If you have had any "opinions" they have been chiefly those of Mr.Tristram Shandy's father and other members of his family, or those of its friends and circle, or of those shadowy personages outside the pretended story, such as Eugenius and Yorick, besides a few discourses which drop the slightest pretension of being Shandean or Tristramic and are plainly and simply the author's.

In the _Journey_ there is more unity; but it is, quite frankly, the unity of the temperament of that author himself.

The incidents--sentimental, whimsical, fie-fie--have no other connection or tendency than the fact that they occur to the "gentleman in the black silk smalls" and furnish him with figures as it were for his performance.

Yet you are _held_ in a way in which nothing but the romance or the novel ever does hold you.

The thing is a [Greek: mythos hamythos]--story without story-end, without story-beginning, without story-connection or middle: but a story for all that.