ENGLISH MEN '^^ LETTERS 
 
 Edited by 
 
 John Mo u ley 
 
 H 
 
 TRAILL 
 
^orttell Untosraitg ffilbtarg 
 
 \ZQt.ScAu/'»rc(/i 
 
CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY 
 
 3 1924 098 498 920 
 
Cornell University 
 Library 
 
 The original of tliis book is in 
 tine Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924098498920 
 
eitflltefj Mm of ILetUrs 
 
 EDITED BY JOHN MOELEY 
 
 STEENE 
 
STERNE 
 
 BY 
 
 H. D. TRAILL 
 
 MAOMILLAN AND CO. 
 
 1882. 
 
 The Slight 0/ Trmislation and Reproduction is Heserveii. 
 
PREFATORY NOTE. 
 
 The materials for a biography of Sterne are by no means 
 abundant. Of the earlier years of his life, the only 
 existing record is that preserved in the brief autobio- 
 graphical memoir which, a few months before his death, 
 he composed, in the usual quaint staccato style of his 
 familiar correspondence, for the benefit of his daughter. 
 Of his childhood ; of his school days ; of his life at Cam- 
 bridge, and in his Yorkshire Vicarage; of his whole 
 history in fact, up to the age of forty-six, we know nothing 
 more than he has there jotted down. He attained that 
 age in the year 1759 ; and at this date begins that series 
 of his Letters, from which, for those who have the 
 patience to sort them out of the chronological confusion 
 in which his daughter and editress involved them, there 
 is no doubt a good deal to be learnt. These letters, 
 however, which extend down to 1768, the year of the 
 writer's death, contain pretty nearly all the contemporary 
 material that we have to depend on. Freely as Sterne 
 mixed in the best literary society, there is singularly little 
 to be gathered about him, even in the way of chance allu- 
 sion and anecdote, from the memoirs and ana of his time. 
 Of the many friends who would have been competent to 
 write his biography while the facts were yet fresh, but 
 one, John Wilkes, ever entertained — if he did seriously 
 entertain — the idea of performing this pious work ; and 
 
vi PREFATORY NOTE. 
 
 he, in spite of the entreaties of Sterne's -wido-w and 
 daughter, then in straitened circumstances, left unre- 
 deemed his promise to do so. The brief memoir by Sir 
 Walter Scott, which is prefixed to many popular editions 
 , of Tristram Shandy and the Sentimental Journey, sets 
 out the so-called autobiography in fuU, but for the rest 
 is mainly critical ; Thackeray's well-known lecture-essay 
 is almost wholly so ; and nothing, worthy to be dignified 
 by the name of a Life of Sterne, seems ever to have been 
 published, until the appearance of Mr. Percy Fitzgerald's 
 two stout volumes, under this title, some eighteen years 
 ago. Of this work it is hardly too much to say, that it 
 contains (no doubt with the admixture of a good deal of 
 superfluous matter) nearly all the information as to the 
 facts of Sterne's life that is now ever likely to be re- 
 covered. The evidence for certain of its statements of 
 fact is not as thoroughly sifted as it might have been ; 
 and with some of its criticism I at least am unable 
 to agree. But no one interested in the subject of this 
 memoir can be insensible of his obligations to Mr. Fitz- 
 gerald, for the fruitful diligence with which he has 
 laboured in a too long neglected field. 
 
 H. D. T. 
 BiCKLEY, May, 1882. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 DATE PAGE 
 
 Birth, Pabentagb, and Early Years . 1713 —1724 . 1 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 School and University — Halifax and 
 
 Cambridge 1724—1738 . 11 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 Life at Sutton — Marriage — The Parish 
 
 Priest 1738—1759 . 20 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 Tristram Shandy, Vols. i. and ii. . . 1759 — 1760 . 33 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 London Triumphs— First Set of Sermons 
 — Tristram Shandy, Vols. hi. and it. 
 — CoxwoLD — Tristram Shandy, VoL^y, 
 V. AND VI. — First Visit to the Con- " 
 tinent— Paris— Toulouse . . . 1760—1762 . 50 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 Life in the South — Return to England 
 — Tristram Shandy, Vols. tii. and 
 VIII. -Second Set of Sermons . . 1762—1765 . 77 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 Fkance and Italy — Meeting with Wife 
 AND Daughter — Eetdbn to England — 
 Tristram Shandy, Vol. ix. — The Sen- 
 timental Journey .... 1765—1768 . 106 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 Last Days, and Death .... 1768 . 120 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 Sterne as a Writer — The Charge of Plagiarism — 
 
 Dr. Febrlak's " Illustrations " 129 
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 
 Style and General Characteristics — Humour, and 
 
 Sentiment . . 142 
 
 CHAPTER XI. 
 
 Creative and Dramatic Power — Place in English 
 
 Literature . . . . ... 167 
 
STEBNE. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 BIRTH, PARENTAGE, AND EARLY TEARS, 
 (1713—1724.) 
 
 Towards the close of the month of November, 1713, one 
 of the last of the English regiments which had been de- 
 tained in Elanders to supervise the execution of the treaty 
 of Utrecht, arrived at Clonmel from Dunkirk. The day 
 after its arrival the regiment was disbanded ; and yet a 
 few days later, on the 24th of the month, the wife of one 
 of its subalterns gave birth to a son. The child who thus 
 early displayed the perversity of his humour by so in- 
 opportune an appearance was Laurence Sterne. " My 
 birthday," he says in the slipshod, loosely-strung notes by 
 which he has been somewhat grandiloquently said to have 
 " anticipated the labours " of the biographer — " my birth- 
 day was ominous to my poor father, who was the day after 
 our arrival, with many other brave officers, broke and 
 sent adrift iuto the wide world with a wife and two 
 children." 
 
 Eoger Sterne, however, now late ensign of the 34th or 
 Chudleigh's regiment of foot, was after aU in less evil 
 
2 STERNE. [chap. 
 
 case than were many probably of his comrades. He had 
 kinsmen to whom he could look for at any rate temporary 
 assistance, and his mother was a wealthy widow. The 
 Sternes, originally of a Suffolk stock, had passed from 
 that county to Nottinghamshire, and thence into lork- 
 shire, and were at this time a family of position and sub- 
 stance in the last-named county. Eoger's grandfather had 
 been Archbishop of York, and a man of more note, if only 
 through the accident of the times upon which he fell, than 
 most of the incumbents of that see. He had played an 
 exceptionally energetic part even for a Cavalier prelate in 
 the great political struggle of the seventeenth century, and 
 had suffered with fortitude and dignity in the royal cause. 
 He had, moreover, a further claim to distittction in having 
 been treated with common gratitude at the Eestoration 
 by the son of the monarch whom he had served. As 
 Master of Jesus College, Cambridge, he had " been active 
 in sending the University plate to his Majesty,'' and for 
 this offence he was seized by Cromwell and carried in 
 military custody to London, whence, after undergoing im- 
 prisonment in various gaols, and experiencing other forms 
 of hardship, he was at length permitted to retire to an 
 obscure retreat in the country, there to commune with 
 himself until that tyranny should be overpast. On the 
 return of the exiled Stuarts Dr. Sterne was made Bishop 
 of CarUsle, and a few years later was translated to the see 
 of York. He lived to the age of eighty-six, and so far 
 justified Burnet's accusation against him of " minding 
 chiefly enriching himself," that he seems to have divided 
 no fewer than four landed estates among his children. 
 One of these, Simon Sterne, a younger son of the arch- 
 bishop, himself married an heiress, the daughter of Sir 
 Koger Jaques of Elvington ; and Roger, the father of 
 
I.] BIRTH, PARENTAGE, AND EARLY YEARS. 3 
 
 Laurence Sterne, was the seventh, and youngest of the 
 issue of this marriage. At the time when the double mis- 
 fortune above recorded befell him at the hands of Lucina 
 and the "War Office, his father had been some years dead ; 
 but Simon Sterne's widow was still mistress of the pro- 
 perty which she had brought with her at her marriage, 
 and to Elvington accordiagly, " as soon," writes Sterne, 
 " as I was able to be carried," the compulsorily retired 
 ensign betook himself with his wife and his two children. 
 He was not, however, compelled to remain long dependent 
 on his mother. The ways of the military authorities were 
 as inscrutable to the army of that day as they are in our day 
 to our own. Before a year had passed the regiment was 
 ordered to be re-established, and " our household decamped 
 with bag and baggage for Dublin." This was in the 
 autumn of 1714, and from that time onward for some 
 eleven years the movements and fortunes of the Sterne 
 family, as detailed ia the narrative of its most famous 
 member, form a history in which the ludicrous struggles 
 strangely with the pathetic. 
 
 A husband, condemned to be the Ulysses-like plaything 
 of adverse gods at the War Office ; an indefatigably pro- 
 lific wife ; a succession of weak and ailing children ; mis- 
 fortune in the seasons of journeying ; misfortune in the 
 moods of the weather by sea and land — under all this 
 combination of hostile chances and conditions was the 
 struggle to be carried on. The little household was per- 
 petually " on the move " — a little household which was 
 always becoming and never remaining bigger — continually 
 increased by births, only to be again reduced by deaths — 
 untU the contest between the deadly hardships of travel 
 and the fatal fecundity of Mrs. Sterne was brought by 
 events to a natural close. Almost might the unfortunate 
 
4 STERNE. [chap. 
 
 lady have exclaimed, Qu<b regio in terns nostri non plena 
 lahoris ? She passes from Ireland to England, and from 
 England to Ireland, from inland garrison to sea-port town 
 and back again, incessantly bearing and incessantly burying 
 children — until even her son in his narrative begins to speak 
 of losing one infant at this place, and " leaving another 
 behind " on that journey, almost as if they were so many 
 overlooked or misdirected articles of luggage. The tragic 
 side of the history, however, overshadows the grotesque. 
 When we think how hard a business was travel even 
 under the most favourable conditions in those days, and 
 how serious even in our own times, when travel is easy, 
 are the discomforts of the women and children of a regi- 
 ment on the march — we may well pity these unresting 
 followers of the drum. As to Mrs. Sterne herself, she 
 seems to have been a woman of a pretty tough fibre, and 
 she came moreover of a campaigning stock. Her father 
 was a " noted suttler " of the name of Nuttle, and her first 
 husband — for she was a widow when Eoger Sterne married 
 her — had been a soldier also. She had, therefore, served 
 some years apprenticeship to the military life before these 
 wanderings began ; and she herself was destined to live 
 to a good old age. But somehow or other she failed to 
 endow her otfspriug with her own robust constitution and 
 powers of endurance. "My father's children were," as 
 Laurence Sterne grimly puts it, " not made to last long ;" 
 but one cannot help suspecting that it was the hardships of 
 those early years which carried them off in their infancy 
 with such painful regularity and despatch, and that it was 
 to the same cause that their surviving brother owed the 
 beginnings of that fatal malady by which his own life was 
 cut short. 
 
 The diary of their travels — for the early part of 
 
1.] BIRTH, PAEENTAGB, AND EARLY YEARS. 5 
 
 Sterne's memoirs amounts to scarcely more — is the more 
 effective for its very brevity and abruptness. Save for 
 one interval of somewhat longer sojourn than usual at 
 Dublin, the reader has throughout it all the feeling of 
 the traveller who never finds time to unpack his port- 
 manteau. On the re-enrolment of the regiment in 1714, 
 " our household," says the narrative, " decamped from 
 York with bag and baggage for Dublin. Within a month 
 my father left us, being ordered to Exeter ; where, in a 
 sad winter, my mother and her two children followed 
 him, travelling from Liverpool, by land, to Plymouth." 
 At Plymouth, Mrs. Sterne gave birth to a son, christened 
 Joram ; and, " in twelve months' time we were all sent 
 back to Dublin. My mother," with her three children, 
 " took ship at Bristol for Ireland, and had a narrow 
 escape from being cast away by a leak springing up in 
 the vessel. At length, after many perils and struggles, 
 we got to Dublin." Here intervenes the short breathing- 
 space, of which mention has been made — an interval 
 employed by Eoger Sterne in " spending a great deal of 
 money " on a " large house," which he hired and fur- 
 nished ; and then " in the year one thousand seven hundred 
 and nineteen, all unhinged again." The regiment had 
 been ordered off to the Isle of "Wight, thence to embark 
 for Spain, on "the Vigo Expedition," and "we," who 
 accompanied it, " were driven into Milford Haven, but 
 afterwards landed at Bristol, and thence by land to 
 Plymouth again, and to the Isle of Wight ; '' losing on 
 this expedition " poor Joram, a pretty boy, who died of 
 the small-pox." In the Isle of Wight, Mrs. Sterne and 
 her family remained, till the Vigo Expedition returned 
 home ; and during her stay there " poor Joram's loss was 
 supplied by the birth of a girl, Anne," a " pretty blossom," 
 
6 STBENE. [chap. 
 
 but destined to fall "at the age of three years." On the 
 return of the regiment to Wicklow, Eoger Sterne again 
 sent to collect his family round him. " We embarked for 
 Dublin, and had all been cast away by a most violent 
 storm ; but, through the intercession of my mother, the 
 captain was preyailed upon to turn back into "Wales, where 
 we stayed a month, and at length got into Dublin, and 
 travelled by land to Wicklow, where my father had, for 
 some weeks, given us over for lost." Here a year passed, 
 and another child, Devijeher — so called after the Colonel 
 of the regiment — was born. " From thence we decamped 
 to stay half a year with Mr. Fetherston, a clergyman, 
 about seven miles from Wicklow, who, being a relative 
 of my mother's, invited us to his parsonage at Animo.' 
 From thence, again, " we followed the regiment to Dublin," 
 where again '• we lay in the barracks a year." In 1722 
 the regiment was ordered to Carrickfergus. " We aU 
 decamped, but got no further than Drogheda ; thence 
 ordered to Mullingar, forty miles west, where, by Provi- 
 dence, we stumbled upon a kind relation, a collateral 
 
 ' " It was in this parish," says Sterne, " that I had that won- 
 derful escape in falling through a mill race while the mill was 
 going, and being taken up unhurt ; the story is incredible, but 
 known to all that part of Ireland where hundreds of the common 
 people flocked to see me." More incredible still does it seem that 
 Thoresby should relate the occurrence of an accident of precisely 
 the same kind to Sterne's great-grandfather the Archbishop. 
 " Playing near a mill, he fell within a claw ; there was but one 
 board or bucket wanting in the whole wheel, but a gracious Pro- 
 vidence so ordered it that the void place came down at that moment, 
 else he had been crushed to death ; but was reserved to be a grand 
 benefactor afterwards." (Thoresby, ii. 15.) But what will pro- 
 bably strike the reader as more extraordinary even than this 
 coincidence is that Sterne should have been either unaware of 
 it, or should have omitted mention of it in the above passage. 
 
I.] BIKTH, PARENTAGE, AND EARLY YEARS. 7 
 
 descendant from Aickbishop Sterne, who took us all to 
 his castle, and kindly entertained us for a year." Thence, 
 by " a most rueful journey " to Carrickfergus, where " we 
 arrived in six or seven days." Here, at the age of three, 
 little Devijeher obtained a happy release from his name ; 
 and " another chUd, Susan, was sent to fiU his place, who 
 also left us behind in this weary journey." In the 
 " autumn of this year, or the spring of the next '' — 
 Sterne's memory failing in exactitude at the very point 
 where we should have expected it to be most precise — 
 " my father obtained permission of his colonel to fix me 
 at school /' and henceforth the boy's share in the family 
 wanderings was at an end. But his father had yet to be 
 ordered from Carrickfergus to Londonderry, where at last 
 a permanent child, Catherine, was born ; and thence to 
 Gibraltar, to take part in the Defence of that famous 
 Eock, where the much-enduring campaigner was run 
 through the body in a duel, " about a goose " (a thoroughly 
 Shandian catastrophe) ; and thence to Jamaica, where, 
 " with a constitution impaired " by the sword-thrust, 
 earned in his anserine quarrel, he was defeated in a more 
 deadly duel with the " coimtry fever," and died. " His 
 malady," writes his son, with a touch of feeling struggling 
 through his dislocated grammar, " took away his senses 
 first, and made a child of him ; and then in a month 
 or two walking about continually without complaining, 
 tiU the moment he sat down in an arm-chair and breathed 
 his last." 
 
 There is, as has been observed, a certain mixture of the 
 comic and the pathetic in the life-history of this obscure 
 father of a famous son. His life was clearly not a 
 fortunate one, so far as external circumstances go ; but its 
 misfortimes had no sort of consoling dignity about them. 
 
8 STERNE. [chap. 
 
 Eoger Sterne's lot in tlie world was not so much an 
 unhappy as an uncomfortable one ; and discomfort earns 
 little sympathy, and absolutely no admiration, for its 
 sufferers. He somehow reminds us of one of those Irish 
 heroes — good-natured, peppery, debt-loaded, light-hearted, 
 shiftless — whose fortunes we follow with mirthful and 
 half-contemptuous sympathy in the pages of Thackeray. 
 He was obviously a typical specimen of that class of men 
 who are destitute alike of the virtues and failings of the 
 " respectable " and successful ; whom many people love 
 and no one respects ; whom everybody pities in their 
 struggles and difficulties, but whom few pity without a 
 smile. 
 
 It is evident, however, that he succeeded in winning the 
 affection of one who had not too much affe'ction of the 
 deeper kind to spare for any one. The figure of Roger 
 Sterne alone stands out with any clearness by the side of 
 the ceaselessly flitting mother and phantasmal children of 
 Laurence Sterne's Memoir ; and it is touched in with 
 strokes so vivid and characteristic that critics have been 
 tempted to find in it the original of the most famous 
 portrait in the Shandy gallery. " My father,'' says 
 Steme, " was a little smart man, active to the last degree 
 in all exercises, most patient of fatigue and disappoint- 
 ments, of which it pleased God to give him fuU measure. 
 He was, in his temper, somewhat rapid and hasty, but of 
 a kindly sweet disposition, void of aU design, and so 
 innocent in his own intentions, that he suspected no one ; 
 so that you might have cheated him ten times a day, if 
 nine had not been sufficient for your purpose.'' This is a 
 captivating little picture ; and it no doubt presents traits 
 which may have impressed themselves early and deeply 
 on the imagination which was afterwards to give birth to 
 
I.] BIRTH, PAEENTAGB, AND EARLY TEARS. 9 
 
 " My Uncle Toby." The simplicity of nature and the 
 " kindly sweet disposition " are common to both the 
 ensign of real life and to the immortal Captain Shandy 
 of fiction ; but the criticism which professes to find traces 
 of Roger Sterne's " rapid and hasty temper " in my Uncle 
 Toby, is compelled to strain itself considerably. And, 
 on the whole, there seems no reason to believe that Sterne 
 borrowed more from the character of his father than any 
 writer must necessarily, and perhaps unconsciously, borrow 
 from his observation of the moral and mental qualities of 
 those with whom he has come into most frequent con- 
 tact. 
 
 That Laurence Sterne passed the first eleven years of 
 his life with such an exemplar of these simple virtues of 
 kindliness, gmlelessness and courage ever before him, is 
 perhaps the best that can be said for the lot in which his 
 early days were cast. In almost all other respects there 
 could hardly have been — for a quick-witted, precocious, 
 imitative boy — a worse bringing-up. No one, I should 
 imagine, ever more needed discipline in his youth than 
 Stems; and the camp is a place of discipline for the 
 soldier only. To all others whom necessity attaches to 
 it, and to the young especially, it is rather a school of 
 licence and irregularity. It is fair to remember these 
 disadvantages of Sterne's early training, in judging of the 
 many defects as a man, and laxities as a writer, which 
 marked his later life : though, on the other hand, there is 
 no denying the reality and value of some of the counter- 
 vailing advantages which came to him from his boyish 
 surroundings. The conception of my Uncle Toby need 
 not have been taken whole from Roger Sterne, or from 
 any one actual captain of a marching regiment ; but the 
 constant sight of, and converse with, many captains and 
 
XO STERNE. [CH. i. 
 
 many corporals may undoubtedly have contributed much 
 to the vigour and vitality of Toby Shandy and Corporal 
 Trim. So far as the externals of portraiture were con- 
 cerned, there can be no doubt that his art benefited much 
 from his early military life. His soldiers have the true 
 stamp of the soldier about them in air and language ; and 
 when his captaiu and corporal fight their Flemish battles 
 over again, we are thoroughly conscious that we are 
 listening, under the dramatic form, to one who must 
 himself have heard many a chapter of the same splendid 
 story from the lips of the very men who had helped to 
 break the pride of the Grand Monarque under Marlborough 
 and Eugene. 
 
CHAPTER II. 
 
 SCHOOL AND UNIVERSITY HALIFAX AND CAMBRIDGE. 
 
 (1723—1738.) 
 
 It was not — as we have seen from the Memoir — till the 
 autumn of 1723, " or the spring of the foUovping year," 
 that Eoger Sterne obtained leave of his colonel to " fix " 
 his son at school ; and this would bring Laurence to 
 the tolerably advanced age of ten, before beginning his 
 education in any systematic way. He records, imder date 
 of 1721, that "in this year I learned to write, &c. ;" but 
 it is not probable that the " &c." — that indolent symbol 
 of which Sterne makes such irritating use in all his 
 familiar writing — covers, in this case, any wide extent of 
 educational advance. The boy, most likely, could just read 
 and write, and no more, at the time when he was fixed at 
 school, " near Halifax, with an able master :" a judicious 
 selection, no doubt, both of place as well as teacher. 
 Mr. Fitzgerald, to whose researches we owe as much light 
 as is ever likely to be thrown upon this obscure and 
 probably not very interesting period of Sterne's life, has 
 pointed out that Richard Sterne, eldest son of the late 
 Simon Sterne, and imcle, therefore, of Laurence, was one 
 of the governors of Halifax Grammar School, and that he 
 may have used his interest to obtain his nephew's 
 admission to the foundation as the grandson of a Halifax 
 
12 STERNE. [chap. 
 
 man, and so, constructively, a child of the parish. But 
 be this as it may, it is more than probable that from the 
 time when he was sent to Halifax School, the whole care 
 and cost of the boy's education was borne by his York- 
 shire relatives. The memoir says that, " by God's care of 
 me, my cousin Sterne, of Elvington, became a father to 
 me, and sent me to the University, &c. &c. :" and it is 
 to be inferred from this that the benevolent guardian- 
 ship of Sterne's uncle Eichard (who died in 1732, the 
 year before Laurence was admitted of Jesus College, 
 Cambridge,) must have been taken up by his son. Of 
 his school course — though it lasted for over seven yeats, 
 the autobiographer has little to say ; nothing, indeed, 
 except that he " cannot omit mentioning " that anecdote 
 with which everybody, I suppose, who has ever come 
 across the briefest notice of Sterne's life, is familiar. 
 The schoolmaster "had the ceiling of the schoolroom 
 new-whitewashed, and the ladder remained there. I, one 
 unlucky day, mounted it, and wrote with a brush in large 
 capital letters, LAU. STEENE, for which the usher 
 severely whipped me. My master was very much hiu?t at 
 this, and said before me that never should that name be 
 effaced, for I was a boy of genius, and he was sure I 
 should come to preferment. This expression made me 
 forget the blows I had received." It is hardly to be 
 supposed, of course, that this story is pure romance ; but 
 it is difficult, on the other hand, to believe that the 
 incident has been related by Sterne exactly as it hap- 
 pened. That the recorded prediction may have been 
 made in jest — or even in earnest (for penetrating teachers 
 have these prophetic moments sometimes) — is, of course, 
 possible ; but that Sterne's master was " very much hurt " 
 at the boy's having been justly punished for an act of 
 
n.] HALIFAX AND OAMBEIDGE. 13 
 
 wanton mischief, or that he recognized it as the natural 
 privilege of nascent genius to deface newly whitewashed 
 ceilings must have been a delusion of the humourist's 
 later years. The extreme fatuity which it would compel 
 us to attribute to the schoolmaster seems inconsistent 
 with the power of detecting intellectual capacity in any 
 one else. On the whole, one inclines to suspect that the 
 remark belonged to that order of half sardonic, half 
 kindly jest which a certain sort of pedagogue sometimes 
 throws off, for the consolation of a recently-caned boy; 
 and that Sterne's vanity, either then or afterwards (for 
 it remained juvenile all his life), translated it into a serious 
 prophecy. In itself, however, the urchin's freak was only 
 too unhappily characteristic of the man. The trick of 
 befouling what was clean (and because it was clean) 
 clung to him most tenaciously all his days ; and many a 
 £iir white surface — of humour, of fancy, or of sentiment 
 — was to be disfigured by him in after-years with stains 
 and splotches iu which we can aU too plainly decipher 
 the literary signature of Laurence Sterne. 
 
 At Halifax School the boy, as has been said, remained 
 for about eight years : that is, until he was nearly nineteen, 
 and for some months after his father's death at Port 
 Antonio, which occurred in March, 1731. " In the 
 year '32," says the memoir, " my cousin sent me to the 
 University, where I stayed some time." In the course of 
 his first year he read for and obtained a sizarship, to 
 which the college records show that he was duly ad- 
 mitted on the 6th of July, 1733. The selection of Jesus 
 College was a natural one : Sterne's great-grandfather, 
 the afterwards Archbishop, had been its Master, and had 
 founded scholarships there, to one of which the young 
 sizar was, a year after his admission, elected. No in- 
 
14 STEENE. [chap. 
 
 ference can, of course, te drawn from this as to Sterne's 
 proficiency, or even industry, in his academical studies : 
 it is scarcely more than a testimony to the fact of decent 
 and regular behaviour. He was bene natus, in the sense 
 of being related to the right man, the Founder ; and in 
 those days he need be only Tery modiee doetiis indeed, in 
 order to qualify himself for admission to the enjoyment 
 of his kinsman's benefactions. Still he must have been 
 orderly and weU-conducted in his ways : and this he 
 would also seem to have been, from the fact of his 
 having passed through his University course without any 
 apparent break or hitch, and having been admitted to his 
 Bachelor's degree after no more than the normal period 
 of residence. The only remark which, in the Memoir, he 
 vouchsafes to bestow upon his academical career, is, that 
 "'twas there that I commenced a friendship with Mr. 
 
 H , which has been lasting on both sides : " and it 
 
 may perhaps be said that this was, from one point of 
 view, the most important event of his Cambridge life. 
 
 For Mr. H was John Hall, afterwards John Hall 
 
 Stevenson, the " Eugenius " of Tristram Shandy ; the 
 master of Skelton Castle, at which Sterne was, throughout 
 life, to be a frequent and most familiar visitor ; and, 
 unfortunately, also a person whose later reputation, both 
 as a man and a writer, became such as seriously to com- 
 promise the not very robust respectability of his clerical 
 comrade. Sterne and Hall were distant cousins and it 
 may have been the tie of consanguinity which first drew 
 them together. But there was evidently a thorough con- 
 geniality of the most unlucky sort between them; and 
 from their first meeting as undergraduates at Jesus, until 
 the premature death of the elder, they continued to sup- 
 ply each other's minds with precisely that sort of occupation 
 
11.] HALIFAX AND CAMBRIDGE. 15 
 
 and stimulus of whieh. each by tiie grace of nature stood 
 least in need. That their close intimacy was ill-calculated 
 to raise Sterne's reputation in later years may he inferred 
 from the fact that HaU Stevenson afterwards ohtaLned 
 literary notoriety by the publication of Crazy Tales, a 
 collection of comic but extremely broad ballads in which 
 his clerical friend was quite unjustly suspected of having 
 had a hand. Mr. HaU was also reported, whether truly or 
 falsely, to have been a member of Wilkes's famous confra- 
 ternity of Medmenham Abbey ; and from this it was an 
 easy step for gossip to advance to the assertion that the 
 Eev. Mr. Sterne had himself been admitted to that unholy 
 order. 
 
 Among acquaintances which the young sizar of Jesus 
 might have more profitably made at Cambridge, but did 
 not, was that of a student destined, like himself, to leave 
 behind him a name famous in English letters. Gray, 
 bom three years later than Sterne, had entered a year 
 after him at Cambridge as a pensioner of Peterhouse, and 
 the two students went through their terms together, 
 though the poet at the time took no degree. There was 
 probably little enough in common between the shy, 
 fastidious, slightly effeminate pensioner of Peterhouse, and 
 a scholar of Jesus, whose chief friend and comrade was a 
 man like HaU ; and no close intimacy between the two 
 men, if they had come across each other, would have been 
 very likely to arise.. But it does not appear that they 
 could have ever met or heard of each other, for Gray 
 writes of Sterne, after Tristram Shandy had made him 
 famous, in terms which clearly show that he did not 
 recaU his feUow-undergraduate. 
 
 In January, 1736, Sterne took his B.A. degree, and 
 quitted Cambridge for York, where another of his father's 
 
16 STERNE. [chap. 
 
 brothers now makes his appearance as his patron. Dr. 
 Jacques Sterne was the second son of Simon Sterne, of 
 Elvington, and a man apparently of more marked and 
 vigorous character than any of his brothers. What 
 induced him now to take notice of the nephew, whom in 
 boyhood and early youth he had left to the unshared 
 guardianship of his brother, and brother's son, does not 
 appear ; but the personal history of this energetic pluralist 
 — Prebendary of Durham, Archdeacon of Cleveland, 
 Canon Eesidentiary, Precentor, Prebendary, and Arch- 
 deacon of York, Eector of Kise, and Eector of Homsey- 
 cum-Eiston — suggests the surmise that he detected 
 qualities in the young Cambridge graduate which would 
 make him useful. For Dr. Sterne was a typical specimen 
 of the Churchman-politician, in days when both com- 
 ponents of the compound word meant a good deal more 
 than they do now. The Archdeacon was a devoted Whig, 
 a Hanoverian to the backbone ; and he held it his duty 
 to support the Protestant succession, not only by the 
 spiritual but by the secular arm. He was a great 
 electioneerer, as befitted times when the claims of two 
 rival dynasties virtually met upon the hustings, and he 
 took a prominent part in the great Yorkshire contest 
 of the year 1734. His most vigorous display of energy, 
 however, was made, as was natural, in "the '45." The 
 Whig Archdeacon, not then Archdeacon of the East 
 Riding, nor as yet quite buried under the mass of prefer- 
 ments which he afterwards accumulated, seems to have 
 thought that this indeed was the crisis of his fortunes, and 
 that unless he was prepared to die a mere prebendary, 
 canon, and rector of one or two benefices, now was the 
 time to strike a blow for his advancement in the Church. 
 His bustling activity at this trying time was indeed 
 
II.] HALIFAX AND CAMBRIDGE. 17 
 
 portentous, and at last took the form of arresting the 
 unfortunate Dr. Burton (the original of Dr. Slop) on 
 suspicion of holding communication with the invading 
 army of the Pretender, then on its march southward from 
 Edinburgh. The suspect, who was wholly innocent, was 
 taken to London and kept in custody for nearly a year 
 before being discharged, after which, by way of a slight 
 redress, a letter of reprimand for his hvp de gele was sent 
 by direction of Lord Carteret to the militant dignitary. 
 But the desired end was nevertheless attained, and Dr. 
 Sterne suceeeded in crowning the edifice of his ecclesiastical 
 honours.^ 
 
 There can be little doubt that patronage extended by 
 such an uncle to such a nephew, received its full equivalent 
 in some way or other, and indeed the Memoir gives us a 
 clue to the mode in which payment was made. "My 
 uncle," writes Sterne, describing their subsequent rupture, 
 " quarrelled with me because I would not write paragraphs 
 in the newspapers ; though he was a party-man, I was 
 not, and detested such dirty work, thinking it beneath 
 me. From that time he became my bitterest enemy." 
 The date of this quarrel cannot be precisely fixed; but 
 we gather from an autograph letter (now in the British 
 
 ' A once-familiar piece of humorous Terse describes the upset 
 of a coach containing a clerical pluralist, — 
 
 When struggling on the ground was seen 
 A Eector, Vicar, Canon, Dean ; 
 Tou might have thought the coach was full. 
 But no ! 'twas only Dr. Bull. 
 
 Dr. Jacques Sterne, however, might have been thrown out of one 
 of the more capacious vehicles of the London General Omnibus 
 Company, with almost the same misleading effect upon those who 
 only hea/rd of the mishap. 
 
 
 
18 STERNE. [chap. 
 
 Museiim) from Sterne to ArcMeacon Blackburne that by 
 the year 1750 the two men had for some time ceased to 
 be on friendly terms. Probably, however, the breach 
 occurred subsequently to the rebellion of '45, and it may 
 be that it arose out of the excess of partisan zeal which 
 Dr. Sterne developed in that year, and which his nephew 
 very likely did not in his opinion sufficiently share. But 
 this is quite consistent with the younger man's having 
 up to that time assisted the elder in his party polemics. He 
 certainly speaks in his " Letters " of his having " employed 
 his brains for an ungrateful person,'' and the remark is 
 made in a way and in a connexion which seems to imply 
 that the services rendered to his uncle were mainly 
 literary. If so his declaration that he " would not write 
 paragraphs in the newspapers," can only mean that hewould 
 not go on writing them. Be this as it may, however, it is 
 certain that the Archdeacon for some time found his 
 account in maintaining friendly relations with his 
 nephew, and that during that period he undoubtedly did 
 a good deal for his advancement. Sterne was ordained 
 deacon by the Bishop of Lincoln in March, 1736, only 
 three months after taking his B. A. degree, and took priest's 
 orders in August, 1738^ whereupon his uncle immediately 
 obtained for him the living of Sutton-on-the-Forest, into 
 which he was inducted a few days afterwards. Other 
 preferments followed, to be noted hereafter, and it must be 
 admitted that until the quarrel occurred about the " party 
 paragraphs " the Archdeacon did his duty by his 
 nephew after the peculiar fashion of that time. When 
 that quarrel came, however, it seems to have snapped 
 more ties than one, for in the Memoir Sterne speaks of 
 his youngest sister Catherine as " stiU living, but most 
 unhappily estranged from me by my uncle's wickedness 
 
II.] HALIFAX AND CAMBEIDGE. 19 
 
 and her own folly." Of his elder sister Mary, wlio was 
 bom at Lille a year before himself, he records that " she 
 married one "Weemans in DubUn, who used her most 
 immercifully, spent his substance, became a bankrupt, 
 and left my poor sister to shift for herself, which she was 
 able to do but for a few months, for she went to a friend's 
 house in the country and died of a broken heart." Truly 
 an unlucky family.'' Only three to survive the hardships 
 among which the years of their infancy were passed, and 
 this to be the history of two out of the three survivors ! 
 
