But it seems clear enough that Sterne himself was troubled by no
conscientious qualms on this subject. Perhaps the most extraordinary
instance of literary effrontery which was ever met with is the passage
in vol. v.c. 1, which even that seasoned detective Dr. Ferriar is
startled into pronouncing "singular." Burton had complained that
writers were like apothecaries, who "make new mixtures every day," by
"pouring out of one vessel into another." "We weave," he said, "the
same web still, twist the same rope again and again." And Sterne
_incolumi gravitate_ asks: "Shall we forever make new books as
apothecaries make new mixtures, by pouring only out of one vessel into
another? Are we forever to be twisting and untwisting the same rope,
forever on the same track, forever at the same pace?" And this he
writes with the scissors actually opened in his hand for the almost
bodily abstraction of the passage beginning, "Man, the most excellent
and noble creature of the world!" Surely this denunciation of
plagiarism by a plagiarist on the point of setting to work could only
have been written by a man who looked upon plagiarism as a good joke.
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