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My father's collection was not great, but to make amends, it was curious; and consequently he was some time in making it; he had the great good fortune hewever, to set off well, in getting Bruscambille's prologue upon long noses, almost for nothing for he gave no more for Bruscambille than three half-crowns; owing indeed to the strong fancy which the stall-man saw my father had for the book the moment he laid his hands upon it.
There are not three Bruscambilles in Christendom said the stall-man, except what are chain'd up in the libraries of the curious. My father flung down the money as quick as lightning took Bruscambille into his bosom hied home from Piccadilly to Coleman-street with it, as he would have hied home with a treasure, without taking his hand once off from Bruscambille all the way.
To those who do not yet know of which gender Bruscambille is inasmuch as a prologue upon long noses might easily be done by either 'twill be no objection against the simile to say, That when my father got home, he solaced himself with Bruscambille after the manner in which, 'tis ten to one, your worship solaced yourself with your first mistress that is, from morning even unto night: which, by-the-bye, how delightful soever it may prove to the inamorato is of little or no entertainment at all to by-standers.
No one suspected that Sterne, not content with borrowing his trick of rambling from Rabelais, and his airs of erudition from Burton, and his fooleries from Bruscambille, had coolly transferred whole passages from the second of these writers, not only without acknowledgment, but with the intention, obviously indicated by his mode of procedure, of passing them off as his own.
From Bruscambille he seems to have taken little or nothing but the not very valuable idea of the tedious buffoonery of vol. iii. c. 30, et sqq.; and to Scarron he, perhaps, owed the incident of the dwarf at the theatre in the Sentimental Journey, an incident which, it must be owned, he vastly improved in the taking.
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.
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