 ' The motfier, Mrs. Sterne, makes her appearance once more 
 for a moment in or alsout the year 1758. Horace Walpole, and 
 after him Byron, accused Sterne of having " preferred whining over 
 a, dead ass to relieving a living mother," and the former went so 
 far as to declare " on indubitable authority " that Mrs. Sterne, 
 " who kept a school (in Ireland), having run in debt on account of 
 an extravagant daughter, would have rotted in a gaol if the parents 
 of her scholars had not raised a subscription for her." Even " the 
 indubitable authority," however, does not positively assert— what- 
 ever may be meant to be insinuated — that Sterne himself did no- 
 thing to assist his mother, and Mr. Fitzgerald justly points out 
 that to pay the whole debts of a bankrupt school might well have 
 been beyond a Yorkshire clergyman's means. Anyhow there is 
 evidence that Sterne at a later date than this was actively concern- 
 ing himself about his mother's interests. She afterwards came to 
 York, whither he went to meet her ; and he then writes to a friend, 
 ' ' I trust my poor mother's affair is by this time ended to ow 
 comfort and hers. " 
 
 2 
 
CHAPTER III. 
 
 LIFE AT SUTTON — MAEEIAGB — THE PARISH PRIEST. 
 
 (1738—1759.) 
 
 Great writers ■wh.o spring late and suddenly from obscurity 
 into fame and yet die early, must always form more or less 
 perplexing subjects of literary biography. The processes 
 of their intellectual and artistic growth lie hidden in 
 nameless years : their genius is not revealed to the world 
 until it has reached its full maturity, and many aspects of 
 it which perhaps would have easily explained themselves 
 if the gradual development had gone on before men's eyes, 
 remain often unexplained to the last. By few, if any, of 
 the more celebrated English men of letters is this observa- 
 tion so forcibly illustrated as it is in the case of Sterne : 
 the obscure period of his life so greatly exceeded in dura- 
 tion the brief season of his fame, and its obscurity was 
 so exceptionally profound. He was forty-seven years of 
 age when, at a bound, he achieved celebrity ; he was not 
 five-and-fifty when he died. And though it* might be too 
 much to say that, the artist sprang, like the reputation, 
 full-grown into being, it is nevertheless true that there are 
 no marks of positive immaturity to be detected even in 
 the earliest public displays of his art. His work grows 
 indeed most marvellously in vividness and symmetry as 
 he proceeds, but there are no visible signs of growth in the 
 
CH. III.] LIFE AT SUTTON. 21 
 
 workman's skill. Even when the highest point of finish 
 is attained, we cannot say that the hand is any more 
 cunning than it was from the first. As weU might we say 
 that the last Hght touches of the sculptor's chisel upon the 
 perfected statue are more skilful, than its first vigorous 
 strokes upon the shapeless block. 
 
 It is certain, however, that Sterne must have been 
 storing up his material of observation, secreting his reflec- 
 tions on life and character, and consciously or unconsciously 
 maturing his powers of expression during the whole of 
 those silent twenty years which have now to be passed 
 under brief review. With one exception, to be noted 
 presently, the only known writings of his which belong 
 to this period are sermons, and these — a mere " scratch " 
 collection of pulpit discourses which as soon as he had 
 gained the public ear, he hastened in characteristic fashion 
 to rummage from his desk and carry to the book-market — 
 throw no light upon the problem before us. There are 
 sermons of Sterne which alike in manner and matter dis- 
 close the author of Tristram Shandy ; but they are not 
 among those which he preached or wrote before that work 
 was given to the world. They are not its ancestors but 
 its descendants. They belong to the post-Shandian period, 
 and are in obvious imitation of the Shandian style ; while 
 in none of the earlier ones — not even in that famous 
 homily on a Good Conscience, which did not succeed tUl 
 Corporal Trim preached it before the brothers Shandy and 
 Dr. Slop — can we trace either the trick of style or the 
 turn of thought that give piquancy to the novel. Yet 
 the peculiar qualities of mind, and the special faculty of 
 workmanship of which this turn of thought and trick of 
 style were the product, must of course have been poten- 
 tially present from the beginning. Men do not blossom 
 
22 STERNE. [chap. 
 
 forth as wits, humourists, masterly delineators of character, 
 and skilful performers on a highly-strung and carefully- 
 tuned sentimental instrument all at once, after entering 
 their " forties ; " and the only wonder is that a posses- 
 sor of these powers — some of them of the kind which, 
 as a rule and in most men, seeks almost as irresistibly 
 for exercise as even the poetic instinct itself — shoidd 
 have been held so long unemployed. 
 
 There is, however, one very common stimulus to literary 
 exertions which in Sterne's case was undoubtedly want- 
 ing — a superabundance of unoccupied time. We have 
 little reason, it is true, to suppose that this light-minded 
 and valetudinarian Yorkshire parson was at any period of 
 his life an industrious " parish-priest ;" but it is probable 
 nevertheless that time never hung very heavily upon his 
 hands. In addition to the favourite amusements which 
 he enumerates in the Memoir, he was all his days addicted 
 to one which is perhaps the most absorbing of all — 
 flirtation. Philandering, and especially philandering of 
 the Platonic and ultra-sentimental order, is almost the 
 one human pastime of which its votaries never seem to 
 tire ; and its constant ministrations to human vanity may 
 serve perhaps to account for their unwearied absorption in 
 its pursuit. Sterne's first love-affair — an affair of which 
 unfortunately the consequences were more lasting than the 
 passion — took place immediately upon his leaving Cam- 
 bridge. To relate it as he relates it to his daughter : "At 
 York I became acquainted with your mother, and courted 
 her for two years. She owned she liked me, but thought 
 herself not rich enough or me too poor to be joined to- 
 gether. She went to her sister's in S[taffordshire], and I 
 wrote to her often. I believe then she was partly deter- 
 mined to have me, but would not say so. At her return 
 
III.] MARRIAGE. 23 
 
 she fell into a consumption, and one evening that I was 
 sitting by her with an almost broken heart to see her so 
 ill, she said : ' My dear Laury, I never can be yours, for 
 I verily believe I have not long to live ! but I have left 
 you every shilling of my fortune.' Upon that she showed 
 me her will This generosity overpowered me. It pleased 
 God that she recovered, and we were married in 1741." 
 The name of this lady was Elizabeth Lumley, and it was 
 to her that Sterne addressed those earliest letters which 
 his daughter included in the collection published by her 
 some eight years after her father's death. They were added, 
 the preface tells us, "injustice to Mr. Sterne's delicate feel- 
 ings ;" and in our modem usage of the word " delicate,'' 
 as equivalent to infirm of health and probably short of 
 life, they no doubt do fuU justice to the passion which 
 they are supposed to express. It would be unfair of 
 course to judge any love-letters of that period by the 
 standard of sincerity applied in our own less artificial age. 
 All such compositions seem frigid and formal enough to 
 us of to-day ; yet in most cases of genuine attachment we 
 usually find at least a sentence here and there in which the 
 natural accents of the heart make themselves heard above 
 the affected modulations of the style. But the letters of 
 Sterne's courtship maintain the pseudo-poetic, shepherd- 
 and-shepherdess strain throughout ; or if the lover ever 
 abandons it, it is only to make somewhat maudlin record 
 of those " tears " which flowed a little too easily at all times 
 throughout his life. These letters, however, have a cer- 
 tain critical interest in their bearing upon those sensi- 
 bilities which Sterne afterwards learned to cultivate in 
 a forcing-frame, with a view to the application of their 
 produce to the purposes of an art of pathetic writing 
 which simulates nature with such admirable fidelity at 
 
24 STERNE. [chap. 
 
 its best, and descends to such singular bathos at its 
 worst. 
 
 Th.e marriage preluded by this courtsbip did not take 
 place tUl Sterne had already been three years vicar of 
 Sutton-on-the-Forest, the benefice which had been pro- 
 cured for him by his uncle the archdeacon; through 
 whose interest also he was appointed successively to 
 two prebends — preferments which were less valuable to 
 him for their emolument than for the ecclesiastical 
 status which they conferred upon him, for the excuse 
 which they gave him for periodical visits to the cathe- 
 dral city to fulfil the residential conditions of his offices, 
 and for the opportunity thus afforded him of mixing ia 
 and studying the society of the Close. Upon his 
 imion with Miss Lumley, and, in a somewhat curious 
 fashion, by her means, he obtaiaed in addition the living 
 of StUlington. " A friend of hers in the south had pro- 
 mised her that if she married a clergyman in Yorkshire, 
 when the living became vacant he would make her a 
 compliment of it ; " and made accordingly this singular 
 " compliment " was. At Sutton Sterne remained nearly 
 twenty years doing duty at both places, during which 
 time " books, painting, fiddling, and shooting were," he 
 says, "my chief amusements." With what success he 
 shot, and with what skill he fiddled, we know not. His 
 writings contain not a few musical metaphors and allusions 
 to music, which seem to indicate a competent acquain- 
 tance with its technicalities ; but the specimen of his powers 
 as an artist, which Mr. Fitzgerald has reproduced from 
 his illustrations of a volume of poems by Mr. Woodhull, 
 does not dispose one to rate highly his proficiency in this 
 accomplishment. "We may expect that after all it was the 
 first-mentioned of his amusements in which he took the 
 
III.] MARRIAGE. 25 
 
 greatest delight, and. that neither the brush, the how, nor 
 the fowling-piece was nearly so often in his hand as the 
 book. Within a few miles of Sutton, at Skelton Castle, 
 an almost unique Eoman stronghold since modernized by 
 Gothic hands, dwelt his college-friend John Hall Steven- 
 son, whose weU-stocked library contained a choice but 
 heterogeneous collection of books — old French " ana,'' and 
 the learning of mediseval doctors — books intentionally and 
 books unintentionally comic, the former of which Sterne 
 read with an only too retentive a memory for their jests, 
 and the latter with an acutely humorous appreciation of 
 their solemn trifling. Later on it will be time to note the 
 extent to which he utilized these results of his widely dis- 
 cursive reading, and to examine the legitimacy of the 
 mode in which he used them : here it is enough to say 
 generally that the materials for many a burlesque chapter 
 of Tristram Shandy must have been unconsciously storing 
 themselves in his mind in many an amused hour passed 
 by Sterne in the library of Skelton Castle. 
 
 But before finally quitting this part of my subject it 
 may be as well perhaps to deal somewhat at length with 
 a matter which wiU doubtless have to be many times 
 incidentally referred to in the course of this study, but 
 which I now hope to relieve myself from the necessity of 
 doing more than touch upon hereafter. I refer of course 
 to Sterne's perpetually recurring flirtations. This is a 
 matter almost as impossible to omit from any biography 
 of Sterne, as it would be to omit it from any biography 
 of Goethe. The English humourist did not, it is true, 
 engage in the pastime in the serious, not to say scientific 
 spirit of the German philosopher-poet; it was not de- 
 liberately made by the former as by the latter to 
 contribute to his artistic development ; but it is neverthe- 
 
26 STEENE. [chap. 
 
 less hardly open to doubt that Steme's philandering 
 propensities did exercise an influence upon his literary 
 character and work in. more ways than one. That his 
 marriage was an ill-assorted and unhappy union was 
 hardly so much the cause of his inconstancy as its effect. 
 It may well be, of course, that the " dear L." whose 
 moral and mental graces her lover had celebrated in such 
 superfine sentimental fashion, was a commonplace person 
 enough. That she was really a woman of the exquisite 
 stolidity of Mrs. Shandy, and that her exasperating feats 
 as an assentatrix did, as has been suggested, supply the 
 model for the irresistibly ludicrous colloquies between 
 the philosopher and his wife, there is no sufficient warrant 
 for believing. But it is quite possible that the daily 
 companion of one of the most indefatigable jesters that 
 ever lived may have been unable to see a joke ; that she 
 regarded her husband's wilder drolleries as mere horse- 
 collar grimacing, and that the point of his subtler humour 
 escaped her altogether. But even if it were so, it is, to 
 say the least of it, doubtful whether Sterne suffered at all 
 on this ground from the wounded feelings of the mari 
 incompris, whUe it is next to certain that it does not need 
 the sting of any such disappointment to account for his 
 alienation. He must have had plenty of time and oppor- 
 tunity to discover Miss Lumley's intellectual limitations 
 during the two years of his courtship; and it is not 
 likely that even if they were as well marked as Mrs. 
 Shandy's own, they would have done much of themselves 
 to estrange the couple. Sympathy is not the necessity to 
 the hiimourist which the poet finds, or imagines, it to be 
 to himself : the humourist indeed will sometimes contrive 
 to extract from the very absence of sympathy in those 
 about him a keener relish for his reflections. With 
 
III.] MARRIAGE. 27 
 
 sentiment, indeed, and stUl more with sentimentalism, 
 the case would of course he different ; hut as for Mr. 
 Sterne's demands for sympathy ia that department of his 
 life and art, one may say without the least hesitation that 
 they would have heen heyond the power of any one 
 woman, however distinguished a disciple of the " Laura 
 Matilda" school, to satisfy. "I must ever," he frankly 
 says in one of the "Yorick to Eliza" letters, "I must 
 ever have some Dulciaea in my head : it harmonizes the 
 soidj" and he might have added that he found it 
 impossible to sustaia the harmony without frequently 
 changing the Dulcinea. One may suspect that Mrs. 
 Sterne soon had cause for jealousy, and it is at least 
 certaia that several years before Sterne's emergence into 
 notoriety their estrangement was complete. One daughter 
 was bom to them in 1 745, but lived scarcely more than 
 long enough to be rescued from the linibus infantium by 
 the prompt rites of the Church. The child was christened 
 Lydia, and died on the following day. Its place was filled 
 in 1747 by a second daughter, also christened Lydia, who 
 lived to become the wife of M. de MedaUe, and the 
 not very judicious editress of the posthumous " Letters." 
 For her as she grew up Sterne conceived a genuine and 
 truly fatherly affection, and it is in writing to her and of 
 her that we see him at his best ; or rather one might say 
 it is almost only then that we can distinguish the true 
 notes of the heart through that habitual falsetto of 
 sentimentalism, which distiaguishes most of Sterne's com- 
 munications with the other sex. There was no subsequent 
 issue of the marriage, and from one of the letters most 
 indiscreetly included in Mdme. de Medalle's collection, 
 it is to be ascertained that some four years or so after 
 Lydia's birth the relations between Sterne and Mrs. Sterne 
 
28 STBENE. [chap. 
 
 ceased to be conjugal, and never again resumed that cha- 
 racter. 
 
 It is, however, probable upon the husband's own con- 
 fessions, that he had given his wife earlier cause for 
 jealousy, and certainly from the time when he begins to 
 reveal himself in correspondence there seems to be hardly 
 a moment when some such cause was not in existence — 
 in the person of this, that, or the other lackadaisical 
 damsel or coquettish matron. From Miss Fourmantelle, 
 the " dear, dear Kitty," to whom Sterne was making 
 violent love in 1759, the year of the York publication of 
 Tristram Shandy, down to Mrs. Draper, the heroine of 
 the famous " Yorick to Eliza" letters, the list of ladies 
 who seem to have kindled flames in that susceptible 
 breast is almost as long and more real than the roll of 
 mistresses immortalized by Horace. How Mrs. Sterne 
 at first bore herself under her husband's ostentatious 
 neglect, there is no direct evidence to show. That she 
 ultimately took refuge in indifference we can perceive, 
 but it is to be feared that she was not always able to 
 maintain the attitude of contemptuous composure. So at 
 least we may suspect from the evidence of that Frenchman 
 who met " le bon et agreable Tristram," and his wife, at 
 Montpellier, and who, characteristically sympathizing with 
 the inconstant husbandj declared that his wife's incessant 
 pursuit of him made him pass " d'assez mauvais moments,'' 
 which he bore " with the patience of an angel." But on 
 the whole Mrs. Sterne's conduct seems by her husband's 
 own admissions to have been not wanting in dignity. 
 
 As to the nature of Sterne's love-affairs I have come, 
 though not without hesitation, to the conclusion that they 
 were most, if not all of them, what is called, somewhat 
 absurdly, Platonic. In. saying this, however, I am by no 
 
HI.] MARRIAGE. 29 
 
 means prepared to assert that they would all of them have 
 passed muster before a prosaic and uusentimental British 
 jury as mere indiscretions, and nothing worse. Sterne's 
 relations with Miss Fourmantelle, for instance, assumed 
 at last a profoundly compromising character, and it is far 
 from improbable that the worst construction would have 
 been put upon them by one of the plain- dealing tribunals 
 aforesaid. Certainly a young woman who leaves her 
 mother at York, and comes up to London to reside alone 
 in lodgings where she is constantly being visited by a 
 lover who is himself living en garqon in the metropolis, 
 can hardly complain if her imprudence is fatal to her re- 
 putation : neither can he if his own suffers in the same 
 way. But as I am not of those who hold that the con- 
 ventionally " innocent " is the equivalent of the morally 
 harmless in this matter, I cannot regard the question as 
 worth any very minute investigation. I am not sure that 
 the habitual male flirt, who neglects his wife to sit con- 
 tinually languishing at the feet of some other woman, 
 gives much less pain and scandal to others, or does much 
 less mischief to himself and the objects of his adoration, 
 than the thorough-going profligate ; and I even feel 
 tempted to risk the apparent paradox, that from the ar- 
 tistic point of view, Sterne lost rather than gained by the 
 generally Platonic character of his amours. For, as it 
 was, the restraint of one instinct of his nature implied 
 the over-indulgence of another which stood in at least as 
 much need of chastenment. If his love-affairs stopped 
 short of the gratification of the senses, they involved a 
 perpetual fondling and caressing of those effeminate sen- 
 sibilities of his into that condition of hyper-sesthesia 
 which, though Sterne regarded it as the strength, was in 
 reality the weakness, of his art. 
 
30 STERNE. [chap. 
 
 Injurious, however, as was the effect which Sterne's 
 philanderings exercised upon his personal and literary- 
 character, it is not likely that, at least at this period of his 
 life at Sutton, they had in any degree compromised his 
 reputation. For this he had provided in other ways, and 
 principally by his exceedingly injudicious choice of 
 associates. " As to the squire of the parish," he remarks 
 in the memoir, " I cannot say we were on a very friendly 
 footing, but at StiUington the family of the C[roft]s 
 showed us every kindness : 'twas most agreeable to be 
 within a mile and a half of an amiable family who were 
 ever cordial friends ;" and who, it may be added, appear 
 to have been Sterne's only reputable acquaintances. For 
 the satisfaction of all other social needs he seems to have 
 resorted to a companionship which it was hardly possible 
 for a clergyman to frequent without scandal — that, namely, 
 of John Hall Stevenson and the kindred spirits whom he 
 delighted to collect round him at Skelton — familiarly 
 known as "Crazy" Castle. The club of the " Demoniacs," 
 of which Sterne makes mention in his letters, may have 
 had nothing very diabolical about it except the name ; 
 but, headed as it was by the suspected ex-comrade of 
 Wilkes and his brother monks of Medmenham, and 
 recruited by gay militaires like Colonels Hall and Lee, 
 and "fast" parsons like the Eev. "Panty" Lascelles 
 (mock godson of Pantagruel) it was certainly a society in 
 which the Vicar of Sutton could not expect to enroU him- 
 self without offence. "We may fairly suppose therefore that 
 it was to his association with these somewhat too " jolly 
 companions " that Sterne owed that disfavour among 
 decorous country circles, of which he shows resentful con- 
 sciousness in the earlier chapters of Tristram Shandy. 
 
 But before we finally cross the line which separates the 
 life of the obscure country parson from the life of the 
 
III.] THE PARISH PRIEST. 31 
 
 famous author, a word or two must be said of that piece 
 of 'writing which was alluded to a few pages back as the 
 only known exception to the generally " professional " cha- 
 racter of aU Sterne's compositions of the Pre-Shandian era. 
 This was a piece in the allegoric-satirical style, which, 
 though not very remarkable in itself, may not improbably 
 have helped to determine its author's thoughts iu the 
 direction of more elaborate literary efforts. In the year 
 1758 a dispute had arisen between a certain Dr. Topham, 
 an ecclesiastical lawyer in large local practice, and Dr. 
 Fountayne, the then Dean of York. This dispute had 
 originated in an attempt on the part of the learned 
 civilian, who appears to have been a pluralist of an 
 exceptionally insatiable order, to obtain the reversion of 
 one of his numerous offices for his son, allegiug a promise 
 made to him on that behalf by the Archbishop. This 
 promise, which had in fact been given, was legally 
 impossible of performance, and upon the failure of his 
 attempt the disappointed Topham turned upon the Dean, 
 and maintained that by him at any rate he had been 
 promised another place of the value of five guineas per 
 annum, and appropriately known as the " Commissaryship 
 of Pickering and Pocklington." This the Dean denied, 
 and thereupon Dr. Topham fired off a pamphlet setting 
 forth the circumstances of the alleged promise, and 
 protesting against the wrong inflicted upon him by its 
 non-performance. At this point Sterne came to Dr. 
 Fountayne's assistance with a sarcastic apologue entitled 
 the " History of a good warm Watchcoat," which had" hung 
 up many years in the parish vestry," and showing how 
 this garment had so excited the cupidity of Trim, the sexton, 
 that " nothing would serve him but he must take it home, 
 to have it converted into a warm under petticoat for his 
 wife and a jerkin for himself against the winter." The 
 
32 STEENB. [oh. iit. 
 
 symbolization of Dr. Topham's snug "patent place,'' 
 which ho wished to make hereditary, under the image of 
 the good warm watchcoat is of course plain enough ; and 
 there is some humour in the way in which the parson 
 (the Archbishop) discovers that his incautious assent to 
 Trim's request had been given vltra vires. Looking 
 through the parish register, at the request of a labourer 
 who wished to ascertain his age, the parson finds express 
 words of bequest leaving the watchcoat "for the sole use of 
 the sextons of the church for ever, to be worn by them 
 respectively on winterly cold nights,'' and at the moment 
 when he is exclaiming, "Just Heaven! what an escape 
 have I had ! Give this for a petticoat to Trim's vnf e ! " he 
 is interrupted by Trim himself entering the vestry with 
 " the coat actually ript and cut out " ready for conversion 
 into a petticoat for his wife. And we get a foretaste of 
 the familiar Shandian impertinence in the remark which 
 follows, that " there are many good similes subsisting in 
 the world, but which I have neither time to recollect nor 
 look for, which would give you an idea of the parson's 
 astonishment at Trim's impudence." The emoluments of 
 " Pickering and Pocklington " appear under the figure of a 
 "pair of black velvet plush breeches" which ultimately "got 
 into the possession of one Lorry Slim (Sterne himself, of 
 course), an unlucky wight by whom they are still worn : in 
 truth, as you will guess, they are very thin by this time." 
 The whole thing is the very slightest of " skits,'' and 
 the quarrel having been accommodated before it could be 
 published, it was not given to the world until after its 
 author's death. But it is interesting as his first known 
 attempt in this line of composition, and the grasping 
 sexton deserves remembrance if only as having handed 
 down his name to a far more famous descendant. 
 
CHAPTEE IV. 
 
 TEISTRAM SHANDY. VOLS. I. AND II. 
 
 (1759—1760.) 
 
 Hitherto we have had to construct our conception of 
 Sterne out of materials of more or less plausible conjec- 
 ture. We are now at last approaching the region of 
 positive evidence, and henceforward, down almost to 
 the last scene of all, Sterne's doings will be chronicled, 
 and his character revealed, by one who happens, in this 
 case, to be the best of aU possible biographers — the man 
 himself. Not that such records are by any means always 
 the most trustworthy of evidence. There are some men 
 whose real character is never more effectually concealed 
 than in their correspondence. But it is not so with Sterne. 
 The careless, slipshod letters which Mdme. de Medalle 
 "pitchforked" into the book-market, rather than edited, 
 are highly valuable as pieces of autobiography. They are 
 easy, naive, and natural, rich in simple self-disclosure in 
 almost every page, and if they have more to teU us about 
 the man than the writer, they are yet not wanting in 
 instructive hints as to Sterne's methods of composition and 
 his theories of art. 
 
 It was in the year 1759 that the Vicar of Sutton and 
 Prebendary of York, already, no doubt, a stone of 
 stumbling and a rock of offence to many worthy people in 
 
3i STERNE. [chap. 
 
 the county, conceived the idea of astonishing and scan- 
 dalizing-them still further after a new and original fashion. 
 His impulses to literary production were probably various, 
 and not all of them, or perhaps the strongest of them, of the 
 artistic order. The first and most urgent was, it may be sus- 
 pected, the simpl3st and most common of all such motive 
 forces. Sterne, in all likelihood, was in want of money. 
 He was not, perhaps, under the actual instruction of that 
 magister artium, whom the Koman satirist has celebrated ; 
 for he declared, indeed, afterwards, that " he wrote not to 
 be fed, but to be famous." But the context of the pas- 
 sage shows that he only meant to deny any absolute com- 
 pulsion to write for mere subsistence. Between this sort 
 of constraint and that gentler form of pressure which 
 arises from the wish to increase an income sufl&cient for 
 one's needs, but inadequate to one's desires, there is a con- 
 siderable difference ; and to repudiate the one is not to 
 disclaim the other. It is, at any rate, certain that Sterne 
 engaged at one time of his life in a rather speculative 
 sort of farming, and we have it from himself in a passage 
 in one of his letters, which may be jest, but reads more like 
 earnest, that it was his losses in this business that first 
 ■ turned his attention to literature.^ His thoughts once set 
 in that direction, his peculiar choice of subject and method 
 of treatment are easily comprehensible. Pantagruelic 
 burlesque came to him, if not naturally, at any rate by 
 " second nature." He had a strong and sedulously culti- 
 vated taste for Kabelaisian humour ; his head was crammed 
 
 ' "I was once such a puppy myself," he writes to a certain baronet 
 whom he is attempting to discourage from speculative farming of 
 this sort, " and had my labour for my pains and two hundred 
 pounds out of pocket. Curse on farming ! (I said). Let us see if 
 the pen will not succeed better than the spade." 
 
IV.] TEISTBAM SHAND-i^. VOLS. I. AND II. 35 
 
 - with all sorts of out-of-the-way learning constantly tickling 
 his comic sense by its Very uselessness ; he relished more 
 keenly than any man the solemn futilities of mediseval 
 doctors, and the pedantic indecencies of casuist fathers ; 
 and along with all these temptations to an enterprise of 
 the kind upon which he entered, he had been experiencing 
 a steady relaxation of deterrent restraints. He had fallen 
 out with his uncle some years since,^ and the quarrel had 
 freed him from at least one influence making for clerical 
 propriety of behaviour. His incorrigible levities had pro- 
 bably lost him the countenance of most of his more serious 
 acquaintances ; his satirical humour had as probably gained 
 him personal enemies not a few, and it may be that he 
 had gradually contracted something of that "naughty- 
 boy " temper, as we may call it, for which the deliberate and 
 ostentatious repetition of offences has an inexplicable charm. 
 It seems clear, too, that, growth for growth with this 
 spirit of bravado, there had sprung up— in somewhat iucon- 
 gruous companionship, perhaps — a certain sense of wrong. 
 Along with the impulse to give an additional shock to 
 the prejudices he had already offended, Sterne felt 
 impelled to vindicate what he considered the genuine 
 moral worth underlying the indiscretions of the offender. 
 What, then, could better suit him than to compose a novel , 
 in which he might give full play to his ^simious humoux ^ 
 startle more hideously than ever his straiter-laced neigh- 
 bours, defiantly defend his own character, and caricature 
 
 2 He himself indeed makes a particular point of this in explain- 
 ing his literary venture. " Now for your desire," he writes to a 
 correspondent in 1759, " of knowing the reason of my turning 
 author ? why truly I am tired of employing my brains for other 
 people's advantage. "Tia a foolish sacrifice I have made for some 
 years for an ungrateful person." — Letters, i. 82. 
 D 2 
 
36 STERNE. [chap. 
 
 whatever eccentric figure in the society around him. might 
 offer the most tempting butt for ridicule ? 
 
 All the world knows how far he ultimately advanced 
 beyond the simplicity of the conception, and into what 
 far higher regions of art its execution led him. But I find 
 no convincing reason for believing that Tristram Shandy 
 had at the outset any more seriously artistic purpose than 
 this ; and much indirect evidence that this, in fact, it 
 was. 
 
 The humorous figure of Mr. Shandy is, of course, the 
 Cervantic centre of the whole ; and it was out of him 
 and his crotchets that Sterne no doubt intended from the 
 first to draw the materials of that often unsavoury fun 
 which was to amuse the light-minded and scandalize the 
 demure. But it can hardly escape notice that the two 
 most elaborate portraits in Vol. I. — the admirable but 
 very flatteringly idealized sketch of the author himself in 
 Yorick, and the GUrayesque caricature of Dr. Slop — are 
 drawn with a distinctly polemical purpose, defensive in 
 the former case and offensive in the latter. On the other 
 hand, with the disappearance of Dr. Slop, caricature of 
 living persons disappears also; while after the famous 
 description of Yorick's death-bed, we meet with no more 
 attempts at self-vindication. It seems probable, there- 
 fore, that long before the first two volumes were com- 
 pleted Sterne had discovered the artistic possibilities of 
 " My Uncle Toby" and " Corporal Trim," and had realized 
 the full potentialities of humour contained in the contrast 
 between the two brothers Shandy. The very work of 
 sharpening and deepening the outlines of this humorous 
 antithesis, while it made the crack-brained philosopher 
 more and more of a burlesque unreality, continually added 
 new touches of life and nature to the lineaments of the 
 
IV.] TBISTSAM SHANDY. VOLS. 1. AND II. 37 
 
 simple-minded soldier; and it was by this curious and 
 half-accidental process that there came to be added to the 
 gaUery of English fiction one of the most perfect and 
 delightful portraits that it possesses. 
 
 We know from internal evidence that Tristram 
 Shandy was begun in the early days of 1759 ; and the 
 first two volumes were probably completed by about the 
 middle of the year. " In the year 1760," writes Sterne, 
 " I went up to London to publish my two first volumes 
 of Shandy." And it is stated in a note to this passage, 
 as cited in Scott's memoir, that the first edition was 
 published " the year before " in York. .There is, how- 
 ever, no direct proof that it was in the hands of the 
 public before the beginning of 1760, though it is possible 
 that the date of its publication may just have fallen 
 within the year. But, at aU events, on the 1st of January, 
 1760, an advertisement in the Public Advertiser informed 
 the world that "this day" was "published, printed on 
 superfine writiag-paper, &c.. The Life and Opinions of 
 Tristram Shandy. York. Printed for and sold by John 
 Hinxham, Bookseller in Stonegate." The great London 
 publisher, Dodsley, to whom the book had been offered, 
 and who had declined the venture, figures in the 
 advertisement as the principal London bookseller from 
 whom it was to be obtained. It seems that only a few 
 copies were in the first instance sent up to the London 
 market; but they feU into good hands, for there is 
 evidence that Tristram Shandy had attracted the 
 notice of at least one competent critic in the capital 
 before the month of January was out. But though the 
 metropolitan success of the book was destined to be 
 delayed for stiU a month or two, in York it had already 
 created a furore in more senses than one. For, in fact, 
 
38 STERNE. [chap. 
 
 and no -wonder, it had in many quarters given the 
 deepest offence. Its Eabelaisian licence of incident and 
 aUtision was calculated to offend the proprieties — the 
 provincial proprieties especially — even in that free-spoken 
 age; and there was that in the book, moreover, which 
 a provincial society may be counted on to abominate, 
 with a keener if less disinterested abhorrence than any 
 sins against decency. It contained, or was supposed to 
 contain, a broadly ludicrous caricature of one well-known 
 local physician ; and an allusion, brief indeed and covert, 
 but highly scandalous, to a certain " droll foible " attri- 
 buted to another personage of much wider celebrity in 
 the scientific world. The victim in the latter case was no 
 longer living ; and this circumstance brought upon Sterne 
 a remonstrance from a correspondent, to which he replied 
 in a letter so characteristic in many respects as to be 
 worth quoting. His correspondent was a Dr. *****, 
 (asterisks for which it is now impossible to substitute 
 letters) ; and the burden of what seem to have been several 
 communications in speech and writing on the subject was 
 the maxim, " de mortuis nil nisi bonum.'' "With such 
 seriousness and severity had his correspondent dwelt upon 
 this adage, that " at length," writes Sterne, " you have 
 made me as serious and as severe as yourself ; but, that 
 the humours you have stirred up might not work too 
 potently within me, I have waited four days to cool 
 myself before I could set pen to paper to answer you. " 
 And thus he sets forth the results of his four days' 
 deliberation : — 
 
 " De mortuis nil nisi bonum." I declare I have considered 
 the wisdom and foundation of it over and over again as dispas- 
 Bionately and charitably as a good Christian can, and after 
 all I can find nothing in it, or make more of it than a non- 
 
IV.] TRISTEAM SHAJSIDY. VOLS. I. AND II. 39 
 
 sensical lullaby of some nurse, put into Latin by some pedant, 
 to be chanted by some bypocrite to the end of the world for the 
 consolation of departing lechers. 'Tis, I own, Latin, and I think 
 that is all the weight it has, for, in plain English, 'tis a loose 
 and futile position below a dispute. " You are not to speak 
 anything of the dead but what is good." Why so ? Who says 
 so? Neither reason nor Scripture. Inspired authors have 
 done otherwise, and reason and common sense tell me that, if 
 the characters of past ages and men are to be drawn at all, they 
 are to be drawn like themselves, that is, with their excellencies 
 and their foibles ; and it as much a piece of justice to the world, 
 and to virtue, too, to do the one as the other. The ruling 
 passion, et les egarements dw caeiir, ane the very things which 
 mark and distinguish a man's character, in which 1 would as 
 soon leave out a man's head as his hobby-horse. However, if, 
 like the poor devil of a painter, we must conform to the pious 
 ■canon, " de mortuis, &c.," which I own has a spice of piety in 
 the sound of it, and be obliged to paint both our angels and our 
 devils out of the same pot, I then infer that our Sydenhams and 
 our Sangrados, our Luoretias and our Messalinas, our Somersets 
 and our Bolingbrokes, are alike entit'ed to statues, and all the 
 historians or satirists who have said otherwise since they 
 
 departed this life, from Sallust to S e, are guilty of the 
 
 crimes you charge ue with, " cowardice and injustice.'' But 
 why cowardice ? " Because 'tis not courage to attack a dead 
 man who can't defend himself." But why do you doctors attack 
 such a one with your incision knife P Oh ! for the good of the 
 living. 'Tis my plea. 
 
