Curse on farming! (I said). Let us see if the pen will
not succeed better than the spade."]
[Footnote 2: He himself, indeed, makes a particular point of this in
explaining his literary venture. "Now for your desire," he writes to
a correspondent in 1759, "of knowing the reason of my turning author?
why, truly I am tired of employing my brains for other people's
advantage. 'Tis a foolish sacrifice I have made for some years for an
ungrateful person."--_Letters_, i. 82.]
All the world knows how far he ultimately advanced beyond the
simplicity of the conception, and into what far higher regions of art
its execution led him. But I find no convincing reason for believing
that _Tristram Shandy_ had at the outset any more seriously artistic
purpose than this; and much indirect evidence that this, in fact, it
was.
The humorous figure of Mr. Shandy is, of course, the Cervantic centre
of the whole; and it was out of him and his crotchets that Sterne,
no doubt, intended from the first to draw the materials of that often
unsavoury fun which was to amuse the light-minded and scandalize the
demure. But it can hardly escape notice that the two most elaborate
portraits in Vol.
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