abruptly with a mock physiologic disquisition upon the importance of a proper ordering of their mental states on the part of the intending progenitors of children, he philosophizes gravely on this theme for two or three chapters; and then wanders away into an account of the local midwife, upon whose sole services Mrs. Shandy, in opposition to her husband, was inclined to rely.  From the midwife it is an easy transition to her patron and protector, the incumbent of the parish, and this, in its turn, suggests a long excursus on the character, habits, appearance, home, friends, enemies, and finally death, burial, and epitaph of the Rev. Mr. Yorick.  Thence we return to Mr. and Mrs. Shandy, and are made acquainted, in absurdly minute detail, with an agreement entered into between them with reference to the place of sojourn to be selected for the lady’s accouchement, the burlesque deed which records this compact being actually set out at full length.  Thence, again, we are beckoned away by the jester to join him in elaborate and not very edifying ridicule of the Catholic doctrine of ante-natal baptism; and thence—­but it would be useless to follow further the windings and doublings of this literary hare.

Yet though the book, as one thus summarizes it, may appear a mere farrago of digressions, it nevertheless, after its peculiar fashion, advances.  Such definite purpose as underlies the tricks and grimaces of its author is by degrees accomplished; and before we reach the end of the first volume the highly humorous, if extravagantly idealized, figure of Mr. Shandy takes bodily shape and consistency before our eyes.  It is a mistake, I think, of Sir Walter Scott’s to regard the portrait of this eccentric philosopher as intended for a satire upon perverted and deranged erudition—­as the study of a man “whom too much and too miscellaneous learning had brought within a step or two of madness.”  Sterne’s conception seems to me a little more subtle and less commonplace than that.  Mr. Shandy, I imagine, is designed to personify not “crack-brained learning” so much as “theory run mad.”  He is possessed by a sort of Demon of the Deductive, ever impelling him to push his premises to new conclusions without ever allowing him time to compare them with the facts.  No doubt we are meant to regard him as a learned man; but his son gives us to understand distinctly and very early in the book that his crotchets were by no means those of a weak receptive mind, overladen with more knowledge than it could digest, but rather those of an over-active intelligence, far more deeply and constantly concerned with its own processes than with the thoughts of others.  Tristram, indeed, dwells pointedly on the fact that his father’s dialectical skill was not the result of training, and that he owed nothing to the logic of the schools.  “He was certainly,” says his son, “irresistible both in his orations and disputations,” but that was because “he was born an orator ([Greek:  Theodidaktos]).  Persuasion hung upon his lips, and the elements of logic and rhetoric were so blended in him, and withal he had so shrewd a guess at the weaknesses and passions of his respondent, that Nature might have stood up and said, ‘This man is eloquent.’  And yet,” continues the filial panegyric,