There is to his credit in general, as has been already pointed out, the great asset of having indicated, and in two notable instances patterned, the out-of-the-way novel--the novel eccentric, particular, individual.

There is to that credit still more the brilliancy of the two specimens themselves in spite of their faults; their effectiveness in the literature of delight; the great powers of a kind more or less peculiar to the artist which they show, and the power, perhaps still greater, which they display in the actually general and ordinary lines of the novel, though adapted to this extraordinary use.
For though it pleased Sterne to anticipate the knife-grinder's innocent confession, "Story?
God bless you! I have none to tell, sir!" in a sardonic paraphrase of half a score of volumes, he actually possessed the narrative faculty in an extraordinary degree.

He does not merely show this in his famous inset short stories, accomplished as these are: he achieves a much greater marvel in the way in which he makes his _fatrasies_ as it were novels.

After one or two, brief but certainly not tedious, volumes of the _Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy_, you know that you are being cheated, and are going to be: at the end you know still more certainly that you have been.

You have had nothing of the "Life" but a great deal round rather than about the birth, and a few equivocal, merely glanced at, and utterly unco-ordinated incidents later.