These lapses, however, are,
fortunately, rare. As a rule we see the worthy Captain only as he
appeared to his creator's keen dramatic eye, and as he is set before
us in a thousand exquisite touches of dialogue--the man of simple mind
and soul, profoundly unimaginative and unphilosophical, but lacking
not in a certain shrewd common-sense; exquisitely _naif_, and
delightfully _mal-a-propos_ in his observations, but always
pardonably, never foolishly, so; inexhaustibly amiable, but with no
weak amiability; homely in his ways, but a perfect gentleman withal;
in a word, the most winning and lovable personality that is to be met
with, surely, in the whole range of fiction.
It is, in fact, with Sterne's general delineations of character as
it is, I have attempted to show, with his particular passages of
sentiment. He is never at his best and truest--as, indeed, no writer
of fiction ever is or can be--save when he is allowing his dramatic
imagination to play the most freely upon his characters, and thinking
least about himself. This is curiously illustrated in his handling
of what is, perhaps, the next most successful of the uncaricatured
portraits in the Shandy gallery--the presentment of the Rev.
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