About Walter Shandy there is more room for difference: and it is possible to contend that, great as he is, he is not complete--that he is something of a "humour" in the old one-sided and over-emphasised Jonsonian sense.

Nothing that he does or says misbecomes him: but a good deal that he does not do and say might be added with advantage, in order to give us the portrait of a whole as well as a live man.

As for the other male characters, Sterne's plan excused him--as it did not quite in Mr.Shandy's case--from making them more than sketches and shadows.

But what uncommonly lively sketches and shadows they are! Sterne's unlucky failing prevented him in most cases from touching the women off with a clean brush: but the quality of _liveness_ pertains to them in almost a higher measure: and perhaps testifies even more strongly to his almost uncanny faculty of communicating it by touches which are not always unclean and are sometimes slight to an astonishing degree.

Even that shadow of a shade "My dear, dear Jenny" has a suggestion of verity about her which has shocked and fluttered some: the maids of the Shandean household, the grisettes and peasant girls and ladies of the _Journey_, have flesh which is not made of paper, and blood that is certainly not ink.