United States or India ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
The Berlinische Monatsschrift calls attention to the excellence of the work and quotes the sermons at considerable length. The comment contains the erroneous statement that Sterne was a dissenter, and opposed to the established church. The translation published at Thorn in 1795, evidently building on this information, continues the error, and, in explanation of English church affairs, adds as enlightenment the thirty-nine articles. This translation is confessedly a working-over of the Leipzig translation already mentioned. It is difficult to discover how these sermons ever became attached to Sterne’s name, and one can hardly explain the fact that such a magazine as the Berlinische Monatsschrift should at that late date publish an article so flatly contradictory to everything for which Sterne stood, so diametrically opposed to his career, save with the understanding that gross ignorance attended the original introduction and early imitation of Yorick, and that this incomprehension, or one-sided appreciation of the real Sterne persisted in succeeding decades. The German Yorick was the champion of the oppressed and downtrodden. The author of the “Sermons to Asses” appeared as such an opponent of coercion and arbitrary power in church and state, an upholder of human rights; hence, possibly, the authorship of this book was attributed to Sterne by something the same process as that which, in the age of heroic deeds, associated a miscellaneous collection of performances with a popular hero. The “Sermons to Asses” were written by Rev. James Murray (1732-1782), a
Word Of The Day