 And, having given this humorous twist to his argument, 
 he glides off into extenuatory matter. He had not even, 
 he protests, made as much as a surgical incision into his 
 victim (Dr. Eichard Mead, the friend of Bentley and of 
 Newton, and a physician and physiologist of high repute 
 in his day) ; he had but just scratched him, and that 
 scarce skin-deep. As to the " droll foible " of Dr. Mead, 
 
40 STERNE. [chap. 
 
 which he had made merry with, " it was not first reported 
 (even to the few who can understand the hint) by me, 
 but known before by every chambermaid and footman 
 within the bills of mortaUty" — a somewhat daring - 
 assertion, one would imagine, considering what the droll 
 foible was ; and Dr. Mead, continues Sterne, great man 
 as he was, had, after aU, not fared worse than " a man 
 of twice his wisdom," — to wit Solomon, of whom the 
 same remark had been made, that " they were both great 
 men, and like all mortal men had each their ruling 
 passion." 
 
 The mixture of banter and sound reasoning in this 
 reply is, no doubt, very skilful. But unfortunately neither 
 the reasoning nor the banter happens to meet the case of 
 this particular defiance of the " De mortuis " maxim, and 
 as a serious defence against a serious charge (which was 
 what the occasion required) Sterne's answer is altogether 
 futile. For the plea of " the good of the living," upon 
 which, after all, the whole defence, considered seriously, 
 rests, was quite inapplicable as an excuse for the incri- 
 minated passage. The only living persons who could pos- 
 sibly be afiected by it, for good or evil, were those 
 surviving friends of the dead man, to whom Sterne's 
 allusion to what he called Dr. Mead's "droll foible " was 
 calculated to cause the deepest pain and shame. 
 
 The other matter of offence to Sterne's Yorkshire 
 readers was of a much more elaborate kind. In the person 
 of Dr. Slop, the grotesque man-midwife, who was to have 
 assisted, but missed assisting at Tristram's entry into the 
 world, the good people of York were not slow to recognize 
 the physical peculiarities and professional antecedents of 
 Dr. Burton, the local accoucheur, whom Archdeacon 
 Sterne had arrested as a Jacobite. That the portrait was 
 
IV.] TRISTEAM SHANDY. VOLS. I. AND II. 41 
 
 faithful to anything but the external traits of the original, 
 or -was intended to reproduce anything more than these, 
 Sterne afterwards denied ; and we have certainly no 
 ground for thinking that Burton had invited ridicule on 
 any other than the somewhat unworthy ground of the 
 curious ugliness of his face and figure. It is most unlikely 
 that his success as a practitioner in a branch of the me- 
 dical art in which imposture is the most easily detected, 
 could have been earned by mere quackery ; and he seems, 
 moreover, to have been a man of learning in more kinds 
 than one. The probability is that the worst that could 
 be alleged against him was a tendency to scientific 
 pedantry in his published writings, which was pretty sure 
 to tickle the fancy of Mr. Sterne. Unscrupulously, however, 
 as he was caricatured, the sensation which appears to have 
 been excited in the county by the burlesque portrait could 
 hardly have been due to any strong public sympathy with 
 the involuntary sitter. Dr. Burton seems, as a suspected 
 Jacobite, to have been no special favourite with the York- 
 shire squirearchy in general, but rather the reverse thereof. 
 TJcalegon, however, does not need to be popular to arouse 
 his neighbour's interest in his misfortunes ; and the cari- 
 cature of Burton was doubtless resented on the proodmus 
 ardet principle by many who feared that their turn was 
 coming next. 
 
 To aU the complaints and protests which reached him 
 on the subject, Sterne would in any case probably 
 have been indifierent ; but he was soon to receive encou- 
 ragement which would have more than repaid a man of 
 his temper for twice the number of rebukes. For London 
 cared nothing for Yorkshire susceptibilities and Yorkshire 
 fears. Provincial notables might be libelled, and their 
 friends might go in fear of similar treatment, but all that 
 
42 STERNE. [CHAP. 
 
 was nothing to " the town," and Tristram Shandy had 
 taken the town by storm. "We gather from a passage in 
 the letter ahove quoted that as early as January 30 the 
 book had " gained the very favourable opinion " of Mr. Gar- 
 rick, afterwards to become the author's intimate friend ; and 
 it is certain that by the time of Sterne's arrival in London, 
 in March, 1760, Tristram Shandy had become the rage. 
 
 To say of this extraordinary work that it defies analysis 
 would be the merest inadequacy of commonplace. It was 
 meant to defy analysis ; it is of the very essence of its 
 scheme and purpose that it should do so ; and the mere 
 attempt to subject it systematically to any such process 
 would argue an altogether mistaken conception of the 
 author's intent. Its fuU " official " style and title is The 
 Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gent, and it is 
 difficult to say which it contains the less about — the 
 opinions of Tristram Shandy or the events of his life. As 
 a matter of fact, its proper description would be "The 
 Opinions of Tristram Shandy's Father, with Some Passages 
 from the Life of his Uncle." Its claim to be regarded as 
 a biography of its nominal hero is best illustrated by the 
 fact that Tristram is not born till the third volume, and 
 not breeched till the sixth ; that it is not till the seventh 
 that he begins to play any active part in the narrative, 
 appearing then only as a completely colourless and unin- 
 dividualized figure, a mere vehicle for the conveyance of 
 Sterne's own Continental impressions de voyage ; and that 
 in the last two volumes, which are entirely taken up with 
 the incident of his uncle's courtship, he disappears from 
 the story altogether. It is to be presumed, perhaps, though 
 not very confidently, that the reader would have seen more 
 of him if the tale had been continued ; but how much or 
 how little is quite uncertain. The real hero of the book 
 
IV.] TRISTRAM SHANDY. VOLS. I. AND II. 43 
 
 is at the outset Mr. Shandy, senior, who is, later on, suc- 
 ceeded in this place of dignity by my uncle Toby. It not 
 only served Sterne's purpose to confine himself mainly to 
 these two characters, as the best whereon to display his 
 powers, but it was part of his studied eccentricitjr to do 
 so. It was a " point " to give as little as possible about 
 Tristram Shandy in a life of Tristram Shandy ; just as it 
 was a point to keep the reader waiting throughout the year 
 1760 for their hero to be so much as bom. In the first 
 volume, therefore, the author does literally everything but 
 make the slightest progress with his story. Starting off 
 abruptly with a mock physiologic disquisition upon the 
 importance of a proper ordering of their mental states on 
 the part of the intending jjrogenitors of children, he phi- 
 losophizes gravely on this theme for two or three chapters ; 
 and then wanders away into an account of the local mid- 
 wife, upon whose sole services Mrs. Shandy, in opposition 
 to her husband, was inclined to rely. From the midwife 
 it is an easy transition to her patron and protector, the 
 incumbent of the parish, and this, in its turn, suggests a 
 long excursus on the character, habits, appearance, home, 
 friends, enemies, and finally death, burial, and epitaph of 
 the Eev. Mr. Yorick. Thence we return to Mr. and Mrs. 
 Shandy, and are made acquainted, in absurdly minute 
 detail, with an agreement entered into between them with 
 reference to the place of sojourn to be selected for the 
 lady's accouchement, the burlesque deed wliich records 
 this compact being actually set out at f uU length. Thence, 
 again, we are beckoned away by the jester to join him in 
 elaborate and not very edifying ridicule of the Catholic 
 doctrine of ante-natal baptism ; and thence — but it would 
 be useless to follow further the windings and doublings 
 of this literary hare. 
 
44 STEENB. [chap. 
 
 Yet, though the book as one thus summarizes it, may- 
 appear a mere farrago of digressions, it nevertheless, after 
 its peculiar fashion, advances. Such definite purpose as 
 underlies the tricks and grimaces of its author is hy 
 degrees accomplished ; and before we reach the end of 
 the first volume, the highly humorous if extravagantly 
 idealized figure of Mr. Shandy takes bodily shape and 
 consistency before our eyes. It is a mistake, I think, of 
 Sir Walter Scott's to regard the portrait of this eccentric 
 philosopher as intended for a satire upon perverted and 
 deranged erudition — as the study of a man "whom too 
 much and too miscellaneous learning had brought within 
 a step or two of madness." Sterne's conception seems to 
 me a little more subtle and less commonplace than that. 
 Mr. Shandy, I imagine, is designed to personify not 
 "crack-brained learning" so much as "theory run mad." 
 He is possessed by a sort of Demon of the Deductive, 
 ever impelling him to push his premises to new conclu- 
 sions without ever allowing him time to compare them 
 with the facts. No doubt we are meant to regard him as 
 a learned man ; but his son gives us to understand dis- 
 tinctly and very early in the book that his crotchets were 
 by no means " those of a weak receptive mind, overladen 
 with more knowledge than it could digest, but rather 
 those of an over-active intelligence, far more deeply and 
 constantly concerned with its own processes than with the 
 thoughts of others. Tristram, indeed, dwells pointedly 
 on the fact that his father's dialectical skill was not the 
 result of training, and that he owed nothing to the logic 
 of the schools. " He was certainly," says his son, 
 " irresistible both in his orations and disputations,'' but 
 that was because " he was born an orator " (©eoSiSaKTos). 
 Persuasion hung upon his lips, and the elements of logic 
 
IV.] TRISTRAM SHANDY. VOLS. I. AND II. 45 
 
 and rhetoric were so blended in him, and witlial he had 
 so shrewd a guess at the weaknesse.s and passions of his 
 respondent that nature might have stood up and said, 
 "This man is eloquent. And yet," continues the filial 
 panegyric,— 
 
 He had never read Cicero nor ',Quintilian de Oratore, nor 
 Aristotle nor Longinus among the ancients, nor Vossius, nor 
 Skioppius, nor Bamus nor Parnaby among the moderns : and 
 what is more astonishing he had never in his whole life the least 
 light or spark of subtilty struck into his mind hy one single 
 lecture upon Crackenthorpe or Burgersdicius or any Dutch com- 
 mentator : he knew not so much as in what the diiference of an 
 argument ad ignorantiam and an argument ad hominem con- 
 sisted ; and when he went up along with me to enter my name 
 at Jesus College, in * * * *, it was a matter of just wonder 
 with my worthy tutor and two or three fellows of that learned 
 society that a man who knew not so much as the names of his 
 tools should he able to work after that fashion with them. 
 
 Surely we all know men of this kind, and the con- 
 sternation — comparable only to that of M. Jourdain under 
 the impromptu carte-and-tierce of his servant-maid' — 
 which their sturdy if informal dialectic will often spread 
 among many kinds of " learned societies.'' But such men 
 are certainly not of the class which Scott supposed to 
 have been ridiculed in the character of Walter Shandy. 
 
 Among the crotchets of this born dialectician was a 
 theory as to the importance of Christian names in 
 determining the future behaviour and destiny of the 
 children to whom they are given ; and whatever 
 admixture of jest there might have been in some of his 
 other fancies, in this his son affirms he was absolutely 
 serious. He solemnly maintained the opinion " that there 
 was a strange kind of magic bias which good or bad 
 
46 STEBNE. [chap. 
 
 names, as he called them, irresistibly impressed upon 
 OTir character and conduct." How many Csesars and 
 Pompeys, he would say, by mere inspiration- of their 
 names have been rendered worthy of them. And how 
 many, he would add, are there who might have done 
 exceeding well in the world had not their characters and 
 spirits been totally depressed and Mcodemus'd into 
 nothing? He was astonished at parents failing to per- 
 ceive that "when once a vile name was wrongfully or 
 injudiciously given, 'twas not like a case of a man's 
 character, which when wronged might afterwards be 
 cleared ; and possibly some time or other, if not in the 
 man's life, at least after his death, be somehow or other 
 set to rights with the world." This name-giving injury, 
 he would say, " could never be undone ; nay, he doubted 
 whether an Act of Parliament could reach it ; he knew, as 
 well as you, that the Legislature assumed a power- over 
 surnames ; but for very strong reasons, which he could 
 give, it had never yet adventured, he would say, to go a 
 step further." 
 
 With all this extravagance, however, there was com- 
 bined an admirable affectation of sobriety. Mr. Shandy 
 would have us believe that he was no blind slave to his 
 theory. He was quite willing to admit the existence of 
 names, which could not affect the character either for 
 good or evil— Jack, Dick, and Tom, for instance; and 
 such the philosopher styled " neutral names,'' affirming of 
 them "without a satire, that there had been, as many 
 knaves and fools at least as wise and good men since the 
 world began, who had indifferently borne them, so that 
 like equal forces acting against each other in contrary 
 directions, he thought they mutually destroyed each 
 others effects ; for which reason he would often declare 
 
I?.] TRISTRAM SHANDY. VOLS. I. AND II. 47 
 
 he would not give a cherrystone to choose among them. 
 Bob, which was my brother's name, was another of these 
 neutral kinds of Christian names which operated very 
 little either way; and as my father happened to he at 
 Epsom when it was given him, he would ofttimes thank 
 heaven it was no worse." Forewarned of this peculiarity 
 of Mr. Shandy's, the reader is, of course, prepared to hear 
 that of all the names in the universe the philosopher 
 had the most unconquerable aversion for Tristram, " the 
 lowest and most contemptible opinion of it of anything in 
 the world." He would break off in the midst of one of 
 his frequent disputes on the subject of names, and " in a 
 spirited epiphonema, or rather erotesis," demand of his 
 antagonist " whether he would take upon him to say he 
 had ever remembered, whether he had ever read, or whether 
 he had ever heard tell of a man called Tristram perform- 
 ing anything great or worth recording. No, he would 
 say. Tristram ! the thing is impossible." It only 
 remained that he should have published a book in defence 
 of the belief, and sure enough " in the year sixteen," two 
 years before the birth of his second son, " he was at the 
 pains of writing an express dissertation simply upon the 
 word Tristram, showing the world with great candour and 
 modesty the grounds of his great abhorrence to the name." 
 And with this idea Sterne continues to amuse himself at 
 intervals till the end of the chapter. 
 
 That he does not so persistently amuse the reader it is, 
 of course, scarcely necessary to say. The jest has not 
 substance enough — few of Sterne's jests have — to stand 
 the process of continual attrition to which he subjects 
 it. But the mere historic gravity with which the 
 various turns of this monomania are recorded — to say 
 nothing of the seldom failing charm of the easy gossiping 
 
48 STEENE. [chap. 
 
 style — prevent the thing from ever becoming utterly 
 tiresome. On the whole, however, one begins to grow 
 impatient for more of the same sort as the three admirable 
 chapters on the Eev. Mr. Yorick, and are not sorry to get 
 to the opening of the second volume with its half-tender, 
 half-humorous, and wholly delightful account of Uncle 
 Toby's difficulties in describing the siege operations before 
 Namur, and of the happy chance by which these difficulties 
 made him ultimately the fortunate possessor of a "hobby." 
 Throughout this volume there are manifest signs of 
 Sterne's unceasing interest in his own creations, and of 
 his increasing consciousness of creative power. Captain 
 Toby Shandy is but just lightly sketched-in in the first 
 volume, while Corporal Trim has not made his appearance 
 on the scene at all ; but before the end of the second we 
 know both of them thoroughly within and without. 
 Indeed, one might almost say that in the first half-dozen 
 chapters which so excellently recount the origin of 
 the corporal's fortification scheme, and the wounded 
 officer's delighted acceptance of it, every trait in the 
 simple characters — alike yet so different in their sim- 
 plicity — of master and of man becomes definitely fixed in 
 the reader's mind. And the total difference between the 
 second and the first volume in point of fulness, variety, 
 and colour is most marked. The artist, the inventor, the 
 master of dialogue, the comic dramatist in fact as 
 distinct from the humorous essayist, would almost seem 
 to have started into being as we pass from the one volume 
 to the other. There is nothing in the drolleries of the 
 first volume — in the broad jests upon Mr. Shandy's 
 crotchets, or even in the subtler humour of the intellectual 
 collision between these crotchets and his brother's plain 
 sense — to indicate the kind of power displayed in that 
 
IV.] TEISTKAM SHAKDY. VOLS. I. AND II. 49 
 
 remarkable colloquy a guatre, whioli begins with the 
 arrival of Dr. Slop and ends with Corporal Trim's recital 
 of the Sermon on Conscience. "Wit, humour, irony, 
 quaint learning, shrewd judgment of men and things, of 
 these Sterne had displayed abundance already ; but it is 
 not in the earlier but in the later half of the first instal- 
 ment of Tristram Shandy that we first become conscious 
 that he is something more than the possessor of all 
 these things : that he is gifted with the genius of 
 creation and has sent forth new beings into that world 
 of immortal shadows which to many of us is more real 
 than our own. 
 
CHAPTEE V. 
 
 LONDON TRIUMPHS FIRST SET OF SERMONS TRISTRAM 
 
 SHANDY, VOLS. III. AND IV. — COXWOLD — VOLS. V. AND VI. 
 — FIRST VISIT TO THE CONTINENT — PARIS — TOULOUSE. 
 
 (1760—1762.) 
 
 Sterne alighted from the York mail just as Byron 
 " awoke one morning,'' to " find himself famous.'' Seldom 
 indeed has any lion so suddenly discovered been pursued 
 SO eagerly and by such a distinguished crowd of hunters. 
 The chase was remarkable enough to have left a lasting 
 impression on the spectators ; for it was several years 
 after (in 1773) that Dr. Johnson, by way of fortifying his 
 very just remark that " any man who has a name or who 
 has the ;power of pleasing will be generally invited in 
 London," observed gruffty that " the man Sterne," he was 
 told, " had had engagements for three months.'' And truly 
 it would appear from abundant evidence tliat " the man 
 Sterne " gained such a social triumph as might well have 
 turned a stronger head than his. "Within twenty-four 
 hours after his arrival, his lodgings in Pall Mall were 
 besieged by a crowd of fashionable visitors ; and in a few 
 weeks ho had probably made the acquaintance of " every- 
 body who was anybody " in the London society of that 
 day. 
 
 How thoroughly he relished the delights of celebrity is 
 
CH. T.] LONDON TRIUMPHS. 51 
 
 revealed, -with, a simple vanity which almost disarms 
 criticism, in many a passage of his correspondence. In 
 one of his earliest letters to Miss Fourmantelle, we find 
 him proudly relating to her how already he " was engaged 
 to ten noblemen and men of fashion." Of Garrick, who 
 had warmly welcomed the humourist whose merits he had 
 beeii the first to discover, Sterne says that he had 
 " promised him at dinner to numbers of great people.'' 
 Among these great people who sought him out for them- 
 selves was that discerning patron of ability in every 
 shape, Lord Eockiugham. In one of the many letters 
 which Madame de MedaUe flung dateless upon the world, 
 but which from internal evidence we can assign to the 
 early months of 1760, Sterne writes that he is about to 
 " set off with a grand retinue of Lord Rockingham's 
 (in whose suite I move) for Windsor " to witness, it 
 should seem, an installation of a Knight of the Garter. 
 It is in his letters to Miss Pourmantelle, however, that 
 his almost boyish exultation at his London triumph 
 discloses itself most frankly. " My rooms," he writes, 
 " are fiUing every hour with great people of the first rank, 
 who strive who shall most honour me." Never, he 
 believes, had such homage been rendered to any man by 
 devotees so distinguished. "The honours paid me were 
 the greatest that were ever known from the great.'' 
 
 The self-painted portrait is not, it must be confessed, 
 altogether an attractive one. It is somewhat wanting in 
 dignity, and its air of over-inflated complacency is at 
 times slightly ridiculous. But we must not judge Sterne 
 in this matter by too severe a standard. He was by nature 
 neither a dignified nor a self-contained man : he had a 
 head particularly unfitted to stand sudden elevation ; and 
 it must be allowed that few men's power of resisting 
 E 2 
 
52 STEENE. [chap. 
 
 giddiness at previously unexplored altitudes was ever so 
 severely tried. It was not only " the great " in the sense 
 of the high in rank and social distinction by whom he 
 was courted ; he was welcomed also by the eminent in 
 genius and learning : and it would be no very difficult 
 task for him to flatter himseK that it was the latter form 
 of recognition which he really valued most. Much, at 
 any rate, in the way of undue elation may be forgiven to 
 a country clergyman who suddenly found himself the 
 centre of a court, which was regularly attended by 
 statesmen, wits, and leaders of fashion, and with which 
 even bishops condescended to open gracious diplomatic- 
 communication. " Even all the bishops," he writes, 
 " have sent their compliments ; " and though this can 
 hardly have been true of the whole episcopal bench, 
 it is certain that Sterne received something more than a 
 compliment from one bishop, who was a host in himself. 
 He was introduced by Garrick to Warbuiton, and re- 
 ceived high encouragement from that formidable prelate.' 
 
 The year 1760, however, was to bring to Sterne more 
 solid gains than that of mere celebrity, or even than the 
 somewhat precarious money profits which depend on 
 hterary vogue. Only a few weeks after his arrival in 
 town he was presented by Lord Falconberg with the 
 curacy of Coxwold, " a sweet retirement," as he describes 
 it, " in comparison of Sutton," — at which he was in future 
 to pass most of the time spent by him in Yorkshire. 
 "What obtained him this piece of preferment is unknown. 
 
 ' It is admitted, moreover, in the correspondence with Miss 
 Fonrmantelle that Sterne received something more sabstantial 
 from the Bishop in the shape of a purse of gold ; and this strange 
 present gave rise to a scandal on which something will be said 
 hereafter. 
 
T.] LONDON TRIUMPHS. 53 
 
 It may be that Tnstram Sliandy drew the Yorkshire 
 peer's attention to the fact that there was a Yorkshireman 
 of genius living within a few miles of a then vacant 
 benefice in his lordship's gift ; and that this was enough 
 for him. But Sterne himself says — in writing a year or 
 so afterwards to a lady of his acquaintance — " I hope I 
 have been of some service to his lordship, and he has 
 suificiently requited me :" and in the face of this plain 
 assertion, confirmed as it is by the fact that Lord Falcon- 
 berg was on terms of friendly intimacy with the Vicar 
 of Coxwold at a much later date than this, we may 
 dismiss idle tales about Sterne's having " black-mailed " 
 the patron out of a presentation to a benefice worth no 
 more, after aU, than some 70Z. a year net. 
 
 There is somewhat more substance, however, in the 
 scandal which got abroad with reference to a certain alleged 
 transaction between Sterne and Warburton. Before Sterne 
 had been many days in London, and while yet his person 
 and doings were the natural subjects of the newest gossip, 
 a story found ifs way into currency to the effect that the 
 new-made Bishop of Gloucester had found it advisable to 
 protect himself against the satiric humour of the author 
 of the Tristram Shandy by a substantial present of 
 money. Coming to Garrick's ears, it was repeated by 
 him — whether seriously or in jest — to Sterne, from whom 
 it evoked a curious letter which in Madame de Medalle's 
 collection has been studiously hidden away among the 
 correspondence of seven years later. " 'Twas for all the 
 world," he began, " like a cut across my finger with a 
 sharp pen-knife. I saw the blood — ^gave it a suck, wrapt 
 
 it up, and thought no more about it The story 
 
 you told me of Tristram's pretended tutor this morning " — 
 (the scandal was, that Warburton had been threatened 
 
54 STERNE. [uhap. 
 
 vdth. caricature in tlie next volume of tlie novel, under 
 the guise of the hero's tutor) — " this vile story, I say, 
 though I then saw both how and where it wounded, I 
 felt little from it at first, or, to speak more honestly 
 (though it ruins my simile), I felt a great deal of pain 
 from it, but affected an air, usual in such accidents, of 
 feeling less than I had." And he goes on to repudiate, 
 it will be observed, not so much the moral offence 
 of corruption, in receiving money to space Warburton, as 
 the intellectual solecism of selecting him for ridicule. 
 " What the devU ! " he exclaims, " is there no one 
 learned blockhead throughout the schools of misapplied 
 science in the Christian world to make a tutor of for 
 my Tristram — are we so run out of stock that there is 
 no one lamber-headed, muddle-headed, mortar-headed, 
 pudding-head chap among our doctors 1 . . . . but I must 
 disable my judgment by choosing a "Warburton." Later 
 on, in a letter to his friend, Mr. Croft, at StiUington, 
 whom the scandal had reached through a " society journal " 
 of the time, he asks whether people would suppose he 
 would be " such a fool as to fall foul of Dr. "Warburton, 
 my best friend, by representing him so weak a man ; or 
 by telling such a lie of him as his giving me a purse to 
 buy off the tutorship of Tristram — or that I should be 
 fool enough to own that I had taken a purse for that 
 purpose.'' It will be remarked that Sterne does not here 
 deny having received a purse from "Warburton, but only 
 his having received it by way of black-mail : and the most 
 mysterious part of the affair is that Sterne did actually 
 receive the strange present of a " purse of gold " from 
 Warburton (whom at that time he did not know nor had 
 ever seen) ; and that he admits as much in one of his 
 letters to Miss FourmanteUe. " I had a purse of guineas 
 
v.] LONDOK TRIUMPHS. 55 
 
 given me yesterday hj a bishop," lie writes triumphantiy, 
 but without volunteering any explanation of this extra- 
 ordinary gift. Sterne's letter to Garrick was forwarded, 
 it would seem, to Warburton ; and the Bishop thanks 
 Garrick for having procured for him " the confutation of an 
 -impertinent story the first moment I heard of it." This, 
 however, can hardly count for much. If "Warburton had 
 really wished Sterne to abstain from caricaturing him, he 
 would be as anxious — and for much the same reasons — to 
 conceal the fact as to suppress the caricature. He would 
 naturally have the disclosure of it reported to Sterne for 
 formal contradiction, as in fulfilment of a virtual term 
 in the bargain between them. The epithet of "irre- 
 vocable scoundrel " which he afterwards applied to 
 Sterne, is of less importance, as proceeding from War- 
 burton, than it would have been had it come from 
 any one not habitually employing Warburton's peculiar 
 vocabulary ; but it at least argues no very cordial feeling 
 on the Bishop's side. And, on the whole, one regrets to 
 feel, as I must honestly confess that I do feel, far less con- 
 fident of the groundlessness of this rather unpleasant story 
 than cpuld be wished. It is impossible to forget, how- 
 ever, that while the ethics of this matter were undoubtedly 
 less strict in those days than they are — or, at any rate, are 
 recognized as being — in our own, there is nothing in 
 Sterne's character to make us suppose him. to have been 
 at all in advance of the morality of his time. 
 
 The incumbent-designate did not go down at once to 
 take possession of his temporalities. His London triumph 
 had not yet run its course. The first edition of Vols. I. 
 and II. of Tristram Shandy was exhausted in some three 
 months. In April, Dodsley brought out a second ; and, 
 concurrently with the advertisement of its issue, there 
 
56 STBENE. [chap. 
 
 appeared — in somewhat incoiigraous companionsliip — the 
 announcement, " Speedily mil be puhlished, The Ser- 
 mons of Mr. Torick." The jndicions Dodsley, or possibly 
 the judicious Sterne himself (acute enough in matters of 
 this kind) had perceived that now was the time to publish 
 a series of sermons by the very unclerical lion of the day. 
 There would — they no doubt thought — ^be an undeniable 
 piquancy, a distinct Savour of semi-scandalous iucongruity 
 ia listening to the Word of life from the lips of this 
 loose-tongued droll ; and the more staid and serious the 
 sermon, the more effective the contrast. There need 
 not have been much trouble in finding the kind of article 
 required : and we may be tolerably sure that, even if 
 Sterne did not perceive that fact for himself, his publisher 
 hastened to inform him that " anything would do." 
 Two of his pulpit discourses, the Assize Sermon and the 
 Charity Sermon, had aheady been thought worthy of 
 publication by their author in a separate form ; and the 
 latter of these found a place in the series ; while the 
 rest seem to have been simply the chance sweepings of 
 the parson's sermon-drawer. Tlie. critics who find wit, 
 eccentricity, flashes of Shandyism, and what not else of the 
 same sort in these discourses, must be able — or so it seems 
 to me — to discover these phenomena anywhere. To the 
 best of my own judgment, the Sermons are — with but few 
 and partial exceptions — of the most commonplace character; 
 platitudinous with the platitudes of a thousand pulpits, 
 and insipid with the crainbe repetita of a hundred thou- 
 sand homilies. A single extract will fully suffice for a 
 specimen of Sterne's pre-Shandian homiletic style ; his 
 post-Shandian manner was very different, as we shall see. 
 The preacher is discoursing upon the well-worn subject of 
 the inconsistencies of human character : — 
 
v.] FIRST SET OF SERMONS. 57 
 
 If such a contrast was only observable in the diflferent stages 
 of a man's life, it would cease to be either a matter of wonder 
 or of just reproach. Age, experience, and much reflection may 
 naturally enough be supposed to alter a man's sense of things, 
 and so entirely to transform him that, not only in outward 
 appearance but in the very oast and turn of his mind, he may 
 be as unlike and different from the man he was twenty or thirty 
 years ago as he ever was from anything of his own species. 
 This, I say, is naturally to be accounted for, and in some cases 
 might be praiseworthy too ; but the observation is to be made 
 of men in the same period of their lives that in the same day, 
 sometimes on the very same action, they are utterly inconsistent 
 and irreconcilable \^ith themselves. Look at the man in one 
 light and be shall seem wise, penetrating, discreet, and brave : 
 behold him in another point of view, and you see a creature all 
 over folly and indiscretion, weak and timorous as cowardice 
 and indiscretion can make him. A man shall appear gentle, 
 courteous, and benevolent to all mankind ; follow him into his 
 own house, maybe you see a tyrant morose and savage to all 
 whose happiness depends upon his kindness. A third, in his 
 general behaviour, is found to be generous, disinterested, 
 humane, and friendly. Hear but the sad story of the friendless 
 orphans too credulously trusting all their whole substance into 
 his hands, and he shall appear more sordid, more pitiless and 
 unjust than the injured themselve have bitterness to paint him. 
 Another shall be charitable to the poor, uncharitable in his cen- 
 sures and opinions of all the rest of the world besides : temperate 
 in his appetites, intemperate in his tongue ; shall have too much 
 conscience and religion to cheat the man who trusts him, and 
 perhaps as far as the business of debtor and creditor extends 
 shall be just and scrupulous to the uttermost mite; yet in 
 matters of full or great concern, where he is to have the handling 
 of the party's reputation and good name, the dearest, the ten- 
 derest property the man has, he will do him irreparable damage, 
 and rob him there without measure or pity. — Sermon XI. — On 
 Evil Speahing. 
 
