'I have laid a plan for something new, quite out of the beaten track.' The result, "A Sentimental Journey," is as far from the conventional travel-book as "Tristram Shandy" differs from other novels. It is fiction rather than reportage, and may well be regarded as yet another offshoot from that picaresque stock which bore such varied fruit throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Although Sterne set out with the conscious aim of exploiting his gift for pathos, the outcome of his work has nothing in common with the study in "The Pathetic," enlivened only by 'the innocently humorous', called for by one of his moralizing critics. A less innocent book has never been written.