“‘De mortuis nil nisi bonum.’  I declare I have considered the wisdom and foundation of it over and over again as dispassionately and charitably as a good Christian can, and, after all, I can find nothing in it, or make more of it than a nonsensical lullaby of some nurse, put into Latin by some pedant, to be chanted by some hypocrite to the end of the world for the consolation of departing lechers.  ’Tis, I own, Latin, and I think that is all the weight it has, for, in plain English, ’tis a loose and futile position below a dispute.  ’You are not to speak anything of the dead but what is good.’  Why so?  Who says so?  Neither reason nor Scripture.  Inspired authors have done otherwise, and reason and common sense tell me that, if the characters of past ages and men are to be drawn at all, they are to be drawn like themselves, that is, with their excellences and their foibles; and it as much a piece of justice to the world, and to virtue, too, to do the one as the other.  The ruling passion, et les egarements du coeur, are the very things which mark and distinguish a man’s character, in which I would as soon leave out a man’s head as his hobby-horse.  However, if, like the poor devil of a painter, we must conform to the pious canon, ‘De mortuis,’ &c., which I own has a spice of piety in the sound of it, and be obliged to paint both our angels and our devils out of the same pot, I then infer that our Sydenhams and our Sangrados, our Lucretias and our Messalinas, our Somersets and our Bolingbrokes, are alike entitled to statues, and all the historians or satirists who have said otherwise since they departed this life, from Sallust to S——­e, are guilty of the crimes you charge me with, ‘cowardice and injustice.’  But why cowardice?  ’Because ’tis not courage to attack a dead man who can’t defend himself.’  But why do you doctors attack such a one with your incision knife?  Oh! for the good of the living.  ’Tis my plea.”

And, having given this humorous twist to his argument, he glides off into extenuatory matter.  He had not even, he protests, made as much as a surgical incision into his victim (Dr. Richard Mead, the friend of Bentley and of Newton, and a physician and physiologist of high repute in his day); he had but just scratched him, and that scarce skin-deep.  As to the “droll foible” of Dr. Mead, which he had made merry with, “it was not first reported (even to the few who can understand the hint) by me, but known before by every chambermaid and footman within the bills of mortality”—­a somewhat daring assertion, one would imagine, considering what the droll foible was; and Dr. Mead, continues Sterne, great man as he was, had, after all, not fared worse than “a man of twice his wisdom”—­to wit Solomon, of whom the same remark had been made, that “they were both great men, and, like all mortal men, had each their ruling passion.”