 There is clearly notMng particularly striking in all 
 
58 STEENE. [chap. 
 
 that, even conveyed as it is in Sterne's effective, if loose 
 and careless, style ; and it is no unfair sample of the 
 whole. The calculation, however, of the author and his 
 shrewd publisher was that, whatever the intrinsic merits 
 or demerits of these sermons, they would "take" on 
 the strength of the author's name; nor, it would seem, 
 was their calculation disappoiuted. The edition of this 
 series of sermons now lying before me is numbered the 
 sixth, and its date is 1764 ; which represents a demand 
 for a new edition every nine months or so, over a space 
 of four years. They may, perhaps, have succeeded, too, 
 in partially reconciling a certain serious-minded portion 
 of the public to the author. Sterne evidently hoped 
 that they might ; for we find him sending a copy to 
 Warburton, in the month of June, immediately after the 
 publication of the book, and receiviag iu return a letter 
 of courteous thanks, and full of excellent advice as to 
 the expediency of avoiding scandal by too hazardous a 
 style of writing ia future. Sterne, in reply, protests 
 that he would "willingly give no offence to mortal by 
 anything which could look like the least violation of 
 either decency or good manners ; " but — and it is an 
 important " but " — he cannot promise to " mutilate every- 
 thing " in Tristram " down to the prudish humour of 
 every particular " (individual), though he will do his best ; 
 but, in any case, " laugh, my Lord, I will, and as loudly 
 as I can." And laugh he did, and in such Eabelaisian 
 fashion that the Bishop (somewhat inconsistently for a 
 critic who had welcomed Sterne on the -appearance of the 
 first two volumes expressly as the " English Eabelais ") 
 remarked of him afterwards with characteristic vigour 
 in a letter to a friend that he fears the fellow is an 
 " irrevocable scoundrel." 
 
v.] FIRST SET 01" SEfiMONS. 59 
 
 The volumes, however, which earned. " the fellow " this 
 Episcopal benediction were not given to the world tUl the 
 next year. At the end of May or beginning of Jime, 1760, 
 Sterne went to his new home at Coxwold, and his letters 
 soon begin to show him. to us at work upon further records 
 of Mr. Shandy's philosophical theory-spinning and the 
 simpler pursuits of his excellent brother. It is probable 
 that this year, 1760, was on the whole the happiest year 
 of Sterne's life. His health, though always feeble, had 
 not yet finally given way ; and though the " vile cough '' 
 which was to bring him more- than once to death's door, 
 and at last to force it open, was Eilready troubling him, he 
 had that within him which made it easy to bear up 
 against aU. such physical ills. His spirits, in fact, were at 
 their highest. His worldly affairs were going at least as 
 smoothly as they ever went. He was basking in that 
 sunshine of fame which was so delightful to a tempera- 
 ment differing from that of the average Englishman, as 
 does the physique of the Southern races from that of the 
 hardier children of the North ; and lastly, he was exulting 
 in a new-born sense of creative power which no doubt 
 made the composition of the earlier volumes of Tristram a 
 veritable labour of love. 
 
 But the witty division of literary spinners into silk- 
 worms and spiders — those who spin because they are full, 
 and those who do so because they are empty — is not 
 exhaustive. There are human silk-worms who become 
 gradually transformed into spiders^men who begin writ- 
 ing in order to unburden a full imagination, and who, 
 long after that process has been completely performed, 
 continue writing in order to fill an empty beUy ; and 
 though Sterne did not live long enough to " write himself 
 out," there are certain indications that he would not have 
 
60 STERNE. [chap. 
 
 left off writing if and when he felt that this stage of 
 exhaustion had arrived. His artistic impulses were 
 curiously combined with a distinct admixture of the 
 "pot-boiler" spirit; and it was with something of the 
 complacency of an annuitant that he looked forward to 
 giving the public a couple of volumes of Tristram 
 Shandy every year as long as they would stand it. In 
 these early days, however, there was no necessity even to 
 discuss the probable period either of the writer's inspira- 
 tion or of the reader's appetite. At present, the public 
 were as eager to consume more Shandyism as Sterne was 
 ready to produce it : the demand was as active as the 
 supply was easy. By the end of the year Vols. III. and 
 IV. were in the press, and on January 27, 1761, they 
 made their appearance. They had been disposed of in 
 advance to Dodsley for 380Z. — no bad terms of remu- 
 neration in those days ; but it is stiU likely enough that 
 the publisher made a profitable bargain. The new volumes 
 sold freely, and the public laughed at them as heartily as 
 their two predecessors. Their author's vogue in London, 
 whither he went in December, 1760, to superintend pub- 
 lication, was as great during the next spring as it had 
 been in the last. The tide of visitors again set in in all 
 its former force and volume towards the " genteel lodg- 
 ings." His diuner list was once more full, and he was 
 feasted and flattered by wits, beaux, courtiers, politicians, 
 and titled-lady lion-hunters as sedulously as ever. His 
 letters, especially those to his friends the Crofts, of 
 Stniington, abound, as before, in touches of the same 
 amusing vanity. With how delicious a sense of self- 
 importance must he have written these words, " You made 
 me and my friends very merry with the accounts current 
 at York of my being forbad the Court, but they do not 
 
v.] TRISTRAM SHANDT. VOLS. III. AND IV. 61 
 
 consider what a considerable person they make of me 
 when they suppose ei,ther my going or not going there 
 is a point that ever enters the K.'s head ; and for those 
 about him, I have the honour either to stand so per- 
 sonally well-known to them, or to be so well repre- 
 sented by those of the first rank as to fear no accident 
 of the kind." Amusing, too, is it to note the familiarity, 
 as of an old liahitue of Ministerial antechambers, with 
 which this country parson discusses the political changes 
 of that interesting year ; though scarcely more amusing per- 
 haps than the solemnity with which his daughter disguises 
 
 the identity of the new Premier under the title B e ; 
 
 and by a similar use of initials attempts to conceal the 
 momentous state secret that the D. of E. had been removed 
 from the place of Groom of the Chambers, and that Sir F. 
 D. had succeeded T. as Chancellor of the Exchequer. 
 Occasionally, however, the interest of his letters changes 
 from personal to public, and we get a ghmpse of scenes 
 and personages that have become historical. He was 
 present in the House of Commons at the first grand 
 debate on the German war after the Great Commoner's 
 retirement from ofiice — "the pitched battle," as Sterne 
 calls it, " wherein Mr. P. was to have entered and thrown 
 down the gauntlet" in defence of his military policy. 
 Thus he describes it : — 
 
 There never was so fall a house — the gallery full to the top 
 — I was there all the day ; when lo ! a political fit of the gout 
 seized the great combatant — he entered not the lists. Beckford 
 got up and begged the House, as he saw not his right honourable 
 friend there, to put off the debate — it could not be done : so 
 Beckford rose up and made a most long, passionate, incoherent 
 speech in defence of the G-erman war, but very severe upon the 
 unfrugal manner it was carried on, in which he addressed him- 
 
62 STERNE. [CHAP. 
 
 self principally to the C[hancellor] of the E[xchequer], and laid 
 
 him on terribly iJegge answered Beckford very rationally 
 
 and coolly. Lord N. spoke long. Sir P. D[ashwcod] main- 
 tained the German war was most pernicious Lord 
 
 B[arrington] at last got up and spoke half an hour with great 
 plainness and temper, explained many hidden things relating to 
 these accounts in favour of the late K., and told two or three 
 conversations which had passed between the K. and himself 
 relative to these expenses, which cast great honour upon the K.'s 
 character. This was with regard to the money the K. had 
 secretly furnished out of his own pocket to lessen the account 
 of the Hanover-score brought us to discharge. Beckford and 
 Barrington abused all who fotight for peace and joined in the 
 cry for it, and Beckford added that the reasons of wishing a peace 
 now were the same as at the peace of Utrecht — that the people 
 behind the curtain could not both maintain the war and their 
 places too, so were for making another saciifice of the nation to 
 their own interests. After all, the cry for a peace is so general 
 that it will certainly end in one. 
 
 And then the letter, recurring to personal matters 
 towards the close, records the success of Vols. III. and 
 TV. " One half of the town abuse my hook as bitterly as 
 the other half cry it up to the skies — the best is they 
 abuse and buy it, and at such a rate that we are going 
 on with a second edition as fast as possible." This was 
 written only in the first week of March, so that the 
 edition must have been exhausted in little more than a 
 month. It was, indeed, another triumph ; and all through 
 this spring up to midsummer did Sterne remain in Lon- 
 don to enjoy it. But with three distinct flocks awaiting 
 a renewal of his pastoral ministrations in Yorkshire it 
 would scarcely have done for him, even in those easy-going 
 days of the Establishment, to take up his permanent abode 
 at the capital ; and early in July he returned to Coxwold. 
 
v.] COXWOLD. 63 
 
 From the middle of this year, 1761, the scene begins 
 to darken, and from the beginning of the next year 
 onward Sterne's life was little better than a truceless 
 struggle with the disease to which he was destined, pre- 
 maturely, to succumb. The wretched constitution, which 
 in common with his short-lived brothers and sisters, he had 
 inherited probably from his father, already began to show 
 signs of breaking up. Invalid from the first, it had doubt- 
 less been weakened by the hardships of Sterne's early years, 
 and yet further, perhaps, by the excitements and dissipa- 
 tions of his London life ; nor was the change from the 
 gaieties of the capital to hard literary labour in a country 
 parsonage calculated to benefit him as much as it might 
 others. Shandy Hall, as he christened his pretty 
 parsonage at Coxwold, and as the house, still standing, is 
 called to this day, soon became irksome to him. The 
 very reaction begotten of unwonted quietude acted on 
 his temperament with a dispiriting rather than a soothing 
 effect. The change from his full and stimulating life in 
 London to the dull round of clerical duties in a Yorkshire 
 village, might well have been depressing to a mind better 
 balanced and ballasted than his. To him, with his light 
 pleasure-loving nature, it was as the return of the school- 
 boy from pantomimes and pony-riding to the more sober 
 delights of Dr. Swishtail'sj and, in a letter to Hall 
 Stevenson, Sterne reveals hisfeehngs with all the juvenile 
 frankness of one of the doctor's pupils. 
 
 I rejoice you are in London, rest you there in peace ; here 'tia 
 the devil. You was a good prophet. I wish myself back again, 
 as you told me I should, hut not because a thin, death-doing, 
 pestiferous north-east wind blows in a line directly from Crazy 
 Castle turret fresh upon me in this cuokoldly retreat (for I 
 value the north-east wind and all its powers not a straw), but 
 
64 STERNE. [chap. 
 
 the transition from rapid motion to absolute rest was too violent. 
 I should have walked about the streets of York ten days, as a 
 proper medium to have passed through before I entered upon 
 my rest ; I stayed but a moment, and I have been here but a few, 
 to satisfy me. I have not managed my miseries like a wise 
 man, and if God for my consolation had not poured forth the 
 spirit of Shandyism unto me, which will not suffer me to 
 think two moments upon any grave subject, I would else just 
 now lay down and die. 
 
 It is true, he adds, in the next sentence, that in half 
 an hour's time " I'll lay a guinea I shall be as merry as a 
 monkey, and forget it all," but such sudden revulsions of 
 high spirits can hardly be allowed to count for much 
 against the prevailing tone of discontented ennui which 
 pervades this letter. 
 
 Apart moreover from Sterne's regrets of London, his 
 country home was becoming from other causes a less 
 pleasant place of abode. His relations with his wife were 
 getting less and less cordial every year. With a perversity 
 sometimes noticeable in the wives of distinguished men, 
 Mrs. Sterne had failed to accept with enthusiasm the role 
 of distant and humbly admiring spectator of her brilliant 
 husband's triumphs. Accept it of course she did, being 
 unable, indeed, to help herself ; but it is clear that when 
 Sterne returned home after one of his six months' revels 
 in the gaieties of London, his wife, who had been vege- 
 tating the while in the retirement of Yorkshire, was not 
 ia the habit of welcoming him with effusion. Perceiving 
 so clearly that her husband preferred the world's society 
 to hers, she naturally, perhaps, refused to disguise her 
 preference of her own society to his. Their estrangement, 
 in short, had grown apace, and had already brought them 
 to that stage of mutual indifference which is at once so 
 
v.] COXWOLD. 65 
 
 comfortable and so hopeless — secure alike against the risk 
 of " scenes " and the hope of reconciliation, shut fast in 
 its exemption from amantium tree against all possibility 
 of redintegratio amoris. To such perfection indeed had 
 the feehng been cultivated on both sides, that Sterne in 
 the letter above quoted can write of his conjugal relations 
 in this philosophic strain : — 
 
 As to matrimony I should be a beast to rail at it, for my wife 
 is easy, but the world is not, and had I stayed from her a second 
 longer it would have been a burning shame — else she declares 
 herself happier without me. But not in anger is this declara- 
 ration made [the most fatal point, of course, about it], but in 
 pure, sober, good sense, built on sound experience. She hopes 
 you will be able to strike a bargain for me before this twelve- 
 month to lead a bear round Europe, and from this hope from 
 you I verily believe it is that you are so high in her favour at 
 present. She swears you are a fellow of wit, though humorous ; ' 
 a funny, jolly soul, though somewhat splenetic, and (bating 
 the love of women) as honest as gold. How do you like the 
 simile P 
 
 There is, perhaps, a touch of affected cynicism in the 
 suggestion that Mrs. Sterne's liking for one of her 
 husband's friends was wholly based upon the expecta- 
 tion that he would rid her of her husband ; but mutual 
 indifference must, it is clear, have reached a pretty 
 advanced stage before such a remark could, even half in 
 jest, be possible. And with one more longing lingering 
 look at the scenes which he had quitted for a lot like that 
 
 ' It is onrions to note as a point in the ohronology of language 
 how exclusive is Sterne's employment of the words " humour," 
 " humourist," in their older sense of " whimsicality," " an eccen- 
 tric." The later change in its meaning gives to the word " though" 
 in the ahove passage an almost comic effect. 
 
 F 
 
66 STERNE. [chap. 
 
 of the Duke of Buckingham's dog, upon whom his master 
 pronounced, the maledictory wish that " he were married 
 and lived in the country," this characteristic letter 
 concludes : — 
 
 Oh, Lord ! now are you going to Banelagh to-night, and I 
 am sittiug sorrowful as the prophet was when the voice cried 
 out to him and said^ " What do'st thou here, Elijah ? " 'Tis well 
 that the spirit does not make the same at Coxwold, for unless 
 for the few sheep left me to take care of in the wilderness, I 
 might as well, nay hetter, be at Mecca. When we find we can, 
 by a shifting of places, run away from ourselves, what think you 
 of a jaunt there before we finally pay a visit to the Vale of 
 Jehoshaphat. As ill a fame as we have, I trust! shall one day 
 or other see you face to face, so tell the two colonels if they love 
 good company to Uve righteously and soberly as you do, and 
 then they will have no doubts or dangers within or without 
 them. Present my best and warmest wishes to them, and advise 
 the eldest to prop up his spirits, and get a rich dowager before 
 the conclusion of the peace. Why will not the advice suit 
 both, par nohile fratrum ? 
 
 In. conclusion, he teUs his friend that the next morning, 
 if Heaven permit, he begins the fifth volume of Shandy, 
 and adds defiantly that he " cares not a curse for the 
 critics," but " will load my vehicle with what goods He 
 sends me, and they may take 'em off my hands or let 'em 
 alone." 
 
 The allusions to foreign travel in this letter were made 
 with something more than a jesting intent. Sterne had 
 already begun to be seriously alarmed, and not without 
 reason, about the condition of his health. He shrank 
 from facing another English winter, and meditated a 
 southward flight so soon as he should have finished his 
 fifth and sixth volumes, and seen them safe in the printer's 
 
v.] TRISTRAM SHANDY. VOLS. V. AND VI. 67 
 
 hands. His publisher he had changed, for what reason is 
 not known, and the firm of Becket and De Hondt had 
 taken the place of Dodsley. Sterne hoped by the end 
 of the year to be free to depart from England, and already 
 he had made all arrangements with his ecclesiastical 
 superiors for the necessary leave of absence. He seems to 
 have been treated with all consideration in the matter. 
 His archbishop, on being applied to, at once excused him 
 from parochial work for a year, and promised, if it 
 should be necessary, to double that term. Fortified with 
 this permission, Sterne bade farewell to his wife and 
 daughter, and betook himself to London with his now 
 completed volumes, at the setting in of the winter. On 
 the 21st of December they made their appearance, and in 
 about three weeks from that date, their author left England 
 with the intention of wintering in the South of France. 
 There were difficulties, however, of more kinds than one 
 which had first to be faced — a pecuniary difficulty which 
 Garrick met by a loan of 20Z., and a political difficulty for 
 the removal of which Sterne had to employ the good 
 offices of new acquaintance later on. He reached Paris 
 about the 17th of January, 1762, and there met with a 
 reception which interposed, as might have been expected, 
 the most effectual of obstacles to his further progress 
 southward. He was received in Paris with open arms, 
 and stepped at once within the charmed circle of the 
 philosophic salons. Again was the old intoxicating cup 
 presented to his lips — this time, too, with more dexterous 
 than English hands — and again did he driuk deeply of it. 
 "My head is turned," he writes to Garrick, " with what 
 I see, and the unexpected honour I have mot with here. 
 Tristram was almost as much known here as in London, 
 at least among your men of condition and learning, and 
 F 2 
 
68 STEENB. [chap. 
 
 has got me introduced into so many circles ('tis comme k 
 Londies) I have just now a fortnight's dinners and 
 suppers on my hands.'' "We may venture to doubt 
 whether Erench politeness had not been in one respect 
 taken somewhat too seriously by the flattered EngHshman, 
 and whether it was much more than the name and general 
 reputation of Tristram, which was " almost as much 
 known " in Paris as in London. The dinners and suppers, 
 however, were at any rate no figures of speech, but very 
 liberal entertainments, at which Sterne appears to have 
 disported himself with all his usual unclerical abandon. 
 " I Shandy it away," he writes in his boyish fashion to 
 Garrick, "iifty times more than I was ever wont, talk 
 more nonsense than ever you heard me talk in all your 
 days, and to aU sorts of people. ' Qui le diable est cet 
 homme-lk 1 ' said Choiseul, t'other day, ' ce Chevalier 
 Shandy ? ' " [We might be listening to one of Thackeray's 
 Irish heroes.] " You'U think me as vain as a devil was I 
 to tell you the rest of the dialogue." But there were dis- 
 tinguished Frenchmen who were ready to render to the 
 English author more important services than that of 
 oflfering him hospitality and flattery. Peace had not been 
 formally concluded between France and England, and the 
 passport with which Sterne had been graciously furnished 
 by Pitt was not of force enough to dispense him from 
 making special application to the French Government for 
 permission to remain, in the country. In this request he 
 was influentially backed. " My application," he writes, 
 " to the Count de Choiseul goes on swimmingly, for not 
 only M. PeUetiere (who by-the-bye sends ten thousand 
 civilities to you and Mrs. G.) has undertaken my afiair, 
 but the Count de Limbourg. The Baron d'Holbach has 
 offered any security for the inoffensiveness of my behaviour 
 
v.] FIRST VISIT TO THE CONTINENT. 69 
 
 in France^'tis more, you rogue ! than you will do." And 
 then the orthodox, or prof essedly orthodox English divine, 
 goes on to describe the character and habits of his strange 
 new friend. " This Baron is one of the most learned 
 noblemen here, the great protector of wits and of the savans 
 who are no wits, keeps open house three days a week — his 
 house is now as yours was to me, my own — he lives at great 
 expense." Equally communicative is he as to his other great 
 acquaintances. Among these weretheCountde Bissie, whom 
 by an " odd incident " (as it seemed to his unsuspecting 
 vanity) " I found reading Tristram when I was intro- 
 duced to him, which I was," he adds fwithout perceiving 
 the connexion between this fact and the " incident "), " at 
 his desire ;" Mr. Fox and Mr. Macartney (afterwards 
 the Lord Macartney of Chinese celebrity) ; and the 
 Duke of Orleans (not yet Egalite) himself, "who has 
 suffered my portrait to be added to the number of some 
 odd men in his collection, and has had it taken most 
 expressively at full length by a gentleman who lives with 
 him." ITor was it only in the delights of society that 
 Sterne was now revelling. He was passionately fond of 
 the theatre, and his letters to Garrick are full of eager 
 criticism of the great French performers, intermingled 
 with flatteries, sometimes rather full-bodied than delicate, 
 of their famous English rival. Of Clairon, in IpMgenie, he 
 says " she is extremely great. Would to God you had one 
 or two like her. What a luxury to see you with one of such 
 power in the same interesting scene ! but 'tis too much." 
 Again he writes : " The French comedy I seldom visit ; 
 they act scarce anything but tragedies ; and the Clairon is 
 great, and Mdlle. Dumesmil in some parts still greater 
 than her. Yet I cannot bear preaching — I fancy I got a 
 surfeit of it in my younger days." And in a later letter : 
 
70 STERNE. [chap. 
 
 After a vile suspension of three weeks, we are beginning 
 with our comedies and operas. Yours I hear never flourished 
 more ; here the comic actors were never so low, the tragedians 
 held up their heads in all senses. I have known one little man 
 support the theatrical world like a David Atlas upon Ms 
 shoulders, but Preville can't do half as much here, though Mad. 
 Clairon stands by him and sets her back to his. She is very 
 great, however, and highly improved since you saw her. She 
 also supports her dignity at table, and has her public day 
 every Thursday, when she gives to eat (as they say here) to all 
 that are hungry and dry. You are much talked of here, and 
 much expected, as soon as the peace will let you. These two 
 last days you have happened to engross the whole conversation 
 at the great houses where I was at dinner. 'Tis the greatest^ 
 problem in nature in this meridian that one and the same man 
 should possess such tragic and comic powers, and in such an 
 equilibria as to divide the world for which of the two nature 
 intended him. 
 
 And while on this subject of the stage, let us pause for 
 a moment to glance at an incident which connects Sterne 
 with one of the most famous of his Prench contempo- 
 raries : — He has been asked " by a lady of talent '' — he 
 tells Garrick, " to read a tragedy, and conjecture if it would 
 do for you ? 'Tis from the plan of Diderot ; and possibly 
 half a translation of it : The Natural Son, or the Tri- 
 umph of Viriue, in five Acts. It has too much sentiment 
 in it (at least for me) ; the speeches too long, and savour 
 too much of preaching. Tliis may be a second reason, 
 it is not to my taste — 'tis all love, love, love, throughout, 
 without much - separation in the characters. Ho I fear it 
 would not do for your stage, and perhaps for the very 
 reason which recommends it to a French one." It is 
 curious to see the " adaptator cerebrosuga " at work in 
 those days as iu these ; though not, in this instance, as it 
 
V.} PARIS. 71 
 
 seems, with as successful results. Tlie Natural Son, or 
 the Tiiumph of Virtue, is not known to have reached 
 either English readers or English theatrical audiences. 
 The French original, as we know, fared scarcely better. 
 "It was not until 1771," says Diderot's latest English 
 biographer, "that the directors of the French Comedy 
 could be induced to place Le Fits Naturel on the stage. 
 The actors detested their task, and, as we can weU believe, 
 went sulkily through parts, which they had not taken the 
 trouble to master. The public felt as little interest in the 
 piece as the actors had done, and after one or two repre- 
 sentations, it was put aside." ^ 
 
 Another, and it is to be guessed a too congenial ac- 
 quaintance, formed by Sterne in Paris, was that of 
 Crebillon ; and with him he concluded " a convention," 
 unedifying enough whether in jest or earnest : " As 
 soon as I get to Toulouse he has agreed to write me an 
 expostulatory letter upon the indecorums of T. Shandy, 
 which is to be answered by recrimination upon the 
 liberties in his own works. These are to be printed 
 together, Crebillon against Sterne, Sterne against CrebiUon, 
 — the copy to be sold, and the money equally divided. 
 This is good Swiss-policy," he adds ; and the idea (which 
 was never carried out) had certainly the merit of ingenuity, 
 if no other. 
 
 The words " as soon as I get to Toulouse," in a letter 
 written from Paris on the 10th of April, might well have 
 reminded Sterne of the strange way in which he had 
 carried out his intention of " wintering in the south." He 
 insists, however, upon the curative effects of his winter of 
 gaiety in Paris. " I am recovered greatly," he says ; " and 
 
 ^ Morley : " Diderot and the EnoyolopsBdists," ii. 305. 
 
72 STEENB. [chap. 
 
 if I could spend one whole winter at Toulouse, I shoidd be 
 fortified in my inner man beyond all danger of relapsing." 
 There was another too for whom this change of cUmate 
 had become imperatively necessary. For three winters 
 past his daughter Lydia, now fourteen years old, had 
 been suffering severely from asthma, and needed to try 
 " the last remedy of a warmer and softer air.'' Her father 
 therefore was about to solicit passports for his wife and 
 daughter, with a view to their joining him at once in Paris, 
 whence, after a month's stay, they were to depart together 
 for the south. This application for passports he intended, 
 he said, to make " this week :'' and it would seem that 
 the intention was carried out : but, for reasons explained 
 in a letter which Mr. Fitzgerald was the fiiTst to publish, 
 it was not till the middle of the next month that he was 
 able to make preparation for their joining him. From this 
 letter — written to his Archbishop, to request an extension 
 of his leave — we learn that while applying for the pass- 
 ports he was attacked with a fever, " which has ended 
 the worst way it could for me, in a defluxion (de) poitrine, 
 as the French physicians call it. It is generally fatal to 
 weak lungs, so that I have lost in ten days all I have 
 gained since I came here : and from a relaxation of my 
 lungs have lost my voice entirely, that 'twill be much if 
 I ever quite recover it. This evil sends me directly to 
 Toulouse, for which I set out from this place directly 
 my family arrives." Evidently there was no time to 
 be lost, and a week after the date of this letter we find 
 him in communication with Mrs. and Miss Sterne, and 
 making arrangements for what was, in those days, a some- 
 what formidable undertaking — the journey of two ladies 
 from the north of England to the centre of France. The 
 correspondence which ensued may be said to give us the 
 
v.] PARIS. 73 
 
 last pleasant glimpse of Sterne's relations with his wife. 
 One can hardly help suspecting, of course, that it was his 
 solicitude for the safety and coiufort of his much-loved 
 daughter that mainly inspired the affectionate anxiety 
 which pervades these letters to Mrs. Sterne ; but their 
 writer is, at the very least, entitled to credit for allowing 
 no difference of tone to reveal itself in the terms in which 
 he speaks of wife and chUd. And whichever of the two 
 he was mainly thinking of, there is something very en- 
 gaging in the thoughtful minuteness of his instructions to 
 the two women travellers, the earnestness of his attempts 
 to inspire them with courage for their enterprise, and the 
 sincere fervour of his many commendations of them to 
 the Divine keeping. The mixture of "canny" counsel 
 and pious invocation has frequently a droll effect : as 
 when the advice to " give the custom-house officers what I 
 told you, and at Calais more, if you have much Scotch 
 snuff f and " to drink smaU. Khenish to keep you cool, 
 that is if you like it,'' is rounded off by the ejaculation 
 " So God in Heaven prosper and go along with you ! " 
 Letter after letter did he send them, full of such re- 
 minders as that "they have bad pins and vile needles 
 here," that it would be advisable to bring with them a 
 strong bottle-screw, and a good stout copper-teakettle ; 
 till at last, in the final words of preparation, his language 
 assumes something of the solemnity of a general addressing 
 his army on the eve of a well-nigh desperate enterprise : 
 " Pluck up your spirits, — trust in God, in me, and your- 
 selves ; with this, was you put to it, you would en- 
 counter aU these difficulties ten times told. Write 
 instantly, and tell me 'you triumph over all fears — tell 
 me Lydia is better, and a help-mate to you. You say 
 she grows like me : let her show me she does so in her 
 
74 STBENE. [chap. 
 
 contempt of small dangers, and fighting against the appre- 
 hensions of them, -which is better still." 
 
 At last this anxiously awaited journey was taken ; and, 
 on Thursday, July 7, Mrs. Sterne and her daughter 
 arrived in Paris. Their stay there was not long — not 
 much extended, probably, beyond the proposed week. 
 For Sterne's health had, some ■ ten days before the arrival 
 of his family, again given him warning to depart quickly. 
 He had but a few weeks recovered from the fever of 
 which he spoke in his letter to the Archbishop, when 
 he again broke a blood-vessel in his lungs. It happened' 
 in the night, and " finding in the morning that I was 
 likely to bleed to death, I sent immediately," he says, in a 
 sentence which quaintly brings out the paradox of con- 
 temporary medical treatment, " for a surgeon to bleed me 
 at both arms. This saved me," — Le. did not kill me, — 
 " and, with lying speechless three days, I recovered upon 
 my back in bed : the breach healed, and in a week after 
 I got out." But the weakness which ensued, and the 
 subsequent " hurrying about," no doubt as cicerone of 
 Parisian sights to his wife and daughter, " made me think 
 it high time to haste to Toulouse." Accordingly, about 
 the 20th of the month, and " in the midst of such heats 
 that the oldest Frenchman never remembers the like," 
 the party set off by way of Lyons and Montpellier for 
 their Pyrenean destination. Their journey seems to have 
 been a journey of many mischances, extraordinary dis- 
 comfort, and incredible length : and it is not till the 
 second week in August that we again take up the broken 
 thread of his correspondence. Writing to Mr. Foley, his 
 banker in Paris, on the 14th of that month, he speaks of 
 its having taken him three weeks to reach Toulouse ; and 
 adds, that " in our journey we suffered so much from the 
 
T.] . TOULOUSE. 75 
 
 heats, it gives me pain to remember it. I never saw a 
 cloud from Paris to Nismes half as broad as atwenty-four sols 
 piece. Good God, we were toasted, roasted, grilled, stewed, 
 carbonaded, on one side or other, all the way : and being 
 all done through (assez cuits) in the day, we were eat up 
 at night by bugs and other unswept-out vermin, the legal 
 inhabitants, if length of possession give right, at every 
 inn on the way." A few miles from Beaucaire he broke 
 a hind wheel of his carriage, and was obliged in con- 
 sequence " to sit five hours on a gravelly road without 
 one drop of water, or possibility of getting any ;" and 
 here, to mend the matter, he was cursed with " two 
 dough-hearted fools " for postilions, who " fell a-crying 
 ' nothing was to be done !' " and could only be recalled to 
 a worthier and more helpful mood by Sterne's " pulling 
 off his coat and waistcoat," and " threatening to thrash 
 them both within an inch of their lives.'' 
 
 The longest journey, however, must come to an end : 
 and the party found much to console them at Toulouse 
 for the miseries of travel. They were fortunate enough 
 to secure one of those large old comfortable houses 
 which were, and, here and there, perhaps, stUl are 
 to be hired on the outskirts of provincial towns, at a 
 rent which would now be thought absurdly small ; 
 and Sterne writes in terms of high complacency of 
 his temporary abode. " Excellent," " well furnished," 
 " elegant beyond anything I ever looked for," are some of 
 the expressions of praise which it draws from him : he 
 observes with pride that the " very great salle a compagnie 
 is as large as Baron d'Holbach's :" and he records with 
 great satisfaction, as well he might, that for the use of this 
 and of a country house two miles out of town, " besides 
 the enjoyment of gardens, which the landlord engaged to 
 
76 STERNE. [ch. v. 
 
 keep in order," lie was to pay no more than thirty pounds 
 a year. " All things," he adds, " are cheap in proportion : 
 so we shall live here for very very little.'' 
 
 And this, no douht, was to Sterne a matter of some 
 moment at this time. The expenses of his long and 
 tedious journey must have been heavy : and the gold- 
 yielding vein of literary popularity, which he had for 
 three years been working, had already begun to show 
 signs of exhaustion. Tristram Shandy had lost its first - 
 vogue ; and the fifth and sixth volumes, the copyright 
 of which he does not seem to have disposed of, were 
 "going off" but slowly. 
 
CHAPTEE VI. 
 
 LIFE IN THE SOUTH RBTUBN TO ENGLAND-»-VOLS. VII. AND 
 
 VIII. —SECOND SET OP SERMONS. 
 
 (1762—1765.) ■ 
 
 The diminislied. appetite of the public for tlie humours of 
 Mr. Shandy and his brother is not perhaps very difficult 
 to understand. Time was simply doing its usual whole- 
 some work in sifting the false from the true — in ridding 
 Sterne's audien-ce of its contingent of sham admirers. This 
 is not to say, of course, that there might not have been 
 other and better grounds for a partial withdrawal of 
 popular favour. A writer who systematically employs 
 Sterne's peculiar methods must lay his account with 
 undeserved loss as well as with unmerited gain. The fifth 
 and sixth volumes deal quite largely enough in mere 
 eccentricity to justify the distaste of any reader upon whom 
 mere eccentricity had begun to pall. But if this were 
 the sole explanation of the book's declining popularity, we 
 should have to admit that the adverse judgment of the 
 public had been delayed too long for justice, and had passed 
 over the worst to light upon the less heinous offences. 
 For the third volume, though its earlier pages contain some 
 good touches, drifts away into mere dull, uncleanly equi- 
 voque in its concluding chapters ; and the fifth and sixth 
 volumes may at any rate quite safely challenge favourable 
 
78 STERNE. [chap. 
 
 comparison with the fourth — the poorest, I venture to think, 
 of the whole series. There is nothing in these two later 
 volumes to compare, for instance, with that most wearisome 
 exercise in double entendre, Slawkenhergius's Tale ; nothing 
 to match that painfully elaborated piece of low comedy, the 
 consultation of philosophers and its episode of Phutatorius's 
 mishap with the hot chestnut ; no such persistent resort, 
 in short, to those mechanical methods of mirth-making 
 xipon which Sterne, throughout a great part of the fourth 
 volume, almost exclusively relies. The humour of the 
 fifth is, to a far larger extent, of the creative and dramatic 
 order ; the ever-delightful collision of intellectual incon- 
 gruities in the persons of the two brothers Shandy gives 
 animation to the volume almost from beginning to end. 
 The arrival of the news of Bobby Shandy's death, and the 
 contrast of its reception by the philosophic father and the 
 simple-minded imcle, form a scene of inimitable absurdity, 
 and the " Tristrapsedia," with its ingenious project for 
 opening up innumerable " tracks of inquiry " before the 
 mind of the pupil by sheer skill in the manipulation of 
 the auxiliary verbs, is in the author's happiest vein. The 
 sixth volume, again, which contains the irresistible dialogue 
 between Mr. and Mrs. Shandy on the great question of 
 the " Breeching of Tristram," and the much-admired, if 
 not whoUy admirable, episode of Le Fevre's death, is fully 
 entitled to rank beside its predecessors. On the whole, 
 therefore, it must be said that the colder reception 
 accorded to this instalment of the novel, as compared with 
 the previous one, can hardly he justified on sound critical 
 grounds. But that literary shortcomings were not, in fact, 
 the cause of Tristram's declining popularity may be con- 
 fidently inferred from the fact that the seventh volume, 
 with its admirably vivid and spirited scenes of Continental 
 
VI.] LIFE IN THE SOUTH. 79 
 
 travel, an(J the eighth and ninth, with their charming 
 narrative of Captain Shandy's love affair, were but slightly- 
 more successful. The readers whom this, the third instalment 
 of the novel, had begun to repel, were mainly, I imagine, 
 those who had never felt any intelligent admiration for 
 the former ; who had been caught by the writer's eccen- 
 tricity, without appreciating his insight into character and 
 his graphic power, and who had seen no other aspects of 
 his humour than those buffooneries and puerilities which, 
 after first amusing, had begun in the natural course of 
 things, to weary them. 
 
