Volume 34, Number 5 · March 26, 1987
The Genius of Shandy Hall
By John Bayley
Laurence Sterne: The Later Years
by Arthur H. Cash
Methuen, 390 pp., $49.95
The only people whom Laurence Sterne did not get on with were other writers. Not that his universal good nature was in the least competitive, but he had an involuntary knack of suborning their confidence in themselves and spoiling their image. Even Dr. Johnson withdrew when the author of The Sermons of Mr. Yorick held forth at one of Joshua Reynolds's parties, nominally because of his impropriety, but actually, one suspects, because the Johnsonian style was insensibly rebuked by Sterne's genius. This is one of the many glimpses that Arthur Cash provides in the second volume of his superlative life.[*]
Review, 3073 words
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