Some there were, no doubt, who
perceived the influence of Rabelais in the incessant digressions and
the burlesque of philosophy; others, it may be, found a reminder of
Burton in the parade of learning; and yet a few others, the scattered
students of French facetiae of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries,
may have read the broad jests with a feeling that they had "seen
something like it before." But no single reader, no single critic of
the time, appears to have combined the knowledge necessary for tracing
these three characteristics of the novel to their respective sources;
and none certainly had any suspicion of the extent to which the
books and authors from whom they were imitated had been laid under
contribution. No one suspected that Sterne, not content with borrowing
his trick of rambling from Rabelais, and his airs of erudition from
Burton, and his fooleries from Bruscambille, had coolly transferred
whole passages from the second of these writers, not only without
acknowledgment, but with the intention, obviously indicated by his
mode of procedure, of passing them off as his own. Nay, it was not
till full fifty years afterwards that these daring robberies were
detected, or, at any rate, revealed to the world; and, with an irony
which Sterne himself would have appreciated, it was reserved for a
sincere admirer of the humourist to play the part of detective.
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