"
Taken altogether, however, his place in English letters is hard to
fix, and his tenure in human memory hard to determine. Hitherto he has
held his own, with the great writers of his era, but it has been in
virtue, as I have attempted to show, of a contribution to the literary
possessions of mankind which is as uniquely limited in amount as it is
exceptionally perfect in quality. One cannot but feel that, as regards
the sum of his titles to recollection, his name stands far below
either of those other two which in the course of the last century
added themselves to the highest rank among the classics of English
humour. Sterne has not the abounding life and the varied human
interest of Fielding; and, to say nothing of his vast intellectual
inferiority to Swift, he never so much as approaches those problems of
everlasting concernment to man which Swift handles with so terrible
a fascination. Certainly no enthusiastic Gibbon of the future is ever
likely to say of Sterne's "pictures of human manners" that they will
outlive the palace of the Escurial and the Imperial Eagle of the
House of Austria. Assuredly no one will ever find in _this_ so-called
English antitype of the Cure of Meudon any of the deeper qualities of
that gloomy and commanding spirit which has been finely compared to
the "soul of Rabelais _habitans in sicco_.
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