His three best known works are Roderick Random (1748), a series of adventures related by the hero; Peregrine Pickle (1751) in which he reflects with brutal directness the worst of his experiences at sea; and Humphrey Clinker (1771), his last work, recounting the mild adventures of a Welsh family in a journey through England and Scotland.  This last alone can be generally read without arousing the readers profound disgust.  Without any particular ability, he models his novels on Don Quixote, and the result is simply a series of coarse adventures which are characteristic of the picaresque novel of his age.  Were it not for the fact that he unconsciously imitates Jonson’s Every Man in His Humour, he would hardly be named among our writers of fiction; but in seizing upon some grotesque habit or peculiarity and making a character out of it—­such as Commodore Trunnion in Peregrine Pickle, Matthew Bramble in Humphrey Clinker, and Bowling in Roderick Random—­he laid the foundation for that exaggeration in portraying human eccentricities which finds a climax in Dickens’s caricatures.

Lawrence Sterne (1713-1768) has been compared to a “little bronze satyr of antiquity in whose hollow body exquisite odors were stored.”  That is true, so far as the satyr is concerned; for a more weazened, unlovely personality would be hard to find.  The only question in the comparison is in regard to the character of the odors, and that is a matter of taste.  In his work he is the reverse of Smollett, the latter being given over to coarse vulgarities, which are often mistaken for realism; the former to whims and vagaries and sentimental tears, which frequently only disguise a sneer at human grief and pity.

The two books by which Sterne is remembered are Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy.  These are termed novels for the simple reason that we know not what else to call them.  The former was begun, in his own words, “with no real idea of how it was to turn out”; its nine volumes, published at intervals from 1760 to 1767, proceeded in the most aimless way, recording the experiences of the eccentric Shandy family; and the book was never finished.  Its strength lies chiefly in its brilliant style, the most remarkable of the age, and in its odd characters, like Uncle Toby and Corporal Trim, which, with all their eccentricities, are so humanized by the author’s genius that they belong among the great “creations” of our literature.  The Sentimental Journey is a curious combination of fiction, sketches of travel, miscellaneous essays on odd subjects,—­all marked by the same brilliancy of style, and all stamped with Sterne’s false attitude towards everything in life.  Many of its best passages were either adapted or taken bodily from Burton, Rabelais, and a score of other writers; so that, in reading Sterne, one is never quite sure how much is his own work, though the mark of his grotesque genius is on every page.