It is to this greater power--this control over a
greater instinct than the human love of joy, that Cervantes owes his
greatness; and it will be found, though it may seem at first a hard
saying, that Sterne shares this power with Cervantes. To pass from
Quixote and Sancho to Walter and Toby Shandy involves, of course, a
startling change of dramatic key--a notable lowering of dramatic
tone. It is almost like passing from poetry to prose: it is certainly
passing from the poetic in spirit and surroundings to the profoundly
prosaic in fundamental conception and in every individual detail.
But those who do not allow accidental and external dissimilarities to
obscure for them the inward and essential resemblances of things, must
often, I think, have experienced from one of the Shandy dialogues the
same _sort_ of impression that they derive from some of the most nobly
humorous colloquies between the knight and his squire, and must have
been conscious through all outward differences of key and tone of a
common element in each. It is, of course, a resemblance of _relations_
and not of personalities; for though there is something of the Knight
of La Mancha in Mr.
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