Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 29, 2025
The simplicity of nature and the "kindly, sweet disposition" are common to both the ensign of real life and to the immortal Captain Shandy of fiction; but the criticism which professes to find traces of Roger Sterne's "rapid and hasty temper" in my Uncle Toby is compelled to strain itself considerably.
Sterne's truly hideous French French at which even Stratford-atte-Bowe would have stood aghast is in itself sufficient evidence of a natural insensibility to grammatical accuracy. Here there can be no suspicion of designed defiance of rules; and more than one solecism of rather a serious kind in his use of English words and phrases affords confirmatory testimony to the same point.
Here the historian ought to sketch this lady; but it occurs to him that even those who are ignorant of Sterne's system of "cognomology," cannot pronounce the three words "Madame de Listomere" without picturing her to themselves as noble and dignified, softening the sternness of rigid devotion by the gracious elegance and the courteous manners of the old monarchical regime; kind, but a little stiff; slightly nasal in voice; allowing herself the perusal of "La Nouvelle Heloise"; and still wearing her own hair.
This, however, is to be found in the Memoirs of John Macdonald, "a cadet of the house of Keppoch," at that time footman to Mr. Crawford, a fashionable friend of Sterne's. His master had taken a house in Clifford Street in the spring of 1768; and "about this time," he writes, "Mr. Sterne, the celebrated author, was taken ill at the silk-bag shop in Old Bond Street.
Its fragmentary form was doubtlessly suggested by Sterne's "Sentimental Journey," and the adventures of the hero himself are reminiscent of those of Moses in "The Vicar of Wakefield." But of these two masterpieces Mackenzie's work falls short: it has none of Sterne's humour, nor has it any of Goldsmith's subtle characterisation.
Sterne's study was the very small room on the right-hand side of the entrance doorway; it now contains nothing associated with him, and there is more pleasure in viewing the outside of the house than is gained by obtaining permission to enter.
But then use is everything, and with proper care . . . The channel was broad and safe enough; the main point was to hit upon the entrance correctly in the dark for if a man got himself involved in that stretch of broken water over yonder he would never get out with a whole ship if he ever got out at all. This was Sterne's last train of thought independent of the great discovery.
Throughout all of them, however, Sterne's new-found literary power displays itself in a vigour of expression and vivacity of illustration which at least serve to make the sermons of 1766 considerably more entertaining reading than those of 1761.
Sterne's twelfth sermon, on the Forgiveness of Injuries, is merely a diluted commentary on the conclusion of Hall's "Contemplation of Joseph."
It is, in fact, with Sterne's general delineations of character as it is, I have attempted to show, with his particular passages of sentiment. He is never at his best and truest as, indeed, no writer of fiction ever is or can be save when he is allowing his dramatic imagination to play the most freely upon his characters, and thinking least about himself.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking