THE NORTH RIDING PROJECT

Many critics and writers of eminence have tried to analyse Sterne’s style and methods, contrasting him with Rabelais, Cervantes, Fielding, and Dickens.  The truth is, our author was so capricious, and even fragmentary and disorderly in his system, that comparison is impossible.  The writers just named were really “monumental” in their handling of their characters, and completed their labour before issuing it to the world.  Sterne sent forth his work in fragments, and often wrote what was sheer nonsense to fill his volumes.  He allowed his pen to lead him, instead of he himself directing his pen.  The whole is so incomplete and disjointed that cosmopolitan readers have not the time or the patience to piece the various scraps together.

Fitzgerald/Dandies