 Meanwhile, however, and with spirits restored by the 
 southern warmth to that buoyancy which never long 
 deserted them, Sterne had begun to set to work upon a 
 new volume. His letters show that this was not the 
 seventh but the eighth ; and Mr. Fitzgerald's conjecture, 
 that the materials ultimately given to the world in the 
 former volume were originally designed for another work, 
 appears exceedingly probable. But for some time after 
 his arrival at Toulouse he was unable, it would seem, to 
 resume his literary labours in any form. Ever liable, 
 through his weakly constitution, to whatever local maladies 
 might anywhere prevail, he had fallen ill, he writes to 
 Hall Stevenson, " of an epidemic vUe fever which killed 
 hundreds about, me. The physicians here," he adds, " are 
 the arrantest charlatans in Europe, or the most ignorant of 
 all pretending fools. I withdrew what was left of me out 
 of their hands, and recommended my affairs entirely to 
 Dame Nature. She (dear goddess) has saved me in 
 fifty different pinching bouts, and I begin to have a kind 
 of enthusiasm now in her favour and my own, so that one 
 or two more escapes will make me believe I shall leave you 
 all at last by translation, and not by fair death." Having 
 
80 STERNE. [chap. 
 
 now become, " stout and foolish again as a man can wish 
 to he, I am," he says, " tusy playiag the fool with my 
 Uncle Toby, whom I have got soused over head and 
 ears in love." Now, it is not till the eighth volume that 
 the Widow Wadman begins to weave her spells around 
 Captain Shandy's ingenuous heart ; while the seventh 
 volume is mainly composed of that series of travel-pictures 
 inwhichSterne has manifestlyrecorded his own impressions 
 of Northern France in the person of the youthful Tristram. 
 It is scarcely doubtful, therefore, that it is these sketches, 
 and the iise which he then proposed to make of them, that 
 he refers to, when speaking in this letter of " hints and 
 projects for other works.'' Originally intended to form a 
 part of the volume afterwards published as the Sentimental 
 Journey, it was found necessary, under pressure, it is to be 
 supposed, of insufficient matter, to work them up instead 
 into an interpolated seventh volume of Tnstram Shandy. 
 At the moment, however, he no doubt as little foresaw this 
 as he did the delay which was to take place before any 
 continuation of the novel appeared. He clearly contem- 
 plated no very long absence from England. " "Wben I 
 have reaped the benefit of the winter at Toulouse, I cannot 
 see I have anything more to do with it. Therefore, after 
 having gone with my wife and girl to Bagneres, I shall 
 return from whence I came.'' Already, however, one can 
 perceive signs of his having too presumptuously marked 
 out his future. " My wife wants to stay another year, to 
 save money ; and this opposition of wishes, though it will 
 not be as sour as lemon, yet 'twUl not be as sweet as 
 sugar.'' And, again, " if the snows will suffer me, I propose 
 to spend two or three months at Barege or Bagneres ; but 
 my dear wife is against all schemes of additional expense, 
 which wicked propensity (though not of despotic power) 
 
VI.] LIFE IN THE SOUTH. 81 
 
 yet I cannot suffer — though, by-the-bye, laudable enough. 
 But she may talk ; I will go my own way, and she will 
 acquiesce without a word of debate on the subject. Who 
 can say so much in praise of his wife ? Few, I trow." 
 The tone of contemptuous amiability shows pretty clearly 
 that the relations between husband and wife had in nowise 
 improved. But wives do not always lose all their influ- 
 ence over husbands' wills along with the power over their 
 affections ; and it wiU be seen that Sterne did not make 
 his projected winter trip to Bagneres, and that he did 
 remain at Toulouse for a considerable part of the second 
 year for which Mrs. Sterne desired to prolong their stay. 
 The place, however, was not to his taste ; arid he was not 
 the first traveller in France who, delighted with the gaiety 
 of Paris, has been disappointed at finding that French pro- 
 vincial towns can be as dull as dulness itself could require. 
 It is in the somewhat unjust mood which is commonly 
 begotten of disillusion that Sterne discovers the cause of his 
 ennui in " the eternal platitude of the French character," 
 with its " little variety and no originality at all." " They are 
 very civil," he admits, " but civility itself so thus imiform 
 wearies and bodders me to death. If I do not mind I shaU. 
 grow most stupid and sententious." With such apprehen- 
 sions it is not surprising that he should have eagerly wel- 
 comed any distraction that chance might offer, and in Decem- 
 ber we find him joyfully informing his chief correspondent 
 of the period, Mr. Foley — who to his services as Sterne's 
 banker seems to have added those of a most helpful and 
 trusted friend — that "there are a company of English 
 stroUers arrived here who are to act comedies aU the Christ- 
 mas, and are now busy in making dresses and preparing some 
 of our best comedies." These so-caUed stroUers were, in 
 fact, certainmembersof the English colony in Toulouse, and 
 
82 STBENE. [chap. 
 
 their performances were among the first of those " amateur 
 theatrical " entertainments which now-a-days may be said 
 tp rival the famous "morning drum-beat" of Daniel 
 Webster's oration, in marking the ubiquity of British 
 boredom, as the 7-eveil does that of British power over all 
 the terrestrial globe. " The next week," writes Sterne, 
 " with a grand orchestra we play TJie Busybody, and the 
 Journey to London the week after; but I have some 
 thought of adapting it to our situation, and making it 
 the Journey to Touloitse, which, with the change of half- 
 a-dozen scenes, may be easily done. Thus, my dear 
 Foley, for want of something better we have recourse to 
 ourselves, and strike out the best amusements we can from 
 such materials." " Eecourse to ourselves," however, means, 
 in strict accuracy, " recourse to each other ;" and when the 
 amateur players had played themselves out, and exhausted 
 their powers of contributing to each others' amusement, 
 it is probable that " recourse to ouraelves," in the exact 
 sense of the phrase, was found ineffective — in Sterne's 
 case, at any rate — to stave off ennui. To him, with his 
 copiously, if somewhat oddly furnished mind, and his 
 natural activity of imagination, one could hardly apply 
 the line of Persius, 
 
 " Tecum habita et noris quam sit tibi curta supellex j" 
 
 but it is yet evident enough that Sterne's was one of that 
 numerous order of intellects which are the convivial 
 associates, rather than the fireside companions, of their 
 owners, and which when deprived of the stimulus of 
 external excitement are apt to become very dull company 
 indeed. Nor does he seem to have obtained much 
 diversion of mind from his Uterary work — a form of 
 intellectual enjoyment which, indeed, more often pre- 
 
VI.] LIFE IN THE SOUTH. 83 
 
 supposes than begets good spirits in suoh temperaments 
 as his. He declares, it is true, that he " sports much with 
 my Uncle Toby" in the volume which he is now 
 " fabricating for the laughing part of the world ;" but if so 
 he must have sported only after a very desultory and 
 dilatory fashion. On the whole one cannot escape a 
 very strong impression that Sterne was heartily bored 
 by his sojourn in Toulouse, and that he eagerly longed for 
 the day of his return to " the dalliance and the wit, the 
 flattery and the strife," which he had left behind him in 
 the two great capitals in which he had shone. 
 
 His stay, however, was destined to be very prolonged. 
 The winter of 1762 went by, and the succeeding year had 
 run nearly half its course before he changed his quarters. 
 " The first week in June," he writes in April to 
 Mr. Foley, " I decamp like a patriarch with all my house- 
 hold, to pitch our tents for three months at the foot of the 
 Pyrensean hiUs at Bagneres, where I expect much health 
 and much amusement from aU corners of the earth.'' He 
 talked too at this time of spending the winter at Florence, 
 and, after a visit to Leghorn, returning home the follow- 
 ing April by way of Paris ; " but this," he adds, " is a 
 sketch only," and it remained only a sketch. Toulouse, 
 however, he was in any case resolved to quit. He should 
 not, he said, be tempted to spend another winter there. 
 It did not suit his health, as he had hoped : he com- 
 plained that it was too moist, and that he could not 
 keep clear of ague. In June, 1763, he quitted it finally 
 for Bagneres ; whence after a short, and, as we sub- 
 sequently learn, a disappointed sojourn, he passed on to 
 Marseilles, and later to Aix, for both of which places he 
 expressed dislike ; and by October he had gone again into 
 winter quarters at MontpeUier, where "my wife and 
 G 2 
 
84 STERNE. [chap. 
 
 daughter," he writes, "purpose to stay at least a year 
 behind me." His own intention was to set out in 
 February for England, " where my heart has been fled 
 these six months." Here again, however, there are traces 
 of that periodic, or rather, perhaps, that chronic conflict 
 of inclination between himself and Mrs. Sterne, of which, 
 he speaks with such a tell-tale affectation of philosophy. 
 " My wife," he writes in January, " returns to Toulouse, 
 and proposes to spend the summer at Bagneres. I, on the 
 contrary, go to visit my wife the church in Yorkshire. 
 We all live the longer, at least the happier, for having 
 things our own way. This is my conjugal maxim. I 
 own 'tis not the best of maxims, but I medntain 'tis not 
 the worst.'' It was natural enough that Sterne at any 
 rate should wish to turn his back on MontpeUier. Again 
 had the unlucky invalid been attacked by a dangerous 
 iUness ; the " sharp air " of the place disagreed with him, 
 and his physicians, after having him under their hands 
 more than a month, informed him coolly that if he stayed 
 any longer in MontpeUier it would be fatal to him. How 
 soon after that somewhat late warning he took his 
 departure there is no record to show; but it is not 
 till the middle of May that we find him writing from 
 Paris to his daughter. And since he there announces 
 his intention of leaving for England in a few days, it is 
 a probable conjecture that he had arrived at the French 
 capital some fortnight or so before. 
 
 His short stay in Paris was marked by two incidents, 
 — trifling in themselves, but too characteristic of the 
 man to be omitted. Lord Hertford, the British ambas- 
 sador, had just taken a magnificent hotel in Paris, and 
 Sterne was asked to preach the first sermon in its chapel. 
 The message was brought him, he writes, " when I was 
 
VI.] LIFB IN THE SOUTH. 85 
 
 playing a sober game of whist with Mr. Thomhill ; and 
 whether I was called abruptly from my afternoon amuse- 
 ment to prepare myself for the business on the next day, 
 or from what other cause, I do not pretend to determine ; 
 but that unlucky kind of fit seized me which you know I 
 am never able to resist, and a very unlucky text did come 
 into my head." The text referred to was 2 Kings xx. 
 15 — Hezekiah's admission of that ostentatious display of 
 the treasures of his palace to the ambassadors of Babylon 
 for which Isaiah rebuked him by prophesying the 
 Babylonian captivity of Judah. Nothing indeed, as 
 Sterne protests, could have been more innocent than the 
 discourse which he founded upon the mal-a-propos text ; 
 but stm it was unquestionably a fair subject for " chafp," 
 and the preacher was rallied upon it by no less a person 
 than David Hume. Grossip having magnified this into 
 a dispute between the parson and the philosopher, Sterne 
 disposes of the idle story in a passage deriving an ad- 
 ditional interest from its tribute to that sweet disposition 
 which had an equal charm for two men so utterly unHke 
 as the author of Tristram Shandy and the author of the 
 Wealth of Nations. " I should," he writes, " be exceed- 
 ingly surprised to hear that David ever had an unpleasant 
 contention with any man ; and if I should ever be made 
 to believe that such an event had happened, nothing 
 would persuade me that his opponent was not in the 
 wrong, for in my life did I never meet with a being of 
 a more placid and gentle nature ; and it is this amiable 
 turn of his character which has given more consequence 
 and force to his scepticism than all the arguments 
 of his sophistry." The real truth of the matter was 
 that, meeting Sterne at Lord Hertford's table on the 
 day when he had preached at the Embassy Chapel, 
 
86 STEENE. [chap. 
 
 " David was disposed to make a little merry with the 
 parson, and in return the parson was equally disposed to 
 make a little merry with the infideL We laughed at one 
 another, and the company laughed with us both." It 
 would be absurd, of course, to identify Sterne's latitu- 
 dinarian bonhomie with the higher order of tolerance ; 
 but many a more confirmed and notorious GaUio than the 
 clerical humourist would have assmned prudish airs of 
 orthodoxy in such a presence, and the incident, if it does 
 not raise one's estimate of Sterne's dignity, displays him 
 to us as laudably free from hypocrisy. 
 
 But the long holiday of somewhat didl travel, with its 
 short last act of social gaiety, was drawing to a close. In 
 the third or fourth week of May Sterne quitted Paris ; 
 and after a stay of a few weeks in London, he returned- to 
 the Yorkshire parsonage, from which he had been absent 
 some thirty months. 
 
 Unusually long as was the interval which had elapsed 
 since the publication of the last instalment of Tristram 
 Shandy, the new one was far from ready ; and even in 
 the " sweet retirement " of Coxwold he seems to have 
 made but slow progress with it. Indeed, the " sweet 
 retirement " itself became soon a little tedious to him. 
 The month of September found him already bored with 
 work and solitude ; and the fine autumn weather of 
 1764 set him longing for a few days' pleasure-making at 
 what was even then the fashionable Yorkshire watering- 
 place. " I do not think," he writes, with characteristic 
 incoherence, to HaU Stevenson, " I do not think a week 
 or ten days' playing the good fellow (at this very time) so 
 abominable a thing, but if a man could get there cleverly, 
 and every soul in his house in the mind to try what could 
 be done in furtherance thereof I have no one to consult in 
 
VI.] EETUEN TO ENGLAND. 87 
 
 these affairs. Therefore, as a man may do ■worse things, 
 the plain English of aU which is, that I am going to 
 leave a few poor sheep in the wilderness for fourteen 
 days, and from pride and naughtiness of heart to go see 
 what is doing at Scarhorough, steadfuUy meaning after- 
 wards to lead a new life and strengthen my faith. Now 
 some folks say there is much company there, and some 
 say not ; and I believe there is neither the one nor the 
 other, but will be both if the world will have patience for 
 a month or so." Of his work he has not much to say : 
 " I go on not rapidly but well enough with my Uncle 
 Toby's amours. There is no sitting and cudgelling one's 
 brains whilst the sun shines bright. 'Twill be all over in 
 six or seven weeks ; and there are dismal weeks enow 
 after to endure suffocation by a brimstone fireside." He 
 was anxious that his boon companion should join him at 
 Scarborough ; but that additional pleasure was denied 
 him, and he had to content himself with the usual gay 
 society of the place. Three weeks, it seems, were passed 
 by him in this most doubtfully judicious form of 
 bodUy and mental relaxation — weeks which he spent, he 
 afterwards writes, in " drinking the waters, and receiving 
 from them marvellous strength, had I not debilitated it as 
 fast as I got it by playing the good fellow with Lord 
 Granby and Co. too much." By the end of the month 
 he was back again at Coxwold, " returned to my Philo- 
 sophical Hut to finish Tristram, which I calculate wiU be 
 ready for the world about Clmstmas, at which time I 
 decamp from hence and fix my head-quarters at London 
 for the winter, unless my cough pushes me forward to 
 your metropolis " (he is writing to Foley, in Paris), "or 
 that I can persuade some gros milord to make a trip to 
 you." Again, too, in this letter we get another glimpse 
 
88 STERNE. [chap. 
 
 at that thoroughly desentimentalized " domestic interior " 
 which the sentimentalist's household had long presented 
 to the view. Writing to request a remittance of money 
 to Mrs. Steme at Montauban — a duty which, to do him 
 justice, he seems to have very watchfully observed — 
 Sterne adds his solicitation to Mr. Poley to " do some- 
 thing equally essential to rectify a mistake in the mind 
 of your correspondent there, who, it seems, gave her a 
 hint not long ago ' that she was separated from me for 
 life.' Now as this is not true ia the first place, and may 
 fix a disadvantageous impression of her to those she 
 Lives amongst, 'twovdd be unmerciful to let her or my 
 daughter sufier by it. So do be so good as to undeceive 
 him ; for in a year or two she purposes (and I expect it 
 with impatience from her) to rejoia me." 
 
 Early in November, the two new volumes of Shandy 
 began to approach completion ; for by this time Sterne had 
 already made up his mind to interpolate these notes of 
 his French travels, which now do duty as Vol. VII. " Tou 
 wiU read," he teUs Foley, " as odd a tour through France 
 as was ever projected or executed by traveller or travel- 
 writer since the world began. 'Tis a laughing, good- 
 tempered satire upon travelling — as puppies travel." By 
 the 16th of the month he had " finished my two volumes 
 of Tristram," and looked to be in London at Christmas, 
 " whence I have some thoughts of going to Italy this year. 
 At least I shall not defer it above another.'' On the 26th 
 of Jamiary, 1765 the two new volumes were given to the 
 world. 
 
 Shorter in length than any of the preceding instal- 
 ments, and filled out as it was, even so, by a process of 
 what would now be called " book-making," this issue will 
 yet bear comparison, I think, with the best of its prede- 
 
VI.] TRISTRAM SHANDT. VOLS. VII. AND VIII. 89 
 
 cessors. Its sketches of travel, thotigli destined to be 
 surpassed in vigoiu- and freedom of draftsmanship, by the 
 Sentimental Journey, are yet excellent, and their very 
 obvious want of connexion with the story — if story it can 
 be called — is so little felt, that we almost resent the 
 head-and-ears introduction of Mr. Shandy and his brother, 
 and the corporal, in apparent concession to the popular 
 prejudice in favour of some sort of coherence between the 
 various parts of a narrative. The first seventeen chapters 
 are perhaps as freshly delightful reading as anything in 
 Sterne. They are literally fiUed and brimming over with 
 the exhilaration of travel : written, or at least prepared 
 for writing, we can clearly see, under the full intoxicant 
 effect which a bewildering succession of new sights and 
 sounds will produce, in a certain measure, upon the coolest 
 of us, and which would set a head like Sterne's in an 
 absolute whirl. The contagion of his high spirits is, 
 however, irresistible ; and putting aside all other and 
 more solid qualities in them, these chapters are, for mere 
 fun — for that kind of clever nonsense which only wins 
 by perfect spontaneity, and which so promptly makes 
 ashamed the moment spontaneity fails — unsurpassed by 
 anytliing of the same kind from the same hand. How 
 strange then that, with so keen an eye for the humorous, so 
 sound and true a judgment in the highest qualities of 
 humour, Sterne should think it possible for any one who 
 has outgrown what may be called the dirty stage of boy- 
 hood to smile at the story which begins a few chapters 
 afterwards — that of the Abbess and Novice of the Convent 
 of Andouillets. The adult male person is not so much 
 shocked at the coarseness of this story, as astounded at 
 the bathos of its introduction. It is as though some 
 matchless connoisseur in wine, after having a Imndred 
 
90 STEBNE. [chap. 
 
 times demonstrated tlie unerring discrimination of his 
 palate for the finest brands, should then produce some 
 vile and loaded compound, and invite us to drink it with 
 all the relish with which he seems to be swallowing it 
 himself. This story of the Abbess and Novice almost 
 impels us to turn back to certain earlier chapters, or former 
 volumes, and re-examine some of the subtler passages of 
 humour to be found there — in downright apprehension, 
 lest we should turn out to have read these " good things," 
 not "in," but " uito " our author. The bad wine is so 
 very bad, that we catch ourselves wondering whether the 
 finer brands were genuine, when we see the same palate 
 equally satisfied with both. But one should, of course, 
 add that it is only in respect of its supposed humour that 
 this story shakes its readers' faith in the gifts of the 
 narrator. As a mere piece of story-telling, and even as a 
 study in landscape and figure painting, it is quite per- 
 versely skilful. There is something almost irritating, as a 
 waste of powers on imworthy material, in the prettiness 
 of the picture which Sterne draws of the preparations for 
 the departure of the two religiemes — the stir in the simple 
 village, the co-operating labours of the gardener and the 
 tailor, the carpenter and the smith, and all those other 
 little details which bring the whole scene before the eye so 
 vividly that Sterne may perhaps, in all seriousness, and , 
 not merely as a piece of his characteristic persiflage, 
 have thrown in the exclamation, " I declare I am 
 interested in this story, and wish I had been there." 
 Nothing again could be better done than the sketch of 
 the little good-natured " broad-set " gardener, who acted as 
 the ladies' muleteer, and the recital of the indiscretions 
 by which he was betrayed into temporary desertion of his 
 duties. Tlie whole scene is Chaucerian in its sharpness 
 
VI.] TRISTRAM SHAUDY. VOLS. VII. AND VIII. 91 
 
 of outline and translucency of atmosphere : though there, 
 unfortunately, the resemblance ends. Sterne's manner of 
 saying what we now leave unsaid, is as milike Chaucer's, 
 and as unlike for the worse, as it can possibly be. 
 
 StiU a certain amount of this element of the non nomi- 
 nandum must be compounded for, one regrets to say, in 
 nearly every chapter that Sterne ever wrote ; and there 
 is certainly less than the average amount of it in the 
 seventh volume. Then again this volume contains the 
 famous scene with the ass — the live and genuinely 
 touching, and not the dead and fictitiously pathetic, 
 animal ; and that perfect piece of comic dialogue — the 
 interview between the puzzled English traveller and the 
 French commissary of the posts. To have suggested this 
 scene is perhaps the sole claim of the absurd fiscal system 
 of the Ancien regime upon the grateful remembrance of 
 the world. A scheme of taxation which exacted posting- 
 charges from a traveller who proposed to continue his 
 journey by water, possesses a natural ingredient of 
 droUery infused into its mere vexatiousness ; but a whole 
 volume of satire could hardly put its essential absurdity 
 in a stronger light than is thrown upon it in the short 
 conversation between the astonished Tristram and the 
 officer of the fisc, who had just handed him a little bill for 
 six livres four sous : — 
 
 " Upon what account P " said I. 
 
 "'Tis upon the part of the king," said the commissary, 
 heaving up his shoulders. 
 
 " My good friend," quoth I, " as sure as I am I, and you are 
 you— " 
 
 " And who are you ? " he said. 
 
 " Don't puzzle me," said I. " But it is an indubitable verity," 
 I continued, addressing myself to the commissary, changing 
 
92 STERNE. [chap. 
 
 only the form of my asseveration, " that I owe the King of 
 France nothing but my good-will, for he is a very honest man, 
 and I wish him all the health and pastime in the world." 
 
 " Pardonnez-moi," replied the commissary. " You are indebted 
 to him six livres four sous for the next post from hence to St. 
 Pons, on your route to Avignon, which being a post royal, you 
 pay double for the horses and postilion, otherwise 'twould have 
 amounted to no more than three livres two sous.'' 
 
 " But I don't go by land," said I. 
 
 " You may, if you please,'' replied the commissary. 
 
 " Your most obedient servant," said I, making him a low 
 bow. 
 
 • The commissary, with all the sincerity of grave good breeding, 
 made me one as low again. I never was more disconcerted by 
 a bow in my life. " The devil take the serious character of these 
 people," said I, aside ; " they understand no more of irony 
 than this." The comparison was standing close by with her 
 panniers, but something sealed up my lips. I could not pro- 
 nounce the name. 
 
 " Sir," said I, collecting myself, " it is not my intention to 
 take post." 
 
 " But you may," said he, persisting in his first reply. " Yon 
 may if you choose." 
 
 " And I may take salt to my pickled herring if I choose.' 
 But I do not choose." 
 
 " But you must pay for it, whether you do or no." 
 
 ' It is the penalty — I suppose the just penalty — paid by habi- 
 tually extravagant humourists, that, meoming not being always 
 expected of them, it is not always sought by their readers with 
 sufficient care. Anyhow it may be suspected that this retort of 
 Tristram's is too often passed over as a mere random absurdity 
 designed for his interlocutor's mystification, and that its extremely 
 felicitous pertinence to the question in dispute is thus overlooked. 
 The point of it, of course, is that the business in which the com- 
 missary was then engaged was precisely analogous to that of 
 exacting salt dues from perverse persons who were impoverishing 
 the revenue by possessing herrings already pickled. 
 
VI.] TRISTRAM SHANDY. VOLS. VII. AND VIII. 93 
 
 " Ay, for the salt," said I, " I know." 
 
 "And '■jr the post, too," added he. 
 
 " Defend me ! " cried I. " I travel by water. I am going 
 down the Rhone this very afternoon ; my baggage is in the boat, 
 and I have actually paid nine livres for my passage.'' 
 
 "C'esttout egal — 'tis all one," said he. 
 
 " Bon Dieu ! What ! pay for the way I go and for the way I 
 do not go ? " 
 
 " C'est tout egal," replied the commissary. 
 
 " The devil it is ! " said I. " But I will go to ten thousand 
 Bastilles first. O, England ! England ! thou land of liberty 
 and climate of good-sense ! thou tenderest of mothers, and 
 gentlest of nurses ! " cried I, kneeling upon one knee as I was 
 beginning my apostrophe — when the director of Madame L. 
 Blanc's conscience coming in at that instant, and seeing a person 
 in black, with a face as pale as ashes, at his devotions, asked if 
 I stood in want of the aids of the church. 
 
 " I go by water," said I, " and here's another will be for 
 making me pay for going by oil." 
 
 The commissary of course remains obdurate, and Tris- 
 tram protests that the treatment to which he is being 
 subjected is "contrary to the law of nature, contrary to 
 reason, contrary to the Gospel." 
 
 " But not to this," said he, putting a printed paper into my 
 hand. 
 
 " ' De par le Roi.' 'Tis a pithy prolegomenon," quoth I, and 
 
 so read on "By all which it appears," quoth I, having 
 
 read it over a little too rapidly, " that if a man sets out in a 
 post-chaise for Paris, he must go on travelling in one all the days 
 of his life, or pay for it." 
 
 " Excuse me," said the commissary, " the spirit of the ordi- 
 nance is this, that if you set out with an intention of running 
 post from Paris to Avignon, &c., you shall not change that 
 intention or mode of travelling without first satisfying the 
 
94 STEENB. [CHAP. 
 
 fermiers for two posts further than the place you repent at ; and 
 'tis founded," continued he, " upon this, that the revenues are 
 not to fall short through your fickleness." 
 
 " O, by heavens ! " cried I, " if fickleness is taxable in France, 
 we have nothing to do but to make the best peace we can." 
 
 And so the peace was made. 
 
 And the volume ends with the dance of villagers on " the 
 road between Nismes and Lunel, where is the best Muscatto 
 wine in all France " — that charming little idyU which won 
 the imwiUing admiration of the least friendly of Sterne's 
 critics.^ 
 
 With the close of this volume the shadowy Tristram dis- 
 appears altogether from the scene ; and even the clearly- 
 sketched figures of Mr. and Mrs. Shandy recede somewhat 
 into the background. The courtship of my uncle Toby 
 forms the whole motif, and indeed almost the entire 
 substance of the next vohmie. Of this famous episode in 
 the novel a great deal has been said and written, and much 
 of the praise bestowed upon it is certainly deserved. The 
 artful coquetries of the fascinating widow, and the gradual 
 capitulation of the captain, are studied with admirable 
 power of humorous insight, and described with infinite grace 
 and skill. But there is perhaps no episode in the novel 
 which brings out what may be called the perversity of 
 Sterne's animalism in a more exasperating way. It is not so 
 much the amount of this element, as the time, place, and 
 manner in which it makes its presence felt. The senses 
 must of course play their part in all love affairs, except 
 those of the angels^or the triangles ; and such writers as 
 Byron, for instance, are quite free from the charge of 
 over-spiritualizing their description of the passion. Yet 
 
 2 Thackeray : English Humov/rists, vol. x. p. 568, ed. 1879. 
 
VI.] TRISTRAM SHANDY. VOLS. Til. AND VIII. 95 
 
 one might safely say, that there is far less to repel a 
 healthy mind in the poet's account of the amour of Juan 
 and Haidee than is to he found in many a passage in 
 this volume. It is not merely that one is the poetry 
 and the other the prose of the sexual passion : the distinc- 
 tion goes deeper, and points to a f imdamental difference of 
 attitude towards their subject iu the two writers' minds. 
 
 The success of this instalment of Tristram Shandy 
 appears to have been slightly greater than that of the 
 preceding one. Writing from London, where he was 
 once more basking in the sunshine of social popularity, 
 to Garrick, then in Paris, he says (March 16, 1765), 
 "I have had a lucrative campaign here. Shandy sells 
 well," and " I am taxing the public with two more 
 volumes of sermons, which wUl more than double the 
 gains of Shandy. It goes into the world with a prancing 
 list de toute la Tiollesse, which will bring me in three hun- 
 dred pounds, exclusive of the sale of the copy.'' The 
 list was indeed extensive and distinguished enough to 
 justify the curious epithet which he applies to it ; but the 
 cavalcade of noble names continued to " prance " for some 
 considerable time without advancing. Yet he had good 
 reasons, according to his own account, for wishing to 
 push on their publication. His parsonage-house at Sutton 
 had just been burnt down through the carelessness of 
 one of his curate's household, with a loss to Sterne of 
 some 3501. " As soon as I can," he says, " I must rebuild 
 it, but I lack the means at present." Nevertheless, the 
 new sermons continued to hang fire. Again, in April he 
 describes the subscription Hst as " the most splendid list 
 which ever pranced before a book since subscription 
 came into fashion ; " but though the volumes which it 
 was to usher into the world were then spoken of as about 
 
96 STERNE. [chap. 
 
 to be printed " very soon," he has again in July to write 
 of them only as " forthcoming ia September, though I 
 fear not in time to bring them with me " to Paris. And. 
 as a matter of fact, they do not seem to have made 
 their appearance until after Sterne had quitted England 
 on his second and last Continental journey. The full 
 subscription list may have had the effect of relaxing his 
 energies ; but the subscribers had no reason to complain 
 when, in 1766, the volumes at last appeared. 
 
 The reception given to the first batch of sermons which 
 Sterne had pubhshed was quite favourable enough to 
 encourage a repetition of the experiment. He was shrewd 
 enough, however, to perceive that on this second occasion 
 a somewhat different sort of article would be required. In 
 the first flush of Tristram Shandy's success, and in the 
 first piquancy of the contrast between the grave profession 
 of the writer and the unbounded licence of the book, he 
 could safely reckon on as large and curious a public for any 
 sermons whatever from the pen of Mr. Yorick. There 
 was no need that the humourist in his pulpit should at all 
 resemble the humourist at his desk ; or, indeed, that he 
 should be in any way an impressive or commanding figure. 
 The great desire of the world was to know what he did 
 resemble in this new and incongruous position. Men 
 wished to see what the queer, sly face looked like over a 
 velvet cushion, in the assurance that the sight would be a 
 strange and interesting one at any rate. Five years after- 
 wards, however, the case was different. The public then 
 had already had one set of sermons, and had discovered 
 that the humorous Mr. Sterne was not a very different man 
 in the pulpit from the dullest and most decorous of his 
 brethren. Such discoveries as these are instructive to 
 make, but not attractive to dwell upon ; and Sterne was 
 
VI.] SECOND SET OF SERMONS. 97 
 
 fully alive to the probability that there would be no 
 great demand for a volume of sermons which should only 
 illustrate for the second time the fact that he could be as 
 common-place as his neighbour. He saw that in future 
 the Rev. Mr. Yorick must a little more resemble the author 
 of Tristram Shandy and it is not improbable that from 
 1760 onwards he composed his parochial sermons with 
 especial attention to this mode of qualifying them for 
 republication. There is, at any rate, no slight critical 
 difficulty in believing that the bulk of the sermons of 
 1766 can be assigned to the same literary period as the 
 sermons of 1761. The one set seems as manifestly to 
 belong to the post-Shandian as the other does to the pre- 
 Shandian era ; and in some indeed of the apparently later 
 productions the daring quaintness of style and illustration 
 is carried so far that, except for the fact that Sterne had 
 no time to spare for the composition of sermons not 
 intended for professional use, one would have been dis- 
 posed to believe that they neither were nor were meant 
 to be delivered from the pulpit at aU.' Throughout all 
 of them, however, Sterne's new-found literary power dis- 
 plays itself in a vigour of expression and vivacity of illus- 
 tration which at least serve to make the sermons of 1766 
 considerably more entertaining reading than those of 1761. 
 In the first of the later series, for instance — the sermon on 
 Shimei — a discourse in which there are no very noticeable 
 sallies of unclerical humour, the quality of liveliness is 
 very conspicuously present. The preacher's view of the 
 character of Shimei, and of his behaviour to David, is 
 hardly that, perhaps, of a competent historical critic, and in 
 
 ' Mr. Fitzgerald, indeed, asserts as a fact that some at least of 
 these sermons were actually composed in the capacity of UUiratewr 
 and not of divine, — for the press and not for the pulpit. 
 
