Читать книгу The Journal to Eliza and Various letters by Laurence Sterne and Elizabeth Draper онлайн

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To explain these remarkable parallelisms,—sometimes word for word—Mr. Sidney Lee has recently suggested that Mrs. Medalle, in editing her father’s correspondence, “foisted some passages from the Journal on her mother’s love-letters.”^[5] Mrs. Medalle was certainly unscrupulous enough for that; but it is more likely that Sterne deliberately adjusted the letters to the Journal from copies preserved at Coxwold. Miss S—— of York consoled with him in the earlier days while Miss Lumley was away in Staffordshire. Mrs. James now consoles with him for the loss of Eliza. The situations are similar; and why should not the same or similar language be used in describing them. Sterne’s plagiarism from himself in the Journal is by no means confined to the sentimental passages. The letter dated June 7, 1767, to A. Lee Esq., descriptive of the golden age at Coxwold, was worked into the Journal for the second of July. And in reverse order, the Shandean story of Sterne’s illness recorded in the Journal for the twenty-second of April, was retold on the twenty-first of May in a letter to the Earl of S——. This was, as has been seen, the manner of the sermons, of which two were nearly alike except for the different texts.