter xii. "When, to gratify "a private appetite, it is once resolved 66 upon, that an innocent and an help"less creature shall be sacrificed, 'tis an easy matter to pick up sticks enow "from any thicket where it has strayed, "to make a fire to offer it up with.' This is taken, almost verbatim, from the BACONIANA. I have said that Sterne took the hint of his marbled pages either from Swift, or the author of Gabriel John, quisquis fuit ille. There is no great merit in his mourning pages for Yorick, which are little superior, in point of invention, to the black borders of a hawker's elegy, yet even here an original genius has anticipated him. Every one knows the black pages in Tristram Shandy; that of prior date is to be found in Dr. Fludd's Utriusque cosmi Historia,* and is emblematic of the chaos. Fludd was a man of extensive erudition, and considerable observation, but his fancy, naturally vigorous, was fermented and depraved, by astrological and cabbalistic researches. It will afford a proof of his strange fancies, and at the same time do away all suspicion of Sterne in this instance, to quote the ludicrous coincidence mentioned by Morhoff, between himself and this author. Cogitandi modum in nobis et speculationis illas rationum, mirificè quodam in loco, videlicet in libro de mystica cerebri anatome [Fluddius] ob oculos ponit. Solent ab anatomicis illic delineari genitalia membra, utriusque sexus, quod processus quidam et sinus, eum in modum figurati sunt. Hic Fluddius invenit, non quod pueri in faba, illic dicit generari cogita * Page 26. |