 H 
 
98 STERNE. [chap. 
 
 treating of the Benjamite's insults to the King of Israel he 
 appears to take no account of the blood-feud between the 
 house of David and the clan towhich the railer belonged ; 
 just as in commenting on Shimei's subsequent and most 
 abject submission to the victorious monarch, Sterne lays 
 altogether too much stress upon conduct which is indica- 
 tive, not so much of any exceptional meanness of disposi- 
 tion, as of the ordinary suppleness of the Oriental put in 
 fear of his life. However, it makes a more piquant and 
 dramatic picture to represent Shimei as a type of the 
 wretch of insolence and servility compact, with a tongue 
 ever ready to be loosed agaiast the unfortunate, and a 
 knee ever ready to be bent to the strong. And tiius he 
 moralizes on his conception : — 
 
 There is not a character in the world which has so bad an 
 influence upon it as this of Shimei. While power meets with 
 honest checks, and the evils of life with honest refuge, the world 
 will never be undone ; but thou, Shimei, hast sapped it at both 
 extremes : for thou corruptest prosperity, and 'tis thou who hast 
 broken the heart of poverty. And so long as worthless spirits 
 can be ambitious ones, 'tis a character we never shall want. 
 Oh ! it infests the court, the camp, the cabinet , it infests the 
 church. Go where you will, in every quarter, in every profes- 
 sion, you see a Shimei following the wheels of the fortunate 
 through thick mire and clay. Haste, Shimei, haste ! or thou 
 wilt be undone for ever. Shimei girdeth up his loins, and 
 speedeth after him. Behold the hand which governs everything 
 takes the wheel from his chariot, so that he who driveth, driveth 
 on heavily. Shimei doubles his speed ; but 'tis the contrary 
 
 way : he flies like the wind over a sandy desert Stay 
 
 Shimei ! 'tis your patron, your friend, your benefactor, the man 
 who has saved you from the dunghill. 'Tis all one to Shimei. 
 Shimei is the barometer of every man's fortune ; marks the rise 
 and fall of it, with all the variations from scorching hot to 
 
VI.] SECOND SET OF SERMONS. 99 
 
 freezing cold upon his countenance that the simile wiU admit 
 of.* Is a cloud upon thy affairs ? See, it hangs over Shimei's 
 brow ! Hast thou been spoken for to the king or the captain of 
 the host without success ? Look not into the Court Calen- 
 dar, the vacancy is filled in Shimei's face. Art thou in debt, 
 though not to Shimei ? No matter. The worst officer of the 
 law shall not be more insolent. What, then, Shimei, is the 
 fault of poverty so black ? is it of so general concern that 
 thou and all thy family must rise up as one man to reproach 
 it ? When it lost everything, did it lose the right to pity too ? 
 Or did he who maketh poor as well as maketh rich strip it 
 of its natural powers to mollify the heart and supple the 
 temper of your race P Trust me you have much to answer 
 for. It is this treatment which it has ever met with from 
 spirits like yours, which has gradually taught the world to 
 look upon it as the greatest of evils, and shun it as the worst 
 disgrace. And what is it, I beseech you, what is it that 
 men will not do to keep clear of so sore an imputation and 
 punishment ? Is it not to fly from this that he rises early, late 
 takes rest, and eats the bread of carefulness ? that he plots, 
 contrives, swears, lies, shuffles, puts on all shapes, tries all gar- 
 ments, wears them with this or that side outward, just as it may 
 favour his escape ? 
 
 And thougli the sermon ends in orthodox fashion, with 
 an assurance that, in spite of the Shimeis by whom we 
 are surrounded, it is in our power to " lay the foundation 
 of our peace (where it ought to be) within our own 
 hearts,'' yet the preacher can, in the midst of his earlier 
 reflections, permit himself the quaintly pessimistic out- 
 burst : " Shimei ! would to Heaven, when thou wast 
 slain, that all thy family had heen slain with thee, and 
 not one of thy resemhlance left ! But ye have multiplied 
 
 ' WMoh are not many in the case of a ha/rometer. 
 H 2 
 
100 STEENB. [chap. 
 
 exceedingly, and replenished the earth ; and if I prophecy 
 rightly, ye will in the end subdue it. 
 
 Nowhere, however, does the man of the world reveal 
 himself with more strangely comical effect under the gown 
 of the divine, than in the sermon on " The Prodigal Son." 
 The repentant spendthrift has returned to his father's 
 house, and is ahout to confess his follies. But, — 
 
 Alas ! How shall he tell his story ? 
 
 Ye who have trod this round, tell me in what words he shall 
 give in to his father the sad items of his extravagance and 
 folly: the feasts' and hanquets which he gave to whole cities 
 in the east ; the costs of Asiatic rarities, and of Asiatic cooks 
 to dress them ; the expenses of singing men and singing wo- 
 men ; the flute, the harp, the sackbut, and all kinds of music ; 
 the dress of the Persian Court how magnificent ! their slaves 
 how numerous ! their chariots, their homes, their pictures, their 
 furniture, what immense sums they had devoured ! what expec- 
 tations from strangers of condition ! what exactions ! How shall 
 the youth make his father comprehend that he was cheated at 
 Damascus by one of the best men in the world ; that he had lent 
 a part of his substance to a friend at Nineveh, who had fled oflf 
 with it to the Ganges ; that a whore of Babylon had swallowed 
 his best pearl, and anointed the whole city with his balm of 
 Gilead ; that he had been sold by a man of honour for twenty 
 shekels of silver to a worker in graven images ; that the images 
 he had purchased produced him nothing, that they could not be 
 transported across the wilderness, and had been burnt with fire 
 at Shusan ; that the apes and peacocks which he had sent for 
 from Tharsis lay dead upon bis hands ; that the mummies had 
 not been dead long enough which he had brought from Egypt ; 
 that all had gone wrong from the day he forsook his father's 
 house ? 
 
 All this, it must he admitted, is pretty lively for a 
 sermon. But hear the reverend gentleman once more, in 
 
VI.] SECOND SET OP SERMONS. 101 
 
 the same discourse, and observe the cliaracteristic coolness 
 with which he touches, only to drop, what may he caUed 
 the "professional" moral of the parable, and gUdes off 
 into a traiu of iateresting, but thoroughly mundane, reflec- 
 tions, suggested — or rather, supposed in courtesy to have 
 been suggested — by the text. " 1 know not," he says, 
 " whether it would be a subject of much edification to 
 convince you here, that our Saviour, by the Prodigal 
 Son, particularly pointed out those who were sinners of 
 the Gentiles, and were recovered by divine grace to 
 repentance; and that by the elder brother, he intended 
 manifestly the more froward of the Jews,'' &c. But 
 whether it would edify you or not, he goes on, in effect, 
 to say, I do not propose to provide you with edification in 
 that kind. " These uses have been so ably set forth in so 
 many good sermons upon the Prodigal Son that I shall 
 turn aside from them at present, and content myself with 
 some reflections upon that fatal passion which led him — 
 and so many thousands after the example — to gather all 
 he had together and take his journey into a far country.'' 
 In other words, " I propose to make the parable a peg 
 whereon to hang a few observations on (what does the 
 reader suppose ?) the practice of sending young men 
 upon the Grand Tour, accompanied by a ' bear-leader,' 
 and herein of the various kinds of bear-leaders, and the 
 services which they do, and do not, render to their 
 charges ; with a few words on society in continental cities, 
 and a true view of ' letters of introduction.' " That is 
 literally the substance of the remainder of the sermon. 
 And thus pleasantly does the preacher play with his 
 curious subject': — 
 
 But you will send an able pilot with your son — a scholar. 
 
102 STEENE. [cHAP. 
 
 If wisdom can speak in no other tongue but Greek or Latin, you 
 do ■well ; or if mathematics will make a man a gentleman, or 
 natural philosophy hut teach him to make a bow, he may be of 
 some sei-vice in introducing your son into good societies, and 
 supporting him in them when he had done. But the upshot 
 will be generally this, that on the most pressing occasions of 
 addresses, if he is not a mere man of reading, the unhappy 
 youth will have the tutor to carry, and not the tutor to carry 
 him. But (let us say) you will avoid this extreme ; he shall be 
 escorted by one who knows the world, not only from books 
 but from his own experience : a man who has been employed on 
 such services, and thrice " made the tour of Europe with success " 
 — that is, without breaking his own or his pupil's neck: for if he is 
 such as my eyes have seen, some broken Swiss valet de chamhre, 
 some general undertaker, who will perform the journey in so 
 many months, " if God permit," much knowledge will not 
 accrue. Some profit, at least : he will leam the amount to a 
 halfpenny of every stage from Calais to Eome ; he will be car- 
 ried to the best inns, instructed where there is the best wine, and 
 sup a livre cheaper than if the youth had been left to make the 
 tour and the bargain himself. Look at our governor, I beseech 
 you ! See he is an inch taller as he relates the advantages. 
 And here endeth his pride, his knowledge, and his use. But 
 when your son gets abroad, he will be taken out of his hand by 
 his society with men of rank and letters, with whom he will 
 pass the greatest part of his time. 
 
 So much, for the bear-leader : and. now a remark or two 
 on the young man's chances of getting into good foreign 
 society ; and then — the benediction : — 
 
 Let me observe in the first place, that company which is really 
 good is very rare and very shy. But you have surmounted this 
 difficulty, and procured him the best letters of recommendation to 
 the most eminent and respectable in every capital. And I 
 answer that he will obtain all by them which courtesy strictly 
 stands obliged to pay on such occasions, but no more. There is 
 
Ti.] SECOND SET OP SERMONS. 103 
 
 nothing in which we are so much deceived as in the advantages 
 proposed from our connexions and discourse with the literati, &c., 
 in foreign parts, especially if the experiment is made before we 
 are matured by years or study. Conversation is a traflSc ; and if 
 you' enter it without some stock of knowledge to balance the 
 account perpetually betwixt you, the trade drops at once ; and 
 this is the reason, however it may be boasted to the contrary, 
 why travellers have so little (especially good) conversation with 
 the natives, owing to their suspicion, or perhaps conviction, 
 that there is nothing to be extracted from the conversation of 
 young itinerants, worth the trouble of their bad language, or the 
 interruption of their visits. 
 
 Very true, no doubt, and excellently well put ; but we 
 seem to have got some distance, in spirit at any rate, from 
 Luke XV. 13 : and it is with somewhat too visible effect, 
 perhaps, that Sterne forces his way hack into the orthodox 
 routes of pulpit disquisition. The youth, disappointed 
 with his reception by " the literati," &c., seeks " an easier 
 society ; and as bad company is always ready, and ever 
 lying in wait, the career is soon finished, and the poor 
 prodigal returns — the same object of pity with the pro- 
 digal in the Gospel." Hardly a good enough "tag," 
 perhaps, to reconcile the ear to the "And now to," &c., as 
 a fitting close to this pointed httle essay in the style of 
 the Chesterfield Letters. There is much internal evidence 
 to show that this so-called sermon was written either after 
 Sterne's visit to, or during his stay in France ; and there 
 is strong reason, I think, to suppose that it was in reality 
 neither intended for a sermon, nor actually delivered from 
 the pulpit. 
 
 No other of his sermons has quite so much vivacity as 
 this. But in the famous discourse upon an unlucky text 
 — the sermon preached at the chapel of the English 
 
104 STERNE. [chap. 
 
 Embassy, in Paris— there are touches of unclerical raillery 
 not a few. Thus : " What a noise," he exclaims, " among 
 the simulants of the various virtues. . . Behold Humility, 
 become so out of mere pride ; Chastity, never once in 
 harm's way ; and Courage, like a Spanish soldier upon an 
 Italian stage — a bladder full of wind. Hush ! the sound 
 of that trumpet ! Let not my soldier run ! 'tis some 
 good Christian giving ahns. Pity, thou gentlest of 
 human passions ! soft and tender are thy notes, and ill 
 accord they with so loud an instrument." 
 
 Here again is a somewhat^bold saying for a divine : — 
 " But, to avoid aU commonplace cant as much as I can on 
 this head, I will forbear to say, because I do not think, 
 that 'tis a breach of Christian charity to think or speak 
 ill of our neighbour. We cannot avoid it: our opinion 
 must follow the evidence," &c. And a little later on, 
 commenting on the insinuation conveyed in Satan's ques- 
 tion, " Does Job serve God for nought 1 " he says : "It 
 is a bad picture, and done by a terrible master ; and yet 
 we are always copying it. Does a man from real con- 
 viction of heart forsake his vices ? The position is not 
 to be allowed. No ; his vices have forsaken him. Does 
 a pure virgin fear God, and say her prayers 1 She is in 
 her climacteric'! Does humility clothe and educate the 
 unknown orphan? Poverty, thou hast no genealogies. 
 See ! is ho not the father of the child V In another 
 sermon he launches out into quaintly contemptuous criti- 
 cism of a religious movement which he was certainly the 
 last person in the world to understand — to wit, Methodism. 
 He asks whether, " when a poor, disconsolated, drooping 
 creature is terrified from all enjoyment, prays without 
 ceasing till his imagination is heated, fasts and mortifies 
 and mopes tiU his body is in as bad a plight as his mind, 
 
Ti.] SECOND SET OF SEEMONS. 105 
 
 it is a wonder that the mechanical disturbances and con- 
 flicts of an empty belly, interpreted by an empty head, 
 should be mistook for workings of a different kind from 
 what they are ?" Other sermons reilect the singularly 
 bitter anti- Catholic feeling which was characteristic 
 even of indifferentism in those days — at any rate among 
 Whig divines. But in most of them one is liable to come 
 at any moment across one of those strange sallies to 
 which Gray alluded, when he said of the effect of Sterne's 
 sermons upon a reader, that "you often see him tottering 
 on the verge of laughter, and ready to throw his periwig 
 in the face of the audience." 
 
CHAPTEE VII. 
 
 FEANCB AND ITALY — MEETING WITH WIFE AND DAUGHTER — 
 EETUEN TO ENGLAND — TEISTEAM SHANDY, VOL. IX. — 
 THE SENTIMENTAL JOUENBY. 
 
 (1765—1768.) 
 
 In the first week of October, 1765, or a few days later, 
 Sterne set out on what was afterwards to become famous 
 as the " Sentimental Journey through France and Italy." 
 Not, of course, that all the materials for that celebrated 
 piece of literary travel were collected on this occasion. 
 From London as far as Lyons, his way lay by a route 
 which he had already traversed three years before, and 
 there is reason to believe that at least some of the scenes 
 in the Sentimental Journey, were drawn from observation 
 made on his former visit. His stay in Paris was shorter 
 this year than it had been on the previous occasion. A 
 month after leaving England he was at Pont Beauvoisin, 
 and by the middle of November he had reached Turin. 
 From this city he wiites, with his characteristic sim- 
 plicity, " I am very happy, and have found my way into 
 a dozen houses already. To-morrow I am to be presented 
 to the king, and when that ceremony is over I shall have 
 my hands full of engagements." From Turin he went on 
 by way of Milan, Parma, Piacenza, and Bologna, to Flo- 
 rence, where, after three days' stay, " to dine with our 
 
CH. VII.] MEETING WITH WIFE AND DAUGHTER. 107 
 
 Plenipo." he continued his journey to Eome. Here, and 
 at Naples, he passed the winter of 1765 — 1766 : ' and pro- 
 longed his stay in Italy until the ensuing spring was well 
 advanced. In the month of May he was again on his 
 way home through France, and had had a meeting after 
 two years' separation from them, with his wife and 
 daughter. His account of it to Hall Stevenson is curious : 
 " Never man," he writes, " has been such a wild goose 
 chase after his wife as I have been. After having sought 
 her in five or six different towns, I found her at last in 
 Franche Comte. Poor woman ! " he adds, " she was very 
 cordial, &c." The &c. is charming. But her cordiality 
 had evidently no tendency to deepen into any more im- 
 passioned sentiment, for she " begged to stay another year 
 or so.'' As to " my Lydia," the real cause we must 
 suspect of Sterne's having turned out of his road, she, 
 he says, " pleases me much. I found her greatly improved 
 in everything I wished her.'' As to himself : " I am most 
 unaccountably well, and most accountably nonsensical. 
 'Tis at least a proof of good spirits, which is a sign and 
 token, in these latter days, that I Inust take up my pen. 
 In faith, I think I shall die with it in my hand ; but I 
 shall live these ten years, my Antony, notwithstanding the 
 fears of my wife, whom I left most melancholy on that 
 account.'' The " fears " and the melancholy were, alas ! 
 to be justified, rather than the " good spirits ;" and the 
 shears of Atropos were to close, not in ten years, but in 
 
 ' It -was on this tour that Sterne picked up the French valet 
 Laflenr, whom he introduced as a character into the Sentimental 
 Journey, but whose subsequently published recollections of the 
 tour (if indeed the veritable Lafleur was the author of the notes 
 from which Soott quotes so freely) appear, as Mr. Fitzgerald has 
 pointed out, from internal evidence to be mostly fictitious. 
 
108 STERNE. [chap. 
 
 little more than twenty months, upon that fragile thread 
 of life. 
 
 By the end of June he was back again in his Yorkshire 
 home, and very soon after had settled down to work 
 upon the ninth and last volume of Tristram Shandy. He 
 was writing, however, as it should seem, under something 
 more than the usual distractions of a man with two 
 establishments. Mrs. Sterne was just then iU. at Mar- 
 seilles, and her husband — ^who, to do Viim justice, was 
 always properly solicitous for her material comfort — was 
 busy making provision for her to change her quarters to 
 Chalons. He writes to M. Panchaud, at Paris, sending 
 fifty pounds, and begging him to make her all further 
 advances that might be necessary. " I have," he says, 
 " such entire confidence in my wife that she spends as 
 little as she can, though she is confined to no particular 
 sum .... and you may rely — in case she should draw 
 for fifty or a hundred pounds extraordinary — that it and 
 every demand shall be punctually paid, and with proper 
 thanks ; and for this the whole Shandian family are 
 ready to stand security." Later on, too, he writes, that 
 " a young nobleman is now inaugurating a jaunt with me 
 for six weeks, about Christmas, to the Faubourg St. 
 Gennain ;" and he adds — in a tone, the sincerity of which 
 he would himself have probably found a difficulty in 
 gauging — " if my wife should grow worse (having had a 
 very poor account of her in my daughter's last), I cannot 
 think of her being without me ; and, however expensive 
 the journey would be, I would fly to Avignon to ad- 
 minister consolation to her and my poor girl."^ The 
 
 ' There can be few admirers of Sterne's genius who would not 
 gladly incline, whenever they find it possible, to Mr. Fitzgerald's 
 very indulgent estimate of his disposition. But this is only one of 
 
vn.] TRISTRAM SHANDY. VOL. IX. 109 
 
 necessity for this flight, however, did not arise. Better 
 accounts of Mrs. Sterne arrived a few weeks later, and the 
 husband's consolations were not required. 
 
 Meanwhile, the idyll of Captain Shandy's love-making 
 was gradually approaching completion : and there are 
 signs to be met with — in the author's correspondence, that 
 is to say, and not in the work itself — that he was some- 
 what impatient to be done with it, at any rate for the 
 time. " I shall publish," he says, " late in this year ; and 
 the next I shaU begin a new work of four volumes, which 
 when finished, I shall continue Tristram, with fresh 
 spirit." The new work in four volumes (not destined to 
 get beyond one) was of course the Sentimental Journey. 
 His ninth volume of Tristram Sliandy was finished by the 
 end of the year, and at Christmas he came up to London, 
 after his usual practice, to see to its publication and enjoy 
 the honours of its reception. The book passed duly 
 through the press, and in the last days of January was 
 issued the announcement of its immediate appearance. 
 Of the character of its welcome I can find no other 
 evidence than that of Sterne himself, in a letter addressed 
 to M. Panchaud some fortnight after the book appeared. 
 "'Tis liked the best of all here;" but, with whatever 
 accuracy this may have expressed the complimentary- 
 opinion of friends, or even the well-considered judgment 
 of critics, one can hardly believe that it enjoyed anything 
 like the vogue of the former volumes. Sterne, however, 
 
 many instances in which the charity of the biographer appears to 
 me to be, if the expression may be permitted, nnconscionable. 
 I can, at any rate, find no warrant whatever in the above passage 
 for the too kindly suggestion that " Sterne was actually nego- 
 tiating a journey to Paris as 'bear-leader' to a young nobleman 
 (an odious office to which he had special aversion), in (yrdffr that 
 he might with economy fly over to Avignon." 
 
110 STERNE. [chap. 
 
 would be tlie less concerned for this, that his head was 
 at the moment f uU of his new venture. " I am going,'* 
 he writes, " to publish A Sentimental Journey through 
 France and Italy. The undertaking is protected and 
 highly encouraged by aU our noblesse. 'Tis subscribed 
 for at a great rate, 'twill be an original, in large quarto, 
 the subscription half a guinea. If you (Panchaud) can 
 procure me the honour of a few names of men of science, 
 or fashion, I shall thank you : they will appear in good 
 company, as aU the nobility here have honoured me with 
 their names.'' As was usual with him, however, he post- 
 poned commencing it, imtil he should have returned to 
 Coxwold ; and, as was equally usual with him, he found 
 it difficult to tear himself away from the delights of 
 London. Moreover, there was in the present instance a 
 special difficulty, arising out of an affair upon which, 
 as it has relations with the history of Sterne's literary 
 work, it would be impossible, even in the most strictly 
 critical and least general of biographies, to observe com- 
 plete silence. I refer of course to the famous and furious 
 flirtation with Mrs. Draper — the Eliza of the Yorick and 
 Eliza Letters. Of the affair itself, but little need be said. 
 I have already stated my own views on the general sub- 
 ject of Sterne's love affairs ; and I feel no inducement to 
 discuss the question of their innocence or otherwise in 
 relation to this particular amourette. I wiU only say that 
 were it technically as innocent as you please, the mean 
 which must be found between Thackeray's somewhat too 
 harsh and Mr. Fitzgerald's considerably too indulgent 
 judgment on it, wiU lie, it seems to me, decidedly nearer 
 to the former than to the latter's extreme. This episode 
 of violently sentimental philandering with an Indian 
 " grass widow " was, in any case, an extremely unlovely 
 passage in Sterne's life. On the best and most charitable 
 
VII.] THE SENTIMENTAL JOUENET. Ill 
 
 view of it, the flirtation, pursued in the way it was, and 
 to the lengths to which it was carried, must be held to 
 convict the elderly lover of the most deplorable levity, 
 vanity, indiscretion, and sickly sentimentalism. It was, 
 to say the least of it, most unbecoming in a man of 
 Sterne's age and profession; and when it is added that 
 Yorick's attentions to Eliza were paid in so open a fashion 
 as to be brought by gossip to the ears of his neglected 
 wife, then living many hundred miles away from him, 
 its highly reprehensible character seems manifest enough 
 in all ways. 
 
 No sooner, however, had the fascinating widow set 
 sail, than the sentimental lover began to feel so strongly 
 the need of a female consoler that his head seems to 
 have softened, insensibly, even towards his wife. " I am 
 unhappy," he writes plaintively to Lydia Sterne. " Thy 
 mother and thyself at a distance from me — and what 
 can compensate for such a destitution ? For God's sake 
 persuade her to come and fix in England ! for life is too 
 short to waste in separation ; and while she lives in one 
 country and I in another, many people wiU suppose it 
 proceeds from choice," — a supposition, he seems to imply, 
 which even my scrupulously discreet conduct in her 
 absence scaicely suffices to refute. " Besides," — a word 
 in which there is here almost as much virtue as in an 
 " if," — " I want thee near me, thou child and darling of 
 my heart. I am in a melancholy mood, and my Lydia's 
 eyes will smart with weeping when I tell her the cause 
 that just now affects me." And then his sensibilities 
 brim over, and into his daughter's ear he pours forth his 
 lamentations over the loss of her mother's rival. " I am 
 apprehensive the dear friend I mentioned in my last 
 letter is going into a decline. I was with her two days 
 ago, and I never beheld a being so altered. She has a 
 
112 STEENE. [chap. 
 
 tender frame, and looks like a drooping lily, for the roses 
 are fled from her cheeks. I can never see or talk to this 
 incomparable woman without bursting into tears. I have 
 a thousand obligations to her, and I love her more than 
 her whole sex, if not aU the world put together. She 
 has a delicacy," &c. &c. And after reciting a frigid 
 epitaph which he had written, " expressive of her modest 
 worth," he winds up with — " Say aU that is kind of me 
 to thy mother ; and believe me, my Lydia, that I love 
 thee most truly." My excuse for quoting thus fully from 
 this most characteristic letter, and indeed for dweUing at 
 aU upon these closing incidents of the Torick and EHza 
 episode, is, that in their striking illustration of the soft, 
 weak, spiritually self-iadulgent nature of the man, they 
 assist us far more than many pages of criticism would 
 do, to imderstand one particular aspect of his literary 
 idiosyncrasy. The sentimentalist of real life explaias the 
 sentimentalist in art. 
 
 In the early days of May Sterne managed at last to tear 
 himself away from London and its joys, and with painful 
 slowness, for he was now in a wretched state of health, to 
 make his way back to Yorkshire. " I have got conveyed," 
 he says in a distressing letter from Newark, to Hall 
 Stevenson, " I have got conveyed thus far like a bale of 
 cadaverous goods consigned to Pluto and Company, lying 
 in the bottom of my chaise most of the route, upon a large 
 pillow which I had the prevoyance to purchase before I 
 set out. I am worn out, but pass on to Barnby Moor 
 to-night, and if possible to York the next. I know not 
 what is the matter with me ; but some derangement 
 presses hard upon this machine. Still, I think it will not 
 be overset this bout " — another of those utterances of a 
 cheerful courage under the prostration of pain which reveal 
 
VII.] THE SENTIMENTAL JOUENBY. 113 
 
 to US tiie manliest side of Sterne's nature. On reaching 
 
 o 
 
 Coxwold Lis health appears to have temporarily mended, 
 and in June we find him giving a far better account of 
 himself to another of his friends. The fresh Yorkshire 
 air seems to have temporarily revived him, and to his 
 friend, Arthur Lee, a young American, he writes thus : 
 "I am as happy as a prince at Coxwold, and I wish you 
 could see in how princely a manner I live. 'Tis a land 
 of plenty. I sit down alone to dinner — fish and wild- 
 fowl, or a couple of fowls or ducks, with cream and all the 
 simple plenty which a rich valley under Hamilton HiUs 
 can produce, with a clean cloth on my table, and a bottle 
 of wine on my right hand to drink your health. I have 
 a hundred hens and chickens about my yard ; and not a 
 parishioner catches a hare, a rabbit, or a trout, but he brings 
 it as an offering to me." Another of his correspondents 
 at this period was the Mrs. H. of his letters, whose identity 
 I have been unable to trace, but who is addressed in a 
 manner which seems to show Sterne's anxiety to expel 
 the old flame of Eliza's kindling by a new one. There is 
 little, indeed, of the sentimentalizing strain in which he 
 was wont to sigh at the feet of Mrs. Draper, but in its place 
 there is a freedom of a very prominent, and here and there 
 of a highly unpleasant kind. To his friends, Mr. and 
 Mrs. James, too, he writes frequently dm-ing this year, 
 chiefly to pour out his soul on the subject of Eliza ; and 
 Mrs. James, who is always addressed in company with her 
 husband, enjoys the almost imique distinction of being 
 the only woman outside his own family circle whom Sterne 
 never approaches in the language of artificial gallantry, 
 but always in that of simple friendship ' and respect.^ 
 
 3 To this period of Sterne's life, it may here be remarked, is to 
 be assigned the dog-Latin letter ("and very aad dog-Latin too") 
 
 I 
 
114 STERNE. [CHAP. 
 
 Meanwhile, however, the Sentimental Journei/ was ad- 
 vancing at a reasonable rate of speed towards completion. 
 In July he writes of himself as " now beginning to be 
 truly busy " on it, " the pain and sorrows of this life 
 having retarded its progress.'' 
 
 His wife and daughter were about to rejoin him in the 
 autumn, and he looked forward to settling them at a hired 
 house in York before going up to town to publish his new 
 volumes. On the 1st of October the two ladies arrived 
 at York, and the next day the reunited family went on to 
 Coxwold. The meeting with the daughter gave Sterne 
 one of the few quite innocent pleasures which he was 
 capable of feeling ; and he writes nest day to Mr. and 
 Mrs. James in terms of high pride and satisfaction of his 
 recovered child. " My girl has returned," he writes in the 
 language of playful affection, " an elegant, accomplished 
 little slut. My wife — but I hate," he adds, with remark- 
 able presence of mind, " to praise my wife. 'Tis as much 
 as decency wUl allow to praise my daughter. I suppose," 
 he concludes, " they will return next summer to Pranca 
 They leave me in a month to reside at York for the winter, 
 and I stay at Coxwold tiU the 1st of January.'' This 
 seems to indicate a little longer delay in the publication of 
 
 so jastly animadverted upon by Thackeray, and containing a pas- 
 sage of which Mdme. DeMedalle, it is to be charitably hoped, had 
 no suspicion of the zneaning. Mr. Fitzgerald, through an over- 
 sight in translation, and understanding Sterne to say that he him- 
 self, and not his correspondent, Hall Stevenson, was " qnadra- 
 ginta et plus annos natus," has referred it to an earlier date. 
 The point, however, is of no great importance, as the untranslate- 
 able passage in the letter would be little less unseemly in 1754 or 
 1755 than in 1768, at the beginning of which year, since the 
 letter is addressed from London to Hall Stevenson, then in 
 Torkshire, it mast, in fact, have been written. 
 
Vii.j THB SENTIMENTAL JOURNET. 115 
 
 the Sentimental Journey than he had at first intended ; for 
 it seems that the book was finished by the end of Novem- 
 ber. On the 28th of that month, he writes to the Earl of 
 
 (as his daughter's foohsh mysteriousness has headed 
 
 the letter), to thank him for his letter of inquiry about 
 Yorick, and to say that Yorick "has worn out both his spirits 
 and body with the Sentimental Journey. 'Tis true that an 
 author must feel himself, or his reader will not " (how mis- 
 taken a devotion Sterne showed to this Horatian canon 
 will be noted hereafter), " but I have torn my whole 
 frame into pieces by my feelings. I believe the brain 
 stands as much in need of recruiting as the body ; therefore 
 I shall set out for town the 20th of next month, after 
 having recruited myself at York." Then he adds the 
 strange observation, " I might, indeed, solace myself 
 with my wife (who is come from France), but, in fact, I 
 have long been a sentimental being, whatever your Lord- 
 ship may think to the contrary. The world has imagined 
 because I wrote Tristram Shandy that I was myself more 
 Shandian than I really ever was. 'Tis a good-natured 
 world we live in, and we are often painted in divers 
 colours, according to the ideas each one frames in his 
 head." It would, perhaps, have been scarcely possible 
 for Sterne to state his essentially unliealthy philosophy 
 of life so concisely as in this naive passage. The con- 
 nubial affections are here, in all seriousness and good faith 
 apparently, opposed to the sentimental emotions — as 
 the lower to the higher. To indulge the former is to 
 be " Shandian," that is to say, coarse and carnal ; to 
 devote oneself to the latter, or, in other words, to spend 
 one's days in semi-erotic languishings over the whole female 
 sex indiscriminately, is to show spirituality and taste. 
 Meanwhile, however, that fragile abode of sentimen- 
 I 2 
 
116 STERNE. [chap. 
 
 talism — that frame which had just been " torn to pieces " 
 by the feelings, was becoming weaker than its owner 
 supposed. Much of the exhaustion which Sterne had 
 attributed to the violence of his literary emotions was no 
 doubt due to the rapid decline of bodily powers which, 
 unknown to him, were already within a few months of 
 their final collapse. He did not set out for London on 
 the 20th of December, as he had promised himself, for 
 on that day he was only just recovering from " an attack 
 of fever and bleeding at the lungs," which had confined 
 him to his room for nearly three weeks. " I am worn 
 down to a shadow," he writes on the 23rd, " but as my 
 fever has left me, I set off the latter end of next week 
 with my friend, Mr. HaU, for town." His home affairs 
 had abeady been settled. Early in December it had been 
 arranged that his wife and daughter should only remain 
 at York during the winter, and should return to the 
 Continent in the spring. " Mrs. , Sterne's health," he 
 writes, "is insupportable in England. She must return 
 to France, and justice and humanity forbid me to 
 oppose it." But separation from his wife meant separa- 
 tion from his daughter ; it was this, of coui-se, which was 
 the really painful parting, and it is to the credit of 
 Sterne's disinterestedness of affection for Lydia, that in 
 his then state of health he brought himself to consent to 
 her leaving him. But he recognized that it was for the 
 advantage of her prospect of settling herself in life that 
 she should go with her mother, who seemed " inclined to 
 establish her in France, where she has had many advan- 
 tageous offers." Nevertheless " his heart bled," as he wrote 
 to Lee, when he thought of parting with his child. " 'Twill 
 be like the separation of soul and body, and equal to 
 nothing but what passes at that tremendous moment ; and 
 
VII.] THE SENTIMENTAL JOURNEY. 117 
 
 like it in one respect, for she ■will be in one kingdom 
 while I am in another." Thus was this matter settled, and 
 by the 1st of January Sterne had arrived in London for 
 the last time, with the first two volumes of the Sentimental 
 Journey. He took up his quarters at the lodgings in Bond 
 Street (No. 41), which he had occupied during his stay in 
 town the previous year, and entered at once upon the 
 arrangements for publication. These occupied two fuU 
 months, and on the 27th of February the last work, as it 
 was destined to be, of the Eev. Mr. Yoriok was issued to 
 the world. 
 
