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Updated: June 14, 2025
A little more than a year later, June 13, 1766, this same journal, under the caption “London,” reviews the Becket and de Hondt four-volume edition of the “Sermons of Mr. Yorick.” The critic thinks a warning necessary: “One should not be deceived by the title: the author’s name is not Yorick,” and then he adds the information of the real authorship. This is a valid indication that, in the opinion of the reviewer, the name Yorick would not be sufficiently linked in the reader’s mind with the personality of Sterne and the fame of his first great book, to preclude the possibility, or rather probability, of error. This state of affairs is hardly reconcilable with any widespread knowledge of the first volumes of Shandy. The criticism of the sermons which follows implies, on the reviewer’s part, an acquaintance with Sterne, with Tristram, a
Votaries of Venus and of Bacchus were all of them, however disguised; and, secure in that close conclave, where no pure female presence was found to check the bacchanalian song, or forbid the ribald jest, all sat to listen to and applaud their host's inimitable stories, his grotesque descriptions, his wayward thoughts and fantastic images; to hearken to his close analysis, his robust reasoning, his wondrous pathos, his sublime exaggeration; and, as the wine circulated, to observe yet more his chameleon aspect and Protean character unfold itself; now grovelling like the Paradisal toad, wherein, at the ear of Eve, was hidden the form of Lucifer; now, touched by the Ithuriel spear of some keen conception, suddenly soaring, like to the bright expanded shape of the surprised and fallen Archangel, till the guests themselves, like the startled Ithuriel recoiling from the instant apparition of the fiend, drew back in amazement, or, as if at the jests of another Yorick, raised over the table a long, eruptive roar.
We'll go o'horseback, said my father, turning to Yorick Of all things in the world, except politicks, the clergy know the least of heraldry, said Yorick. No matter for that, cried my father I should be sorry to appear with a blot in my escutcheon before them. Never mind the bend-sinister, said my uncle Toby, putting on his tye-wig.
"I put it down just as it was," said Shakespeare, hotly, "and you can't dispute it." "Yes, he can," said Yorick. "You made him tell Horatio he knew me well, and he never met me in his life." "I never told Horatio anything of the sort," said Hamlet. "I never entered the graveyard even, and I can prove an alibi."
This Yorick it was who declared that the Frenchman's epigram describing gravity as "a mysterious carriage of the body to cover the defects of the mind," deserved "to be wrote in letters of gold"; and I make no doubt that had there been a greater recognition of the extreme value and importance of humour in the early ages of the world, our history books would record fewer blunders on the part of kings, counsellors, and princes, and the great churches would not have alienated the sympathy of so many goodly people at the most important moment in their existence the beginning of their proselytism.
I think there must certainly have been a mixture of ill-luck in it, that the reasons on both sides should happen to be so equally balanced by each other; for though my father weigh'd them in all humours and conditions spent many an anxious hour in the most profound and abstracted meditation upon what was best to be done reading books of farming one day books of travels another laying aside all passion whatever viewing the arguments on both sides in all their lights and circumstances communing every day with my uncle Toby arguing with Yorick, and talking over the whole affair of the Ox-moor with Obadiah yet nothing in all that time appeared so strongly in behalf of the one, which was not either strictly applicable to the other, or at least so far counterbalanced by some consideration of equal weight, as to keep the scales even.
And as that delineator enters the grave, and commences his tune, the old man's anxiety increases. A twitching and shrugging of the shoulders, discovers Mr. McArthur's feelings. The grave-digger, to the great delight of the Star, bespreads the stage with a multiplicity of bones. Then he follows them with a skull, the appearance of which causes Mr. McArthur to exclaim, "Ah! that's my poor Yorick."
The reviewer thus singled out for especial approval two interpolations by the German translator, incidents which in their conception and narration have not the true English Yorick ring.
Bauer errs in stating that Shandy appeared 1759-67 in York, implying that the whole work was issued there. He gives the dates of Sterne’s first visit to Paris, also incorrectly, as 1760-62. Finally, Wieland cannot be classed among the slavish imitators of Yorick; he is too independent a thinker, too insistent a pedagogue to allow himself to be led more than outwardly by the foreign model.
The air hung dull and lifeless. The chairs stood stiff against the wall, the watching books had no greeting. Only Yorick swung and flapped in his cage, his throat full of mutterings. It is all very well to be a good loser. But loss is bitter. Here was loss, stark and staring. Spence walked over to the neatly tidied desk and there, for an instant, the cold finger lifted from his heart.
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