As to the charge of plagiarism, we may say that Sterne's hero
is like the _Gargantua_ of Rabelais in many particulars; but he is a man
instead of a monster; while the chapter on _Hobby-Horses_ is a
reproduction, in a new form of crystallization, of _Gargantua's wooden
horses_.
So, too, the entire theological cast of _Tristram Shandy_ is that of the
sixteenth century;--questions before the Sorbonne, the use of
excommunication, and the like. Dr. Slop, the Roman Catholic surgeon of the
family, is but a weak mouthpiece of his Church in the polemics of the
story; for Sterne was a violent opponent of the Church of Rome in story as
well as in sermon; and Obadiah, the stupid man-servant, is the lay figure
who receives the curses which Dr. Slop reads,--"cursed in house and
stable, garden and field and highway, in path or in wood, in the water or
in the church." Whether the doctor was in earnest or not, Obadiah paid
him fully by upsetting him and his pony with the coach-horse.
But in spite of the resemblance to Rabelais and a former age, it must be
allowed that _Tristram Shandy_ contains many of the richest pictures and
fairest characters of the age in which it was written.
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