 Its success would seem to have been immediate, and 
 was certainly great and lasting. In one sense, indeed, it 
 was far greater than had been, or than has siace been, 
 attained by Tristram Shandy. The compliments which 
 courteous Frenchmen had paid the author upon his 
 former work, and which his simple vanity had swallowed 
 whole and unseasoned, without the much-needed grain of 
 salt, might, no doubt, have been repeated to him with far 
 greater sincerity as regards the Sentimental Journey, had 
 he lived to receive them. Had any Frenchman told him 
 a year or two afterwards that the latter work was " almost 
 as much known in Paris as in London, at least among men 
 of condition and learning,'' he would very likely have 
 been telling him no more than the truth. The Sentimental 
 Journey certainly acquired what Tristram Shandy never 
 did — a European reputation. It has been translated into 
 Italian, German, Dutch, and even Polish ; and into French 
 again and again. The French, indeed, have no doubt 
 whatever of its being Sterne's chef-d'oeuvre ; and one has 
 only to compare a French translation of it with a rendering 
 of Tristram Shandy into the same language to understand, 
 and from our neighbours' point of view even to admit. 
 
118 STERNE. [chap. 
 
 the justice of their preference. The charms of the 
 Journey, its grace, wit, and urbanity, are thoroughly con- 
 genial to that most graceful of languages, and reproduce 
 themselves readily enough therein ; while, on the other 
 hand, the fantastic digressions, the elaborate mystifications, 
 the farcical interludes of the earlier work, appear intolerably 
 awkward and bizaire in their Prench dress j and what is 
 much more strange, even the point of the double entendres 
 is sometimes unaccountably lost. Were it not that the 
 genuine humour of Tristram Shandy in a great measure 
 evaporates in translation, one would be forced to admit that 
 the work which is the more catholic in its appeal to apprecia- 
 tion is the better of thb two. But having regard to this 
 disappearance of genuine and unquestionable excellencies 
 in the process of translation, I see no good reason why 
 those Englishmen— the great majority, I imagine — who 
 prefer Tristram Shandy to the Sentimental Journey should 
 feel any misgivings as to the soundness of their taste. The 
 humour which goes the deepest down beneath the surface 
 of things is the most Hkely to become inextricably inter- 
 woven with those deeper fibres of associations which lie 
 at the roots of a language ; and it may weU happen, there- 
 fore, though from the cosmopolitan point of view it is a 
 melancholy reflection, that the merit of a book to those 
 who use the language in which it is written, bears a 
 direct ratio to the persistence of its refusal to yield up its 
 charm to men of another tongue. 
 
 The favour, however, with which the Sentimental 
 Journey was received abroad, and which it still enjoys 
 (the last French translation is very recent), is, as Mr. 
 Fitzgerald says, " worthily merited, if grace, nature, true 
 sentiment, and exquisite dramatic power be qualities that 
 are to find a welcome. And apart," he adds, " from these 
 
VII.] THE SENTIMENTAL JOUENEY. 119 
 
 attractions it has a iinique charm of its own, a flavour, so 
 to speak, a fragrance that belongs to that one book alone. 
 Never was there such a charming series of complete little 
 pictures, which for delicacy seem like the series of medal- 
 lions done on Sevres china which we sometimes see in old 
 
 French cabinets The figures stand out brightly, 
 
 and in what number and variety ! Old Calais, with its 
 old inn • M. Dessein, the monk, one of the most artistic 
 figures on literary canvas ; the charming French lady 
 whom M. Dessein shut iuto the carriage with the traveller ; 
 the de'honnaire French captain, and the English travellers 
 returning, touched in with only a couple of strokes ; La 
 Fleur, the valet; the pretty French glove-seUer, whose 
 pulse the Sentimental one felt : her husband, who passed 
 through the shop and pulled off his hat to Monsieur for the 
 honour he was doing him ; the little maid in the book- 
 seller's shop, who put her little present a pari; the 
 charming Greuze 'grisset,' who sold him the ruffles; the 
 reduced chevalier selling pates ; the groups of beggars at 
 Montreml ; the fade Coimt de Bissie, who read Shake- 
 speare ; and the crowd of minor croquis — postillions 
 landlords, notaries, soldiers, abbes, precieuses, maids — 
 merely touched, but touched with wonderful art, make 
 up a surprising collection of distinct and graphic 
 characters." 
 
CHAPTEE VIII. 
 
 LAST DAYS AND DEATH. 
 (1768.) 
 
 The end was now fast approaching. Months before, 
 Sterne had written doubtfully of his being able to stand 
 another wiuter in England, and his doubts were to be 
 fatally justified. One can easily see, however, how the 
 unhappy experiment came to be tried. It is possible 
 that he might have delayed the publication of his book 
 for a while, and taken refuge abroad from the rigours 
 of the two remaining winter months, had it not been 
 in the nature of his malady to conceal its deadly ap- 
 proaches. Consumption sported with its victim, ia the 
 cruel fashion that is its wont. " I continue to mend," 
 Sterne writes from Bond Street on the first day of the 
 new year, " and doubt not but this with all other evils 
 and uncertainties of life will end for the best." And 
 for the best perhaps it did end, in the sense in which 
 the resigned Christian uses these pious words ; but this, 
 one fears, was not the sense intended by the dying man. 
 All through January and February he was occupied not 
 only with business, but as it would seem with a fair 
 amount, though less no doubt than his usual share, of 
 pleasure also. Vastly active was he, it seems, in the great 
 undertaking of obtaining tickets for one of Mrs. Comely's 
 
CH. VIII.] LAST DAYS AND DEATH. 121 
 
 entertainments (the "tlihig" to go to at that particular time) 
 for his friends the Jameses. He writes them on Monday that 
 he has not been a moment at rest since writing the previous 
 day about the Soho ticket. " I have been at a Secretary 
 of State to get one, have been upon one knee to my 
 friend Sir George Macartney, Mr. Lascelles, and Mr. Fitz- 
 maurice, without mentioning five more. I believe I could 
 as soon get you a place at Court, for everybody is going ; 
 but I will go out and try a new circle, and if you do not 
 hear from me by a quarter to three, you may conclude I 
 have been unfortunate in my supplications." Whether he 
 was or was not unfortunate, history does not record. A 
 week or two later the old round of dissipation had ap- 
 parently set in. " I am now tied down neck and heels by 
 engagements every night this week, or most joyfully would 
 have trod the old pleasiag road from Bond to Gerrard 
 
 Street I am quite well, but exhausted with a 
 
 roomful of company every morning till dinner.'' A Httle 
 later, and this momentary flash of health had died out ; and 
 we find him writing what was his last letter to his daughter, 
 fuU evidently of uneasy forebodings as to his approaching 
 end. He speaks of " this vile influenza — be not alarmed. 
 I think I shall get the better of it, and shall be with you 
 both the 1st of May ;" though, he adds, " if I escape, 'twill 
 not be for a long period, my child — unless a quiet retreat 
 and peace of mind can restore me." But the occasion of 
 this letter was a curious one, and a Httle more must be 
 extracted from it. Lydia Sterne's letter to her father had 
 he said, astonished him. " She (Mrs. Sterne) could know 
 but Httle of my feelings to teU thee that tmder the sup- 
 position I should survive thy mother I should bequeath 
 thee as a legacy to Mrs. Draper. No, my Lydia, 'tis a 
 lady whose virtues I wish thee to imitate " — Mrs. James, 
 
122 STERNE. [cHAPi 
 
 in fact, whom he proceeds to praise with much and 
 probably well-deserved warmth. " But," he adds sadly, 
 " I think, my Lydia, thy mother will survive me j do not 
 deject her spirit with thy apprehensions on my account. I 
 have sent you a necklace and buckles, and the same to 
 your mother. My girl cannot form a wish that is in the 
 power of her father, that he will not gratify her in ; and I 
 cannot in justice be less kind to thy mother. I am never 
 alone. The kindness of my friends is ever the same. I 
 wish though I had thee to nurse me, but I am denied that. 
 Write to me twice a week at least. God bless thee, my 
 child, and believe me ever, ever, thy affectionate father." 
 The despondent tone of this letter was to be only too soon 
 justified. The "vile influenza" proved to be or became 
 a pleurisy. On Thursday, March 10, he was bled three 
 times, and blistered on the day after. And on the 
 Tuesday following, in evident consciousness that his end 
 was near, he penned that cry " for pity and pardon," as 
 Thackeray calls it — the first as well as the last, and which 
 sounds almost as strange as it does piteous from those 
 mocking lips. 
 
 The physician says I am better God knows, for I feel 
 
 myself sadly wrong, and shall, if I recover, be a long while of 
 gaining strength. Before I have gone through half the letter, 
 I must stop to rest my weak hand a dozen times. Mr. James 
 was so good as to call upon me yesterday. I felt emotions not 
 to be described at the sight of him, and he overjoyed me by 
 talking a great deal of you. Do, dear Mrs. James, entreat him 
 to come to-morrow or next day, for perhaps I have not many 
 days or hours to live. I want to ask a favour of him, if I find 
 myself worse, that I shall beg of you if in this wrestling I come 
 off conqueror. My spirits are fled. It is a bad omen ; do net 
 weep, my dear lady. Your tears are too precious to be shed for me. 
 
Till.] LAST DATS AND DEATH. 123 
 
 Bottle them up, and may the cork never be drawn. Dearest, 
 kindest, gentlest, and best of women ! may health, peace, and 
 happiness prove your handmaids. If I die, cherish the remem- 
 brance of me, and forget the follies which you so often con- 
 demned, which my heart, not my head, betrayed me into. Should 
 my child, my Lydia, want a mother, may I hope you will (if she 
 is left parentless) take her to your bosom ? You are the only 
 woman on earth I can depend upon for such a benevolent action. 
 I wrote to her a fortnight ago, and told her what, I trust, she 
 
 will find in you. Mr. James will be a father to her 
 
 Commend me to him, as I now commend you to that Being 
 who takes under his care the good and kind part of the world. 
 Adieu, aU grateful thanks to you and Mr. James. — Prom your 
 affectionate friend, L. Stebne. 
 
 This pathetic death-bed letter is superscribed " Tuesday." 
 It seems to have been written on Tuesday, the I5tli of 
 March, and three days later the writer breathed his last. 
 But two persons, strangers both, were present at his death- 
 bed, and it is by a singularly fortunate chance therefore 
 that one of these — and he not belonging to the class of 
 people who iisually leave behind them published records of 
 the events of their lives— should have preserved for us an 
 account of the closing scene. This, however, is to be found 
 in the Memoirs of John Macdonald, "a cadet of the house 
 of Keppoch," at that time footman to Mr. Crawford, a 
 fashionable friend of Sterne's. His master had taken a 
 house in Clifford Street in the spring of 1768 ; and " about 
 this time," he writes, " Mr. Sterne, the celebrated author, 
 was taken ill at the silk-bag shop in Old Bond Street. 
 He was sometimes called Tristram Shandy and sometimes 
 Yorick, a very great favourite of the gentlemen. One 
 day" — namely, on the aforesaid 18th of March— "my 
 master had company to diimer who were speaking about 
 
124 STEBNE. [chap. 
 
 him, the Duke of Eoxburghe, the Earl of March, the Earl 
 of Ossory, the Duke of Grafton, Mr. Garrick, Mr. Hume, 
 and a Mr. James." Many, if not most, of the party there- 
 fore were personal friends of the man who lay dying in 
 the street hard by, and naturally enough the conversation 
 turned on his condition. " ' John,' said my master," the 
 narrative continues, " 'go and inquire how Mr. Sterne is to- 
 day.' " Macdonald did so ; and, in language which seems 
 to hear the stamp of truth upon it, he thus records the 
 grim story which he had to report to the assembled guests 
 on his return. " I went to Mr. Sterne's lodgings ; the 
 mistress opened the door. I inquired how he did ; she 
 told me to go up to the nurse. I went into the room, and 
 he was just a-dying. I waited ten miuutes ; but in five 
 he said, ' Now it is come.' He put up his hand as if 
 to stop a blow, and died in a minute. The gentlemen 
 were all very sorry, and lamented him very much.'' 
 
 Thus, supported by a hired nurse, and under the curious 
 eyes of a stranger, Sterne breathed his last. His wife 
 and daughter were far away ; the convivial associates " who 
 were all very sorry and lamented him very much," were for 
 the moment represented only by " John ;'' and the shock- 
 ing tradition goes that the alien hands by which the 
 " dying eyes were closed," and the " decent limbs com- 
 posed, " remunerated themselves for the pious office by 
 abstracting the gold sleeve-links from the dead man's 
 wrists. One may hope indeed that this last circumstance 
 is to be rejected as sensational legend, but even without it 
 the story of Sterne's death seems sad enough, no doubt. 
 Yet it is, after all, only by contrast with the excited gaiety 
 of his daily life in London, that his end appears so forlorn. 
 From many a " set of residential chambers," from many 
 of the old and silent inns of the lawyers, departures as 
 
Tin.] LAST DAYS AND DEATH. 125 
 
 lonely, or lonelier, are being made around us in London 
 every year : the departures of men not necessarily kinless 
 or friendless, but living solitary lives, and dying before 
 their friends or kindred can be summoned to their bed- 
 sides. Such deaths no doubt are often contrasted in con- 
 ventional pathos with that of the husband and father 
 surrounded by a weeping wife and children ; but the 
 more sensible among us construct no tragedy out of a 
 mode of exit which must have many times entered as at 
 least a possibility into the previous contemplation of the 
 dying man. And except, as has been said, that Sterne 
 associates himself in our minds with the perpetual excite- 
 ments of lively companionship, there would be nothing 
 particularly melancholy in his end. This is subject, of 
 course, to the assumption that the story of his landlady 
 having stolen the gold sleeve-links from his dead body may 
 be treated as mythical; and, rejecting this story, there 
 seems no good reason for making much ado about the man- 
 ner of his death. Of friends, as distinguished from mere 
 dinner-table acquaintances, he seems to have had but few 
 in London : with the exception of the Jameses, one knows 
 not with certainty of any ; and the Jameses do not appear 
 to have neglected him in the illness which neither they 
 nor he suspected to be his last. Mr. James had paid him 
 a visit but a day or two before the end came : and it may 
 very likely have been upon his report of his friend's con- 
 dition that the message of inquiry was sent from the 
 dinner-table at which he was a guest. No doubt Sterne's 
 flourish in Tristram Sliandy about his preferring to die at 
 an inn, untroubled by the spectacle of " the concern of my 
 friends, and the last services of wiping my brows and 
 smoothing my pillow," was a mere piece of bravado : and 
 the more probably so because the reflection is appropriated 
 
126 STERNE. [chap. 
 
 almost bodily from Bishop Burnet, who quotes it as a fre- 
 quent observation of Archbishop Leighton. But consider- 
 ing that Sterne was in the habit of passing nearly half of 
 each year alone in London lodgings, the realization of his 
 wish does not strike me, I confess, as so dramatically im- 
 pressive a coincidence as it is sometimes represented. 
 
 According, however, to one strange story the dramatic 
 element gives place after Sterne's very burial to melodrama 
 of the darkest kind. The funeral, which pointed after 
 all a far sadder moral than the death, took place on Tues- 
 day, March 22, attended by only two mourners, one of 
 whom is said to have been his publisher Becket, and the 
 other probably Mr. James ; and thus duly neglected by 
 the whole crowd of boon companions, the remains of 
 Yorick were consigned to the " new burying-ground near 
 Tyburn " of the parish of St. George's, Hanover Square. 
 In that now squalid and long-decayed grave-yard, within 
 sight of the Marble Arch and over against the broad ex- 
 panse of Hyde Park, is still to be found a tombstone in- 
 scribed with some inferior lines to the memory of the 
 departed humourist, and with a statement, inaccurate by 
 eight months, of the date of his death, and a year out 
 as to his age. Dying, as has been seen, on the 18th of 
 March, 1768, at the age of fifty-four, he is declared on 
 this slab to have died on the 13th of November, aged fifty- 
 three years. There is more excuse, however, for this want 
 of veracity than sepulcliral inscriptions can usually plead. 
 The stone was erected by the pious hands of " two brother 
 masons," many years, it is said, after the event which it 
 purports to record ; and from the wording of the epitaph 
 which commences, " Near this place lyes the body, &c.," 
 it obviously does not profess to indicate — what doubtless 
 there was no longer any means of tracing — the exact spot 
 
VIII.] LAST DAYS AND DEATH. 127 
 
 in which Sterne's remains were laid. But, wherever the 
 grave really was, the body interred in it, according to the 
 strange story to which I have referred, is no longer there. 
 That story goes : that two days after the burial, on the 
 night of the 24th of March, the corpse was stolen by 
 body-snatchers, and by them disposed of to M. Collignon, 
 Professor of Anatomy at Cambridge ; that the Professor 
 invited a few scientific friends to witness a demonstration, 
 and that among these was one who had been acquainted 
 with Sterne, and who fainted with horror on recognizing 
 in the already partially dissected " subject," the features 
 of his friend. So at least this very gruesome and Poe- 
 like legend runs : but it must be confessed that aU the 
 evidence which Mr. Fitzgerald has been able to collect in 
 its favour is of the very loosest and vaguest description. 
 On the other hand, it is of course only fair to recollect 
 that, in days when respectable surgeons and grave scien- 
 tific Professors had to depend upon the assistance of 
 law-breakers for the prosecution of their studies and 
 teachings, every efibrt would naturally be made to hush 
 up any such unfortunate affair. There is, moreover, 
 independent evidence to the fact that similar desecrations 
 of this grave-yard had of late been very common ; and 
 that at least one previous attempt to check the operations 
 of the " resurrection-men " had been attended with pecu- 
 liarly infelicitous results. In the St. James's Ghronicle 
 for November 26th, 1767, we find it recorded that "the 
 Burying Ground in Oxford Koad, belonging to the Parish 
 of St. George's, Hanover Square, having been lately robbed 
 of several dead bodies, a Watcher was placed there, 
 attended by a large mastiff Dog ; notwithstanding which, 
 on Sunday night last, some Villains found means to steal 
 out another dead Body, and carried off the very Dog." 
 
128 STERNE. [cH. Tin. 
 
 Body-snatchers so adroit and determined as to contrive 
 to make additional profit out of the actual means taken to 
 prevent their depredations, would certainly not have been 
 deterred by any considerations of prudence from attempt- 
 ing the theft of Sterne's corpse. There was no such 
 ceremony about his funeral as would lead them to suppose 
 that the deceased was a person of any importavice, or one 
 whose body could not be stolen without a risk of creating 
 undesirable excitement. On the whole, therefore, it is 
 impossible to reject the body-snatching story as certainly 
 fabulous, though its truth is far from being proved : and 
 though I can scarcely myself subscribe to Mr. Fitzgerald's 
 view, that there is a " grim and lurid Shandyism " about 
 the scene of dissection, yet if others discover an appeal 
 to their sense of humour in the idea of Sterne's body 
 being dissected after death, I see nothing to prevent them 
 from holding that hypothesis as a " pious opinion." 
 
CHAPTEE IX. 
 
 STERNE AS A WRITER — THE CHARGE OP PLAGIARISM — 
 
 DB. ferriar's illustrations. 
 
 Everyday experience suffices to show that the qualities 
 which win enduring fame for hooks and for their 
 authors are not always those to which they owe their 
 first popularity. It may with the utmost probahiUty be 
 affirmed that this was the case with Tristram Shandy 
 and with Sterne. We cannot, it is true, altogether dis- 
 sociate the permanent attractions of the novel from those 
 characteristics of it which have long since ceased to 
 attract at aU : the two are united in a greater or less 
 degree throughout the work ; and this being so, it is of 
 course impossible to prove to demonstration that it was 
 the latter qualities, and not the former, which procured it 
 its immediate vogue. But, as it happens, it is possible to 
 show that what may he called its spurious attractions, varied 
 directly, and its real merits inversely, as its popularity 
 with the public of its day. In the higher qualities of 
 humour, in dramatic vigour, in skilful and subtle delinea- 
 tion of character, the novel showed no deterioration, but 
 in some instances, a marked improvement as it proceeded : 
 yet the second instalment was not more popular, and 
 most of the succeeding ones were distinctly less popidar, 
 than the first. They had gained in many qualities, 
 
130 STEENE. [chap. 
 
 while they had lost in only the single one of novelty : 
 and we may infer, therefore, with approximate certainty, 
 that what " took the town " in the first instance was, 
 that quality of the book which was strangest at its first 
 appearance. The mass of the public read, and enjoyed, 
 or thought they enjoyed, when they were really only 
 puzzled and perplexed. The wUd digressions, the auda- 
 cious impertinences, the burlesque philosophizing, the 
 broad jests, the air of recondite learning, all combined to 
 make the book a nine-days' wonder : and a majority of 
 its readers would probably have been prepared to pro- 
 nounce Tristram Shandy a work as original in scheme 
 and conception as it was eccentric. Some there were, no 
 doubt, who perceived the influence of Eabelais in the 
 incessant digressions and the burlesque of philosophy ; 
 others, it may be, found a reminder of Burton in the 
 parade of learning : and yet a few others, the scattered 
 students of French faoetiaa of the fourteenth and fifteenth 
 centuries, may have read the oroad jests with a feeling 
 that they had " seen something like it before.'' But no 
 single reader, no single critic of the time, appears to have 
 combined the knowledge necessary for tracing these three 
 characteristics of the novel to their respective sources : 
 and none certainly had any suspicion of the extent to 
 which the books and authors from whom they were 
 imitated had been laid under contribution. No one sus- 
 pected that Sterne, not content with borrowing his trick 
 of ran..bling from Eabelais, and his airs of erudition from 
 Burton, and his fooleries from Bruscambille, had coolly 
 transferred whole passages from the second of these 
 writers, not only without acknowledgment, but with the 
 intention, obviously indicated by his mode of procedure, 
 of passing them off as his own. Nay, it was not till full 
 
IX.] THE CHARGE OF PLAGIARISM. 131 
 
 fifty years afterwards that these daring robberies were 
 detected, or at any rate revealed to the world ; and with 
 an irony which Sterne himself would have appreciated, 
 it was reserved for a sincere admirer of the humourist 
 to play the part of detective. In 1812 Dr. John Ferriar 
 published his Illustrations of Sterne, and the prefatory 
 sonnet, in which he solicits pardon for his too minute 
 investigations, is sufficient proof of the curiously reverent 
 spirit in which he set about his damaging task. 
 
 Sterne, for whose sake I plod through miry ways 
 Of antic wit, and quibtling mazes drear. 
 Let not thy shade malignant censure fear, 
 
 If aught of inward mirth my search betrays. 
 
 Long slept that mirth in dust of ancient days, 
 Erewhile to Guise or wanton Valois dear, &o. 
 
 Thus commences Dr. Ferriar's apology, which, however, 
 can hardly be held to cover his offence ; for, as a matter 
 of fact, Sterne's borrowings extend to a good deal besides 
 " mirth ;" and some of the most unscrupulous of these 
 forced loans are raised from passages of a perfectly serious 
 import in the originals from which they are taken. 
 
 Here, however, is the list of authors to whom Dr. 
 Ferriar holds Sterne to have been more or less indebted : 
 Eabelais, Beroalde de VerviUe, Bouchet, BruscambiUe, 
 Scarron, Swift, an author of the name or pseudonym of 
 " Gabriel John," Burton, Bacon, Blount, Montaigne, Bishop 
 Hall. The catalogue is a reasonably long one ; but it is 
 not, of course, to be supposed that Sterne helped: himself 
 equally freely from every author named in it. His obli- 
 gations to some of them are, as Dr. Ferriar admits, but 
 slight. From Eabelais, besides his vagaries of narrative, 
 Sterne took, no doubt, the idea of the Tristra^cedia (by 
 descent from the " education of Pantagruel," through 
 K 2 
 
132 STEENE. [chap. 
 
 " Martinus Soriblerus ") ; but though he has appropriated 
 bodily the passage in which Friar John attributes the 
 beauty of his nose to the pectoral conformation of his 
 nurse, he may be said to have constructively acknowledged 
 the debt in a reference to one of the characters in the 
 Kabelaisian dialogue.' 
 
 Upon Beroalde, again, upon D'Aubigne, and upon 
 Bouchet he has made no direct and verbatim depre- 
 dations. From Bruscambille he seems to have taken 
 little or nothing but the not very valuable idea of the 
 tedious buffoonery of Vol. iii. c. 30, et sqq. : and to 
 Scarron he perhaps owed the incident of the dwarf at 
 the theatre in the Sentimental Journey, an incident which, 
 it must be owned, he vastly improved in the taking. All 
 this, however, does not amount to very much, and it is 
 only when we come to Dr. Ferriar's collations of Tristram 
 Shandy with the Anatomy of Melancholy, that we begin 
 to understand what feats Sterne was capable of as a 
 plagiarist. He must, to begin with, have relied with 
 cynical confidence on the conviction that famous writers 
 are talked about and not read ; for he sets to work with 
 the scissors upon Burton's first page. " Man, the most 
 excellent and noble creature of the world, the principal 
 
 ' " There is no cause but one," said my uncle Toby, " why one 
 man's nose is longer than another, but because that God pleases 
 to have it so." " That is Grangousier'a solution," said my father. 
 " 'Tis He," continued my uncle Toby, " who makes us all, and 
 frames and puts us together in such forms .... and for such 
 ends as is agreeable to his infinite wisdom." — Tristrwm Shandy, 
 vol. iii. 0. 41. " Par ce, repondit Grrangousier, qu'ainsi Dieu I'a 
 voulu, lequel nous fait en cette forme et cette fin selon divin 
 arbitre."— iJafteJois, book i. o. 41. In another place, however 
 (vol. viii. c. 3), Sterne has borrowed a whole passage from this 
 French humourist without any acknowledgment at all. 
 
II.] DE. FEEEIAH'a ILLTJSTEATIONS. 133 
 
 and mighty work of God ; wonder of nature, as Zoroaster 
 calls Mm; audaeis naturm miraculum, tlie marvel of 
 marvels, as Plato; the abridgment and epitome of the 
 world, as Pliny," &c. Thus Burton : and, with a few 
 additions of his own, and the substitution of Aristotle 
 for Plato as the author of one of the descriptions, 
 thus Sterne : " Who made Man with powers which 
 dart him from heaven to earth in a moment, — 
 that great, that most excellent and noble creature of 
 the world, the miracle of nature, as Zoroaster, in his 
 book Trepi ^vo-£(os, called him, — ^the Shekinah of the 
 Divine Presence, as Chrysostom, — the image of God, as 
 Moses, — ^the ray of Divinity, as Plato, — the marvel of 
 marvels, as Aristotle," &c.' And in the same chapter, ia 
 the " Fragment upon Whiskers," Sterne relates how a 
 " decayed kinsman " of the Lady Baussiere " ran begging, 
 bareheaded, on one side of her palfrey, conjuring her by 
 the former bonds of friendship, alliance, consanguinity, 
 &c. — cousin, aunt, sister, mother — for virtue's sake, for 
 yoxiT own sake, for mine, for Christ's sake, remember me ! 
 pity me ! " And again he tells how a " devout, venerable, 
 hoary-headed man " thus beseeched her : " ' I beg for the 
 unfortunate. Good my lady, 'tis for a prison — for an 
 hospital ; 'tis for an old man — a poor man undone by 
 shipwreck, by suretyship, by fire. I call God and all His 
 angels to witness, 'tis to clothe the naked, to feed the 
 hungry, — 'tis to comfort the sick and the broken-hearted.' 
 The Lady Baussiere rode on." ^ 
 
 But now compare this passage from the Anatomy of 
 Melancholy : — 
 
 A poor decayed kinsman of his sets upon him by the way, 
 
 ' Tristrwm Shandy, vol. v. o. 1. ^ Ibid. 
 
131 STERNE. [chap. 
 
 in all his jollity, and runs begging, bareheaded, by him, con- 
 juring him by those former bonds of friendship, alliance, consan- 
 guinity, &c., " Uncle, cousin, brother, father,show some pitj' 
 for Christ's sake, pity a sick man, an old man," &o. ; he cares 
 not — ride on : pretend sickness, inevitable loss of limbs, plead 
 suretyship or shipwreck, fire, common calamities, show thy 
 wants and imperfections, take God and all his angels to wit- 
 ness .... put up a supplication to him in the name of a thou- 
 sand orphans, an hospital, a spittle, a prison, as he goes by ... . 
 ride on. 
 
 Hardly a casual coincidence this. But it is yet more 
 unpleasant to find that the mock philosophic reflections 
 with which Mr. Shandy consoles himself on Bobby's 
 death, in those delightful chapters on that event, are not 
 taken, as they profess to be, direct from the sages of anti- 
 quity, but have been conveyed through, and " conveyed " 
 from, Burton. 
 
 " When Agrippina was told of her son's death," says 
 Sterne, " Tacitus informs us that, not being able to 
 moderate her passions, she abruptly broke off her work." 
 Tacitus does, it is true, inform us of this. But it was 
 undoubtedly Burton {Anat. Mel. 213) who informed Sterne 
 of it. So, too, when Mr. Shandy goes on to remark upon 
 death that " 'Tis an inevitable chance — the first statute 
 in Magna Charta — it is an everlasting Act of Parliament, 
 my dear brother — all must die," the agreement of his 
 views with those of Burton, who had himself said of death, 
 " 'Tis an inevitable chance — the first statute in Magna 
 Charta — an everlasting Act of Parhament — all must die," ° 
 is even textually exact. 
 
 In the next passage, however, the humourist gets the 
 better of the plagiarist, and we are- ready to forgive the 
 theft for the happily comic turn which he gives to it. 
 * Burton : Anat. Mel., p. 269. ' Ihid., p. 215. 
 
IX.] DR. FEBEIAR'S ILLUSTRATIONS. 135 
 
 Buiton : — 
 
 Tully was much grieved for his daughter TuUiola's death at 
 first, until such time that he had confirmed his mind by philoso- 
 phical precepts ; then he began to triumph over fortune and 
 grief, and for her reception into heaven to be much more joyed 
 than before he was troubled for her loss. 
 
 Sterne : — 
 
 When Tully was bereft of his daughter, at first he laid it to 
 his heart, he listened to the voice of nature, and modulated his 
 own unto it. O my Tullia ! my daughter ! my child ! — Still, 
 stUl, still, — 'twas O my Tullia, my Tullia ! Methinks I see my 
 Tullia, I hear my Tullia, I talk with my Tullia. But as soon 
 as he began to look into the stores of philosophy, and consider 
 how many excellent things might he said upon the occasion — 
 nobody on earth can conceive, says the great orator, how happy, 
 how joyful it made me. 
 
 " Kingdoms and provinces, cities and towns," continues 
 Burton, " have their periods, and are consumed." " King- 
 doms and provinces, and town and cities," exclaims Mr. 
 Shandy, throwing the sentence, like the " bom orator " his 
 son considered him, into the rhetorical interrogative, 
 " have they not their periods ? " " Where," he proceeds^ 
 " is Troy, and Mycenae, and Thebes, and Delos and Perse- 
 polis, and Agrigentum ? What is become, brother Toby, of 
 Nineveh and Babylon, of Cyzicum and Mytilene 1 The 
 fairest towns that ever the sun rose upon " (and all, with 
 the curious exception of Mytilene, enumerated by Burton) 
 "are now no more." And then the famous consolatory 
 letter from Servius Sulpicius to Cicero on the death of 
 Tullia is laid imder contribution — Burton's rendering of 
 the Latin being followed almost word for word. " Return- 
 ing out of Asia,'' declaims Mr. Shandy, " when I sailed 
 from .i^ina towards Megara " (when can this have been % 
 
136 STERNE. [chap. 
 
 thought my Uncle Toby), " I began to view the covmtry 
 round about. JE^na, was behind me, Megara before," &c., 
 and so on, down to the final reflection of the philosopher. 
 " Kemember that thou art but a man :" at which point 
 Sterne remarks coolly, " Now, my Uncle Toby knew not 
 that this last paragraph was an extract of Servius Sul- 
 picius's consolatory letter to Tully '' — the tjiing to be 
 really known being that the paragraph was in fact Servius 
 Sulpicius filtered through Burton. Again, and stiU quoting 
 from the Anatomy of Melancholy, Mr. Shandy remarks 
 how "the Thracians wept when a chUd was bom, and 
 feasted and made merry when a man went out of the 
 world ; and with reason." He then goes on to lay pre- 
 datory hands on that fine, sad passage in Lucian, which 
 Burton had quoted before him : " Is it not better not to 
 hunger at all, than to eat 1 not to thirst, than to take physic 
 to cure it ? " (why not " than to drink to satisfy thirst ? " 
 as Lucian wrote, and Burton translated). " Is it not better 
 to be freed from cares and agues, love and melancholy, and 
 the other hot and cold fits of life, than, like a galled 
 traveller who comes weary to his inn, to be bound to begin 
 his journey afresh ?" Then, closing his Burton, and 
 opening his Bacon at the Essay on Death, he adds, 
 " There is no terror, brother Toby, in its (death's) looks, 
 but what it borrows from groans and convulsions and " 
 (here parody forces its way in) " the blowing of noses, and 
 the wiping away of tears with the bottoms of curtaLas in 
 a sick man's bed-room ;" and with one more theft from 
 Burton, after Seneca : " Consider, brother Toby, when we 
 are, death is not ; and when death is, we are not," this 
 extraordinary cento of plagiarisms concludes. 
 
 Not that this is Sterne's only raid upon the quaiat old 
 writer of whom he has here made such free use. Several 
 
IX.] DB. FEEEIAE'S ILLTJSTBATIONS. 137 
 
 other instances of word for word appropriation might be 
 quoted from this and the succeeding volumes of Tristram 
 Shandy. The apostrophe to " blessed health " in c. xxxui. 
 of Yol. V. is taken direct from ^& Anatomy of Melancholy ; 
 so is the phrase, " he has a gourd for his head and a pippin 
 for his heart,'' in c. ix. ; so is the jest about Franciscus 
 Eibera's computation of the amount of cubic space required 
 by the souls of the lost ; so is HUarion the hermit's com- 
 parison of his body with its unruly passions to a kicking 
 ass. And there is a passage in the Sentimental Journey, 
 the " Fragment in the Abderitans," which shows. Dr. 
 Ferriar thinks, though it does not seem to me to show 
 conclusively, that Sterne was unaware that what he was 
 taking from Biirton had been previously taken by Burton 
 from Lucian. 
 
