Книга: The Life and Times of Laurence Sterne

The great humourist whose life I have undertaken to relate anew, would have been amused by a serious attempt to discover him among his ancestors. linsty records preserve religiously by his Yorkshire neighbours, that they might the more readily boast the achievements of a great-grandfather, interested him, it is true, greatly but only because they fur: nished matter for jest. His Tristram Shandy is, as all readers of it know, a burlesque history of a typical English family (much Like Stee's own) that gained its rank in the, time of Henry the Eighth, and subsequently sank under the disgrace of fiat noses and inauspicious names. The Shandys could claim in the sixteenth century, says Sterne with near reference to himself, 'no less than a dozen alchym,' whose souls passed on, a century or two later, into an archbishop, a Welsh judge, 'some three or four aldermen', and eventually into a mountebank.