‘Yorickism’ is, there is scarcely need to say, the very opposite of the humour of Swift. One recognizes that the universe is rich in things to laugh at and to love; the other recognizes that the universe is rich in things to laugh at and to hate. One recognizes that among these absurd things there is nothing else so absurd and (because so absurd) so lovable as a man; the other recognizes that there is nothing else so absurd and (because so absurd) so hateful as a man. The intellectual process is the same; the difference lies in the temperament—the temperament of Jaques and the temperament of Apemantus. And in regard to misanthropic ridicule it is difficult to say which fate is more terrible, Swift’s or Carlyle’s—that of the man whose heart must needs yearn towards a race which his piercing intellect bids him hate, or that of the man, religious, conscientious, and good, who would fain love his fellows and cannot. It is idle for men of this kind to try to work in the vein of Yorick. It needs the sweet temper of him who at the Mermaid kept the table in a roar, or of him who, in the words of the ‘cadet of the house of Keppoch,’ was ‘sometimes called Tristram Shandy and sometimes Yorick, a very great favourite of the gentlemen.’ Sterne, like Jaques and Hamlet, deals with ‘the irony of human intercourse,’ but what he specially recognizes is a deeper irony still—the irony of man’s intercourse with himself and with nature, the irony of the intercourse between man the spiritual being and man the physical being—the irony, in short, of man’s position amid these natural conditions of life and death. It is in the apprehension of this anomaly—a spiritual nature enclosed in a physical nature—that Sterne’s strength lies.