Not that this is Sterne’s only raid upon the quaint old writer of whom he has here made such free use.  Several other instances of word for word appropriation might be quoted from this and the succeeding volumes of Tristram Shandy.  The apostrophe to “blessed health,” in c. xxxiii. of vol. v. is taken direct from the Anatomy of Melancholy; so is the phrase, “He has a gourd for his head and a pippin for his heart,” in c. ix.; so is the jest about Franciscus Ribera’s computation of the amount of cubic space required by the souls of the lost; so is Hilarion the hermit’s comparison of his body with its unruly passions to a kicking ass.  And there is a passage in the Sentimental Journey, the “Fragment in the Abderitans,” which shows, Dr. Ferriar thinks—­though it does not seem to me to show conclusively—­that Sterne was unaware that what he was taking from Burton had been previously taken by Burton from Lucian.

There is more excuse, in the opinion of the author of the Illustrations, for the literary thefts of the preacher than for those of the novelist; since in sermons, Dr. Ferriar observes drily, “the principal matter must consist of repetitions.”

But it can hardly, I think, be admitted that the kind of “repetitions” to which Sterne had recourse in the pulpit—­or, at any rate, in compositions ostensibly prepared for the pulpit—­are quite justifiable.  Professor Jebb has pointed out, in a recent volume of this series, that the description of the tortures of the Inquisition, which so deeply moved Corporal Trim in the famous Sermon on Conscience, was really the work of Bentley; but Sterne has pilfered more freely from a divine more famous as a preacher than the great scholar whose words he appropriated on that occasion.  “Then shame and grief go with her,” he exclaims in his singular sermon on “The Levite and his Concubine;” “and wherever she seeks a shelter may the hand of Justice shut the door against her!” an exclamation which is taken, as, no doubt, indeed, was the whole suggestion of the somewhat strange subject, from the Contemplations of Bishop Hall.  And so, again, we find in Sterne’s sermon the following: 

“Mercy well becomes the heart of all Thy creatures! but most of Thy servant, a Levite, who offers up so many daily sacrifices to Thee for the transgressions of Thy people.  But to little purpose, he would add, have I served at Thy altar, where my business was to sue for mercy, had I not learned to practise it.”

And in Hall’s Contemplations the following: 

“Mercy becomes well the heart of any man, but most of a Levite.  He that had helped to offer so many sacrifices to God for the multitude of every Israelite’s sins saw how proportionable it was that man should not hold one sin unpardonable.  He had served at the altar to no purpose, if he (whose trade was to sue for mercy) had not at all learned to practise it.”

Sterne’s twelfth sermon, on the Forgiveness of Injuries, is merely a diluted commentary on the conclusion of Hall’s “Contemplation of Joseph.”  In the sixteenth sermon, the one on Shimei, we find: