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A letter was read also from Manchester, signed conjointly by George Barton, Thomas Cooper, John Ferriar, Thomas Walker, Thomas Phillips, Thomas Butterworth Bayley, and George Lloyd, esquires, promising their assistance for that place.
Perhaps the most extraordinary instance of literary effrontery which was ever met with is the passage in vol. v.c. 1, which even that seasoned detective Dr. Ferriar is startled into pronouncing "singular." Burton had complained that writers were like apothecaries, who "make new mixtures every day," by "pouring out of one vessel into another."
By this article Nicolai choked the malicious criticism of the late favorite which might have followed from some sources, had another communicated the facts of Sterne’s thievery. Lichtenberg in the “Göttingischer Taschenkalender,” 1796, that is, after the publication of Nicolai’s article, but with reference to Ferriar’s essay in the Manchester Memoirs, Vol. IV, under the title of “Gelehrte Diebstähle” does impugn Sterne rather spitefully without any acknowledgment of his extraordinary and extenuating use of his borrowings. “Yorick,” he says, “once plucked a nettle which had grown upon Lorenzo’s grave; that was no labor for him. Who will uproot this plant which Ferriar has set on his?” Ferriar’s book was reviewed by the Neue Bibliothek der schönen Wissenschaften, LXII, p.
Böttiger tells us that Lessing possessed a copy of Burton’s “Anatomy of Melancholy,” from which Sterne filched so much wisdom, and that Lessing had marked in it several of the passages which Ferriar later advanced as proof of Sterne’s theft. It seems that Bode purchased this volume at Lessing’s auction in Hamburg.
A letter was read also from Manchester, signed conjointly by George Barton Thomas Cooper, John Ferriar, Thomas Walker, Thomas Phillips, Thomas Butterworth Bayley, and George Lloyd, Esqrs., promising their assistance from that place.
Some of his lines are transferred bodily, and without acknowledgment, from Hafiz; and, no doubt, if anybody were to take the trouble to investigate, it would be found that many other lines are not original. It is really not very much to anyone's credit to play the John Ferriar to so careless a Sterne. He doesn't steal the material for his brooms, he steals the brooms ready-made.
And there is a passage in the Sentimental Journey, the "Fragment in the Abderitans," which shows, Dr. Ferriar thinks though it does not seem to me to show conclusively that Sterne was unaware that what he was taking from Burton had been previously taken by Burton from Lucian. Ferriar observes drily, "the principal matter must consist of repetitions."
Ferriar holds Sterne to have been more or less indebted: Rabelais, Beroalde de Verville, Bouchet, Bruscambille, Scarron, Swift, an author of the name or pseudonym of "Gabriel John," Burton, Bacon, Blount, Montaigne, Bishop Hall. The catalogue is a reasonably long one; but it is not, of course, to be supposed that Sterne helped himself equally freely from every author named in it.
Lessing evidently thought it not worth while to mention these discoveries, as he is entirely silent on the subject. Böttiger is, in his account, most unwarrantedly severe on Ferriar, whom he calls “the bilious Englishman” who attacked Sterne “with so much bitterness.” This is very far from a veracious conception of Ferriar’s attitude.
His obligations to some of them are, as Dr. Ferriar admits, but slight. "That is Grangousier's solution," said my father. "'Tis He," continued my Uncle Toby, "who makes us all, and frames and puts us together in such forms ... and for such ends as is agreeable to His infinite wisdom." Tristram Shandy, vol. iii. c. 41.
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