5.
When you have secured a man's likings and prejudices in your favour, you may then safely appeal to his impartial judgment. In the following passage not only is acute sense shrouded in wit, but a life and a character are added which exalt the whole into the dramatic:
"I see plainly, Sir, by your looks" (or as the case happened) my father would say "that you do not heartily subscribe to this opinion of mine which, to those," he would add, "who have not carefully sifted it to the bottom, I own has an air more of fancy than of solid reasoning in it; and yet, my dear Sir, if I may presume to know your character, I am morally assured, I should hazard little in stating a case to you, not as a party in the dispute, but as a judge, and trusting my appeal upon it to your good sense and candid disquisition in this matter; you are a person free from as many narrow prejudices of education as most men; and, if I may presume to penetrate farther into you, of a liberality of genius above bearing down an opinion, merely because it wants friends. Your son, your dear son, from whose sweet and open temper you have so much to expect, your Billy, Sir! would you, for the world, have called him JUDAS? Would you, my dear Sir," he would say, laying his hand upon your breast, with the genteelest address, and in that soft and irresistible piano of voice which the nature of the argumentum ad hominem absolutely requires, "Would you, Sir, if a Jew of a godfather had proposed the name for your child, and offered you his purse along with it, would you have consented to such a desecration of him? O my God!" he would say, looking up, "if I know your temper rightly, Sir, you are incapable of it; you would have trampled upon the offer; you would have thrown the temptation at the tempter's head with abhorrence. Your greatness of mind in this action, which I admire, with that generous contempt of money, which you show me in the whole transaction, is really noble; and what renders it more so, is the principle of it; the workings of a parent's love upon the truth and conviction of this very hypothesis, namely, that were your son called Judas, the sordid and treacherous idea, so inseparable from the name, would have accompanied him through life like his shadow, and in the end made a miser and a rascal of him, in spite, Sir, of your example." (Vol. i. c. 19.)
6.
There is great physiognomic tact in Sterne. See it particularly displayed in his description of Dr. Slop, accompanied with all that happiest use of drapery and attitude, which at once give reality by individualizing and vividness by unusual, yet probable, combinations:
Imagine to yourself a little squat, uncourtly figure of a Doctor Slop, of about four feet and a half perpendicular height, with a breadth of back, and a sesquipedality of belly, which might have done honour to a serjeant in the horseguards. ... Imagine such a one; for such I say, were the outlines of Dr. Slop's figure, coming slowly along, foot by foot, waddling through the dirt upon the vertebræ of a little diminutive pony, of a pretty colour but of strength, alack! scarce able to have made an amble of it, under such a fardel, had the roads been in an ambling condition; they were not. Imagine to yourself Obadiah mounted upon a strong monster of a coach-horse, pricked into a full gallop, and making all practicable speed the adverse way. (Vol. ii. c. 9.)
7.
I think there is more humour in the single remark, which I have quoted before "Learned men, brother Toby, don't write dialogues upon long noses for nothing!" than in the whole Slawkenburghian tale that follows, which is mere oddity interspersed with drollery.
8.
Note Sterne's assertion of, and faith in, a moral good in the characters of Trim, Toby, &c. as contrasted with the cold scepticism of motives which is the stamp of the Jacobin spirit. (Vol. v. c. 9.)