 There is more excuse, in the opiuion of the author of the 
 Illustrations for the literary thefts of the preacher, 
 than for those of the novelist ; since in sermons. Dr. 
 Ferriar observes drily, " the principal matter must consist 
 of repetitions." But it can hardly, I think, be admitted 
 that the kind of " repetitions '' to which Sterne had 
 recourse in the pulpit — or, at any rate, in compositions 
 ostensibly prepared for the pulpit — are quite justifiable. 
 Professor Jebb has pointed out, in a recent volume of this 
 series, that the description of the tortures of the Inquisi- 
 tion, which so deeply moved Corporal Trim ia the famous 
 Sermon on Conscience, was reaUy the work of Bentley ; 
 but Sterne has pilfered more freely from a diviae more 
 famous as a preacher than the great scholar whose words 
 he appropriated on that occasion. " Then shame and grief 
 go with her," he exclaims in his singular sermon on " The 
 Levite and his Concubine ;" " and wherever she seeks a 
 shelter, may the hand of justice shut the door against her !" 
 
138 STERNE. [chap. 
 
 an exclamation which is taken, as no doubt indeed was the 
 whole suggestion of the somewhat strange subject, from 
 the Gontemplations of Bishop Hall. And so, again, we 
 find in Sterne's sermon the following : — 
 
 Mercy well becomes the heart of all Thy creatm'es ! but most 
 of Thy servant, a Levite, who oifers up so many daily sacrifices 
 to Thee for the transgressions of Thy people. But to little pur- 
 pose, he would add, have I served at Thy altai', where my busi- 
 ness was to sue for mercy, had I not learned to practise it. 
 
 And in Hall's Gontemplations the following : — 
 
 Mercy becomes well the heart of any man, but most of a 
 Levite. He that had helped to offer so many sacrifices to God 
 for the multitude of every Israelite's sins, saw how proportionable 
 it was that man should not hold one sin unpardonable. He 
 had served at the altar to no purpose, if he (whose trade was to 
 sue for mercy) had not at all learned to practise it. 
 
 Sterne's twelfth sermon, on the Forgiveness of Injuries, 
 is merely a diluted commentary on the conclusion of 
 Hall's " Contemplation of Joseph." In the sixteenth 
 sermon, the one on Shimei, we find : — 
 
 There is no small degree of malicious craft in fixing upon a 
 season to give a mark of enmity and ill wiU : a word, a look, 
 which at one time would make no impression, at another time 
 wounds the heart, and, like a shaft flying with the wind, pierces 
 deep, which, with its own natural force, would scarce have 
 reached the object aimed at. 
 
 This, it is evident, is but slightly altered, and by no 
 means for the better, from the more terse and vigorous 
 language of the bishop : — 
 
 There is no small cruelty in the picking out of a time 
 for mischief: that word would scarce gall at one season 
 
IX.] DK. FEBEIAR'S ILLUSTEATIONS. 139 
 
 whicli at another killeth. The same shaft flying with the wind 
 pierces deep, which against it can hardly find strength to stick 
 upright. 
 
 But enough, of these pieces de conviction. Indict- 
 ments for plagiarism are often too hastily laid : but there 
 can be no doubt, I should imagine, in the mind of any 
 reasonable being upon the evidence here cited, that the 
 offence in this case is clearly proved. Nor, I think, can 
 there be much question as to its moral complexion. For 
 the pilferings from Bishop Hall, at any rate, no shadow 
 of excuse can, so far as I can see, be alleged. Sterne could 
 not possibly plead any better justification for borrowing 
 Hall's thoughts and phrases and passing them off upon 
 his hearers or readers as original, than he could plead for 
 claiming the authorship of one of the bishop's benevolent 
 actions and representing himself to the world as the 
 doer of the good deed. In the actual as ia the hypo- 
 thetical case there is a dishonest appropriation by one 
 maji of the credit — in the former case the intellectual, in 
 the latter the moral credit — belonging to another : the 
 offence in the actual case being aggravated by the fact 
 that it involves a fraud upon the purchaser of the ser- 
 mon, who pays money for what he may already have in 
 his library. The plagiarisms from Burton stand upon a 
 slightly different, though not I think a much more de- 
 fensible footing. For ia this case it has been urged, that 
 Sterne, being desirous of satiriziug pedantry, was justified 
 in resorting to the actually existent writings of an antique 
 pedant of real life ; and that since Mr. Shandy could not 
 be made to talk more like himself than Burton talked 
 like Mm, it was artistically lawful to put Burton's exact 
 words into Mr. Shandy's mouth. It makes a difference, 
 it may be said, that Sterne is not here speaking in his 
 
140 STBKNE. [chap. 
 
 own person, as he is in his Sermons, hut in the person of 
 one of his characters. This casuistry, however, does not 
 seem to me to be sound. Even as regards the passages 
 from ancient authors, which, whUe quoting them fl?om 
 Burton, he tacitly represents to his readers as taken from 
 his own stores of knowledge, the excuse is hardly 
 sufficient ; while as regards the original reflections of the 
 author of the Anatomy of Melancholy it obviously fails 
 to apply at all. And ia any case there could be no 
 necessity for the omission to acknowledge the debt. 
 Even admitting that no more characteristic reflections 
 could have been composed for Mr. Shandy than were 
 actually to be found in Burton, art is not so exacting a 
 mistress as to compel the artist to plagiarize against his 
 will. A scrupulous writer, being also as ingenious as 
 Sterne, coidd have found some means of indicating the 
 source from which he was borrowing without destroying 
 the dramatic illusion of the scene. 
 
 But it seems clear enough that Sterne himself was 
 troubled by no conscientious qualms on this subject. 
 Perhaps the most extraordinary instance of literary 
 effrontery which was ever met with is the passage in 
 Vol. V. c. 1, which even that seasoned detective Dr. 
 Ferriar is startled into pronouncing " singular.'' Burton 
 had complained that writers were like apothecaries, who 
 " make new mixtures every day," by " pouring out of one 
 vessel into another." ""We weave," he said, "the same 
 web still, twist the same rope again and again." And 
 Sterne incolumi gravitate asks : " Shall we for ever make 
 new books as apothecaries make new mixtures,by pouring 
 only out of one vessel into another 1 Are we for ever 
 to be twisting and untwisting the same rope, for ever on 
 the same track, for ever at the same paoe ? " And this he 
 
IX.] DE. FEREIAR'S ILLUSTRATIONS. 141 
 
 writes, with, tlie scissors actually opened in his hand for 
 the almost hodily abstraction of the passage beginning, 
 "Man, the most excellent and noble creature of the 
 world ! " Surely this denunciation of plagiarism by a 
 plagiarist on the point of setting to work could only have 
 been written by a man who looked upon plagiarism as a 
 good joke. 
 
 Apart however from the moralities of the matter, it 
 must in fairness be admitted that in most cases Sterne 
 is no servile copyist. He appropriates other men's 
 thoughts and phrases, and with it of course the credit 
 for the wit, the truth, the vigour or the learning which 
 characterizes them ; but he is seldom found, in Tristram 
 Shandy at any rate, to have transferred them to his own 
 pages out of a mere indolent inclination to save himseK 
 the trouble of composition. He takes them less as sub- 
 stitutes than as groundwork for his own invention, — as 
 so much material for his own inventive powers to work 
 upon ; and those powers do generally work upon them 
 with conspicuous skill of elaboration. The series of 
 cuttings, for instance, which he makes from Burton, on 
 the occasion of Bobby Shandy's death, are woven into 
 the main tissue of the dialogue with remarkable in- 
 genuity and naturalness ; and the bright strands of his 
 own unborrowed humour fly flashing across the fabric at 
 every transit of the shuttle. Or to change the metaphor, 
 we may say that ia almost every instance the jewels that 
 so glitter in their stolen setting were cut and set by 
 Sterne himself. Let us allow that the most expert of 
 lapidaries is not justified in stealing his settings ; but let 
 us still not forget that the jewels are his, or permit our 
 disapproval of his laxity of principle to make us unjust 
 to his consummate skill 
 
CHAPTER X. 
 
 STTLB AND GENERAL CHABACTERISTICS — HUMOUR AND 
 SENTIMENT. 
 
 To talk of " tlie style " of Sterne is almost to play one 
 of those tricks witli language of whicli he himself was so 
 fond. For there is hardly any definition of the word 
 which can make it possible to describe him as having any 
 style at all. It is not only that he manifestly recognized 
 no external canons whereto to conform the expression of 
 his thoughts, but he had apparently no inclination to 
 invent and observe, except indeed in the most negative 
 of senses, any style of his own. The " style of Sterne,'' 
 in short, is as though one should say "the form of Proteus." 
 He was determined to be uniformly eccentric, regularly 
 irregular, and that was all. His digressions, his asides, 
 and his fooleries in. general, would of course have in any 
 case necessitated a certain general jerkiness of manner ; 
 but this need hardly have extended itself habitually to 
 the structure of individual sentences, and as a matter of 
 fact he can at times write, as he does for the most part in 
 his Sermons, in a style which is not the less vigorous for 
 being fairly correct. But as a rule his mode of expressing 
 himself is destitute of any pretensions to precision ; and 
 in many instances it is a perfect marvel of literary slip- 
 shod. Nor is there any ground for believing that the 
 
CH. X.] STYLE AND GENERAL CHAEACTEEISTICS. 143 
 
 slovenliness -was invariably intentional. Sterne's truly 
 hideous French — French at which even Stratford-atte- 
 Bowe would have stood aghast — is in itself sufficient 
 evidence of a natural insensibility to grammatical ac- 
 curacy. Here there can be no suspicion of designed 
 defiance of rules : and more than one solecism of rather a 
 serious kind in his use of English words and phrases 
 affords confirmatory testimony to the same point. His 
 punctuation is fearful and wonderful, even for an age in 
 which the rationale of punctuation was more imperfectly 
 understood than it is at present ; and this, though an 
 apparently sHght matter, is not without value as an indi- 
 cation of ways of thoiight. But if we can hardly de- 
 scribe Sterne's style as being in the literary sense a style 
 at all, it has a very distinct colloquial character of its 
 own, and as such it is nearly as much deserving of praise 
 as from the literary point of view it is open to exception. 
 Chaotic as it is in the syntactical sense, it is a perfectly 
 clear vehicle for the conveyance of thought : we are as 
 rarely at a loss for the meaning of one of Sterne's sen- 
 tences, as we are, for very different reasons, for the 
 meaning of one of Macaulay's. And his language is so full 
 of life and colour, his tone so animated and vivacious, 
 that we forget we are reading and not listening, and we 
 are as little disposed to be exacting in respect to form as 
 though we were listeners in actual fact. Sterne's manner, 
 in short, may be that of a bad and careless writer, but it 
 is the manner of a first-rate talker ; and this of course 
 enhances rather than detracts from the unwearying charm 
 of his wit and humour. 
 
 To attempt a precise and final distinction between 
 these two last-named qualities in Sterne or any one else 
 would be no very hopeful task perhaps ; but those who 
 
144 STEENE. [chap. 
 
 have a keen peioeption of either find no great difficulty in 
 discriminating, as a matter of feeling, between the two. 
 And what is true of the qualities themselves is true, 
 mutatis mutandis, of the men by whom they have been 
 most conspicuously displayed. Some wits have been 
 humourists also ; nearly all humourists have been also wits ; 
 yet the two fall on the whole into tolerably weU-marked 
 classes, and the ordinary uncritical judgment would pro- 
 bably enable most men to state with sufficient certainty 
 the class to which each famous name iti the world's 
 literature belongs. Aristophanes, Shakespeare, Cervantes, 
 Moliere, Swift, Fielding, Lamb, Eichter, Carlyle : 
 widely as these writers differ from each other in style and 
 genius, the least skilled reader would hardly need to be 
 told that the list which includes them all is a catalogue of 
 humourists. And Cicero, Lucian, Pascal, Voltaire, Congreve, 
 Pope, Sheridan, Courier, Sydney Smith— this, I suppose, 
 would be recognized at once as an enumeration of wits. 
 Some of these humourists, like Pielding, like Eichter, 
 like Carlyle, are always, or almost always, humourists 
 alone. Some of these wits, like Pascal, like Pope, like 
 Courier, are wits with no or but slight admixture of 
 humour; and in the classification of these there is of 
 course no difficulty at all. But even with the wits who 
 very often give us humour also, and with the humourists 
 who as often delight us with their wit, we seldom find 
 ourselves in any doubt as to the real and more essential 
 affinities of each. It is not by the wit which he has 
 infused into his talk, so much as by the humour with 
 which he has delineated the character, that Shakespeare 
 has given his Palstaff an abiding place in our memories. 
 It is not the repartees of Benedick and Beatrice, but the 
 immortal fatuity of Dogberry that the name of Much 
 
X.] STYLE AND GENERAL CHAEACTERISTICS. 145 
 
 Ado about Nothing recalls. None of tlie verbal quips of 
 Touclistone tickle us like his exquisite patronage of 
 William and the fascination which he exercises over the 
 melancholy Jacques. And it is the same throughout all 
 Shakespeare. It is of the humours of Bottom and Lance, 
 and Shallow, and Sly, and Aguecheek ; it is of the 
 laughter that treads upon the heels of horror and pity 
 and awe, as we listen to the Porter in Macbeth, to the 
 Grave-digger ia Hamlet, to the Fool in Lear — it is of 
 these that we think when we think of Shakespeare in 
 any other but his purely poetic mood. Whenever, that is 
 to say, we think of him as anything but a poet, we 
 think of him not as a wit, but as a humourist. So, too, it 
 is not the dagger-thrusts of the Urapier's Letters, but the 
 broad ridicule of the Voyage to Laputa, the savage irony 
 of the Voyage to the Houyhnhnms, that we associate with 
 the name of Swift. And conversely, it is the cold epi- 
 grammatic glitter of Congreve's dialogue, the fizz and 
 ■crackle of the fireworks which Sheridan serves out with 
 undiscriminating hand to the most insignificant of his 
 characters, — it is this which stamps the work of these 
 dramatists with characteristics far more marked than any 
 which belong to them in right of' humorous portraiture 
 of human foibles or ingenious invention of comic 
 incident. 
 
 The place of Sterne is unmistakably among writers of 
 the former class. It is by his humour — ^his humour of 
 character, his dramatic as distinct from his critical de- 
 scriptive personal humour, though of corase he possesses 
 this also as all humourists must, that he lives and wiU live. 
 In Tristram Shandy as in the Sermons there is a suffi- 
 ciency of wit, and considerably more than a sufficiency of 
 humorous reflection, inuendo and persiflage ; but it is the 
 
 L 
 
146 STEENE. [chap. 
 
 actors in Ms almost plotless drama who have established 
 their creator ia his niche in the Temple of Fame. "We 
 cannot indeed he sure that what has given him his hold 
 upon posterity is what gave him his popularity with his 
 contemporaries. On the contrary, it is perhaps more pro- 
 bable that he owed his first success with the public of his 
 day to those eccentricities which are for us a little too 
 consciously eccentric — those artifices which fail a little too 
 conspicuously in the ars celandi artem. But however 
 these tricks may have pleased in days when such tricks 
 were new, they much more often weary than divert us 
 now ; and I suspect that many a man whose delight in 
 the Corporal and his master, ill Bridget and her mistress, 
 is as fresh as ever, declines to accompany their creator in 
 those perpetual digressions into nonsense or semi- 
 nonsense the fashion of which Sterne borrowed from 
 Eabelais without Eabelais's excuse for adopting it. To' 
 us of this day the real charm and distinction of the book 
 is due to the marvellous combination of vigour and 
 subtlety in its portrayal of character, and in the purity 
 and delicacy of its humour. Those last two apparently 
 paradoxical substantives are chosen advisedly, and em- 
 ployed as the most convenient way of introducing that 
 disagreeable question which no commentator on Sterne 
 can possibly shirk, but which every admirer of Sterne 
 must approach with reluctance. There is of course 
 a sense in which Sterne's humour — if indeed we may 
 bestow that name on the form of jocularity to which 
 I refer — is the very reverse of pure and delicate : a sense 
 in which it is impure and indelicate in the highest 
 degree. On this it is necessary, however briefly, to 
 touch ; and to the weighty and many-counted indictment 
 which may be framed against Sterne on this head, there 
 
X.] HUMOUR AND SENTIMENT. 147 
 
 is of course but one possible plea — the plea of guilty. 
 Nay, the plea must go further than a mere admis- 
 sion of the offence ; it must include an admission of 
 the worst motive, the worst spirit as animating the 
 offender. It is not necessary to my purpose, nor doubt- 
 less congenial to the taste of the reader, that I should 
 enter upon any critical analysis of this quality in the 
 author's work, or compare him in. this respect with the 
 two other great humourists who have been the worst 
 offenders in the same way. In one of those highly in- 
 teresting criticisms of English literature which, even when 
 they most conspicuously miss the mark, are so instructive 
 to Englishmen, M. Taine has instituted an .elaborate com- 
 parison, very much, I need hardly say; to the advantage 
 of the latter, between the indecency of Swift and that of 
 Eabelais — that " good giant,'' as his countryman calls 
 him, "who rolls himself joyously about on his dunghill, 
 thinking no evil." And no doubt the world of literary 
 moralists will always be divided upon the question — one 
 mainly of national temperament — whether mere animal 
 spirits or serious satiric purpose is the best justification 
 for offences against cleanliness. It is of course only the 
 former theory, if either, which could possibly avail 
 Sterne, and it would need an unpleasantly minute 
 analysis of this characteristic in his writings to ascertain 
 how far M. Taine's eloquent defence of Eabelais pould 
 be made applicable to his case. But the inquiry, one is- 
 glad to think, is as unnecessary as it would be disagreeable ; 
 for, unfortunately for Sterne, he must be condemned on a 
 quantitative comparison of indecency, whatever may be 
 his fate when compared with these other two great writers 
 as regards the quality of their respective transgressions. 
 There can be no denying, I mean, that Sterne is of all 
 L 2 
 
148 STERNE. [chap. 
 
 writers the most permeated and penetrated ■with impiirity 
 of thought and suggestion ; that in no other writer is its 
 latent presence more constantly .felt, even if there be any 
 in whom it is more often openly obtruded. The unclean 
 spirit pursues him everywhere, disfiguring his scenes of 
 humour, demoralizing his passages of serious reflection, 
 debasing even his sentimental interludes. His coarse- 
 ness is very often as great a blot on his art as on his 
 morality — a thing which can very rarely be said of either 
 Swift or Eabelais ; and it is sometimes so distinctly fatal 
 a blemish from the purely literary point of view, that 
 one is amazed at the critical faculty which could have 
 tolerated its presence. 
 
 But when all this has been said of Sterne's humour, it 
 still remains true that, in another sense of the words 
 " purity " and " delicacy " he possesses humour more pure 
 and delicate than perhaps any other writer in the world 
 can show. For if that humour is the purest and most 
 delicate which is the freest from any admixture of farce, 
 and produces its effects with the lightest touch, and the 
 least obligations to ridiculous incident, or what may be 
 called the " physical grotesque,'' in any shape- — then one 
 can point to passages from Sterne's pen which, for fulfilment 
 of these conditions, it would be difficult to match elsewhere. 
 Strange as it may seem, to say this of the literary Gilray 
 who drew the portrait of Dr. Slop, and of the literary 
 Grimaldi who tormented Phutatorius with the hot chest- 
 nut, it is nevertheless the fact, that scene after scene 
 may be cited from Tristram Sliandy, and those the most 
 delightful in th^ book, which are not only free from even 
 the momentary intrusion of either the clown or the 
 caricaturist, but even from the presence of " comic pro- 
 perties " (as actors would call them) of any kind : scenes 
 
X.] , HUMOUR AND SENTIMENT. 149 
 
 of whicli the external setting is of the simplest possible 
 character, while the humour is of that deepest and most 
 penetrative kind which springs from the eternal incon- 
 gruities of human nature, the ever-recurring cross-purposes 
 of human lives. 
 
 Carlyle classes Sterne with Cervantes among the great 
 humourists of the world ; and from one, and that the 
 most important point of view, the praise is not extrava- 
 gant. By no other writer besides Sterne, perhaps, since 
 the days of the Spanish humourist, have the vast incon- 
 gruities of human character been set forth with so masterly 
 a hand. It is in virtue of the new insight which his 
 humour opens to us of the immensity and variety of man's 
 life that Cervantes makes us feel that he is great : not 
 deUghtful merely ; not even eternally dehghtful only, and 
 secure of immortahty through the perennial human need 
 of joy — but great, but immortal in right of that which 
 makes Shakespeare and the Greek dramatists immortal, 
 namely, the power, not alone over the pleasure-loving 
 part of man's nature, but over that equally universal, but 
 more enduring element in it, his emotions of wonder and 
 of awe. It is to this greater power — this control over 
 a greater instinct than the human love of joy, that 
 Cervantes owes his greatness : and it will be found, 
 though it may seem at first a hard saying, that Sterne 
 shares this power with Cervantes. To pass from Quixote 
 and Sancho, to Walter and Toby Shandy involves of 
 course a startling change of dramatic key — a notable 
 lowering of dramatic tone. It is almost hke passing from 
 poetry to prose ; it is certainly passing from the poetic in 
 spirit and surroundings, to the profoundly prosaic in 
 fundamental conception and in every individual detail. 
 But those who do not allow accidental and external 
 
150 STERNE. [chap. 
 
 dissimilarities to obscure for them the inward and essential 
 resemblances of things, must often, I think, have expe- 
 rienced from one of the Shandy dialogues the same sort 
 of impression that they derive from some of the most 
 nohly humorous colloquies betvfeen the knight and his 
 squire, and must have heen conscious through all outvi^ard 
 differences of key and tone of a common element in each. 
 It is of course a resemblance of relations, and not of 
 personalities : for though there is something of the Knight 
 of La Mancha in Mr. Shandy, there is nothing of Sancho 
 about his brother. But the serio-comic game of cross- 
 purposes is the same between both couples ; and what 
 one may call the irony of human intercourse, is equally 
 profound, and pointed with equal subtlety, in each. In 
 the Spanish romance of course it is not likely to be 
 missed. It is enough in itself that the deranged brain 
 which takes windmills for giants, and carriers for knights, 
 and Eosinante for a Bucephalus, has fixed upon Sancho 
 Panza — the crowning proof of its mania — as the fitting 
 squire of a knight errant ! To him — to this compound of 
 somnolence, shrewdness, and good nature — to this creature 
 with no more tinctu.re of romantic idealism than a wine- 
 skin, the knight addresses, without misgiving, his lofty 
 dissertations on the glories and the duties of chivalry — 
 the squire responding after his fashion. And thus these 
 two hold converse, contentedly incomprehensible to each 
 other, and with no suspicion that they are as incapable 
 of interchanging ideas as the inhabitants of two different 
 planets. With what heart-stirring mirth, and yet with 
 what strangely deeper feeling of the infinite variety of 
 human nature, do we follow their converse throughout ! 
 Yet Quixote and Sancho are not more life-like and 
 human, nor nearer together at one point, and farther 
 
S..J HUMOUE AND SENTIMENT. 151 
 
 apart at another, than are "Walter Shandy and his brother. 
 The squat little Spanish peasant is not more gloriouslj' 
 incapable of following the chivalric vagaries of his master 
 than the simple soldier is of grasping the philosophic 
 •crotchets of his brother. Both couples are in sympathetic 
 contact absolute and complete at one point : at another 
 they are " poles asunder" both of them. And in both 
 contrasts there is that sense of futility and failure, of 
 alienation and misunderstanding — that element of under- 
 lying pathos in short, which so .strangely gives its keenest 
 salt to humour. In both alike there is the same sugges- 
 tion of the Infinite of disparity bounding the finite of 
 resemblance — of the Incommensurable in man and nature 
 Iseside which all minor imifomiities sink into insig- 
 nificance. 
 
 The pathetic element which underlies and deepens the 
 liumour is of course produced in the two cases in two 
 exactly opposite ways. In both cases it is a picture of 
 human simplicity — of a noble and artless nature out of 
 harmony with its surroundings, which moves us ; but 
 whereas in the Spanish romance the simplicity is that of 
 the incompris, in the English novel it is that of the man 
 with whom the incompris consorts. If there is pathos as 
 well as humour, and deepening the humour, m the figure 
 of the distraught knight-errant talking so hopelessly over 
 the head of his attached squire's morality, so too there 
 is pathos, giving depth to the humour of the eccentric 
 philosopher, shooting so hopelessly wide of the intellectual 
 appreciation of the most affectionate of brothers. One's 
 sympathy perhaps is even more strongly appealed to in the 
 latter than in the former case, because the effort of the 
 good Captain to understand is far greater than that of 
 the Don to make himself understood, and the concern of 
 
152 STERNE. [chap. 
 
 lie former at Lis failure is proportionately more marked 
 than that of the latter at liis. And the general rapport 
 between one of the two ill-assorted pairs is much closer 
 than that of the other. It is, indeed, the tantahzing 
 approach to a mutual understanding, which gives so much 
 more subtle a zest to the humour of the relations between 
 the two brothers Shandy than to that which arises out of 
 the relations between the philosopher and his wife. The 
 broad comedy of the dialogues between Mr. and Mrs. 
 Shandy is irresistible in its way : but it is broad comedy. 
 The philosopher knows that his wife does not comprehend 
 him : she knows that she never will ; and neither of 
 them much cares. The husband snubs her openly for 
 her mental defects ; and she with perfect placidity accepts 
 his rebukes. " Master," as he once complains, " of one 
 of the finest chains of reasoning in the world, he is unable 
 for the soul of him to get a single link of it into the head 
 of his wife ;" but we never hear him lamenting in this 
 serio-comic fashion over his brother's inability to follow 
 his processes of reasoning. That is too serious a matter 
 with both of them ; their mutual desire to share each 
 other's ideas and tastes, is too strong : and each time that 
 the philosopher shows his impatience with the soldier's 
 fortification-hobby, or the soldier breaks his honest shins 
 over one of the philosopher's crotchets, the regret and 
 remorse on either side is equally acute and sincere. It 
 must be admitted, however, that Captain Shandy is the 
 one who the more frequently subjects himself to pangs of 
 this sort, and who is the more innocent sufferer of the 
 two. 
 
 From the broad and deep humour of this central 
 conception of contrast, flow as from a head-water innu- 
 merable rills of comedy, through many and many a 
 
X.] HUMODR AND SENTIMENT. 153 
 
 page of dialogue; but not, of course, from this source 
 alone. Uncle Toby- is ever deligbtful, even when his 
 brother is not near him as his foil : the faithful corporal 
 brings out another side of his character, upon which we 
 linger with equal pleasure of contemplation : the allure- 
 ments of the Widow Wadman reveal him to us in yet 
 another — but always in a captivating aspect. There is 
 too, one need hardly say, an abundance of humour, of a 
 high, though not the highest order, in the minor charac- 
 ters of the story — in Mrs. Shandy, in the fascinating 
 widow, and even, under the coarse lines of the physical 
 caricature, in the keen little Catholic, Slop himself. But 
 it is in Toby Shandy alone that humour reaches that 
 supreme level which it is only capable of attaining when 
 the collision of contrasted qualities in a human character 
 produce a corresponding conflict of the emotions of mirth 
 and tenderness in the minds of those who contemplate it. 
 
 This, however, belongs more rightfully to the considera- 
 tion of the creative and dramatic element in Sterne's 
 genius ; and an earlier place in the analysis is claimed by 
 that power over the emotion of pity upon which Sterne, 
 beyond question, prided hicoself more highly than upon 
 any other of his gifts. He preferred, we can plainly see, 
 to think of himself, not as the great humourist, but as the 
 great sentimentalist : and though the word " sentiment " 
 had something even in Jus day of the depreciatory mean- 
 ing which distinguishes it nowadays from " pathos,'' there 
 can be little doubt that the thing appeared to Steme to 
 be on the whole, and both in life and literature, rather 
 admirable than the reverse. 
 
 "What then were his notions of true " sentiment " in 
 literature 1 We have seen elsewhere that he repeats, 
 it would appear unconsciously, and commends the canon 
 
154 STEENE. [ciiAP. 
 
 Avhicli Horace propounds to the tragic poet, in the 
 words, — 
 
 Si vis me flere, dolendum 
 Primum ipsi tibi : tunc tna me infortunia Isedent. 
 
 And that canon is sound enough, no doubt, in the sense 
 in which it was meant, and ia its relation to the person to 
 whom it was addressed. A tragic drama, peopled with 
 heroes who set forth their woes in frigid and unim- 
 passioned verse, will unquestionably leave its audience as 
 cold as itself. Nor is this true of drama alone. All poeti-y 
 indeed, whether dramatic or other, presupposes a sympa- 
 thetic unity of emotion between the poet and those whom 
 he addresses ; and to this extent it is obviously true that 
 he must feel before they can. Horace, who was (what 
 every literary critic is not) a man of the world and an. 
 observer of human nature, did not of course mean that 
 this capacity for feeling was all, or even the chief part of 
 the poetic faculty. He must have seen many an "intense" 
 young Eoman make that pathetic error of the young in 
 all countries and of all periods — ^the error of mistaking the 
 capacity of emotion for the gift of expression. He did, how- 
 jcver, undoubtedly mean that a poet's power of affecting 
 others presupposes passion in himself ; and as regards the 
 poet he was right. But his criticism takes no account 
 whatever of one form of appeal to the emotions which has 
 been brought by later art to a high pitch of perfection, 
 but with which the personal feeling of the artist has not 
 much more to do than the " passions " of an auctioneer's 
 clerk have to do with the compilation of his inventory. A 
 poet himself, Horace wrote for poets : to him the pathetic 
 implied the ideal, the imaginative, the rhetorical ; he lived 
 before the age of Eealism and the Eealists, and would 
 scarcely have comprehended either the men or the method 
 
X.J HUMOUR AND SENTIMENT. 155 
 
 if he could have come across them. Had he done so, how- 
 ever, he would have been astonished to find his canon 
 reversed, and to have perceived that the primary condition 
 of the Eealist's success, and the distinctive note of those 
 writers who have pressed genius into the service of Eealism, 
 is that they do not share — that they are unalterably and 
 ostentatiously free from — the emotions to which they 
 appeal in their readers.- A fortunate accident has enabled 
 ITS to compare the treatment which the world's greatest 
 tragic poet and its greatest master of realistic tragedy have 
 respectively applied to virtually the same subject ; and 
 the two methods are never likely to be again so impres- 
 sively contrasted as in King Lear and Le Pere Goriot. 
 But, in truth, it must be impossible for any one who feels 
 Balzac's power not to feel also how it is heightened by 
 Balzac's absolute calm— a calm entirely different from that 
 stem composure which was merely a point of style and 
 not an attitude of the heart with the old Greek trage- 
 dians — a cahn which, unlike theirs, insulates, so to speak, 
 and is intended to insulate the writer, to the end that his 
 individuality, of which only the electric current of sym- 
 pathy ever makes a reader conscious, may disappear, and 
 the characters of the drama stand forth the more life-like 
 from the complete concealment of the hand that moves 
 them. 
 
 Of this kind of art Horace, as has been said, knew 
 nothing, and his canon only applies to it by the rule 
 of contraries. Undoubtedly, and in spite of the marvels 
 which one great genius has wrought with it, it is a form 
 lower than the poetic — essentially a prosaic, and in many 
 or most hands an unimaginative form of art ; but for this 
 very reason, that it demands nothing of its average prac- 
 titioner but a keen eye for facts great and small, and 
 
156 STERNE. [chap. 
 
 a knack of graphically recording tiiem, it has become a 
 far more commonly and successfully cultivated form of 
 art than any other. As to the question who are its 
 practitioners, it would, of course, be the merest dog- 
 matism to commit oneself to any attempt at rigid classi- 
 fication in such a matter. There are few if any writers 
 who can be described without qualification either as 
 Realists or as Idealists. Nearly all of them, probably, are 
 Realists at one moment and in one mood, and Idealists 
 at other moments and in other moods. All that need be 
 insisted on is that the methods of the two forms of art 
 are essentially distinct, and that artistic failure must result 
 from any atteqipt to combine them ; for, whereas the 
 primary condition of success in the one case is that the 
 reader should feel the sympathetic presence of the writer, 
 the primary condition of success in the other is that the 
 writer should efface .himself from the reader's consciousness 
 altogether. And it is, I think, the defiance of these con- 
 ditions which explains why so much of Sterne's deli- 
 berately pathetic writing is, from the artistic point of view, 
 a failure. It is this which makes one feel so much of it 
 to be strained and unnatural, and which brings it to pass 
 that some of his most ambitious efforts leave the reader 
 indifferent, or even now and then contemptuous. In 
 those passages of pathos in which the effect is distinctly 
 sought by realistic means, Sterne is perpetually ignoring 
 the " self-denying ordinance " of his adopted method — 
 perpetually obtruding his own individuality, and begging 
 us, as it were, to turn from the picture to the artist, to 
 cease gazing for a moment at his touching creation, and 
 to admire the fine feeUng, the exquisitely sympathetic 
 nature of the man who created it. No doubt, as we must 
 in fairness remember, it was part of his " humour " — in 
 
X.] HUMOUR AND SENTIMENT. 167 
 
 Ancient Pistol's sense of the word — to do this ; it is true, 
 no doubt (and a truth which Sterne's most famous critic 
 was too prone to ignore) that his sentiment is not always 
 meant for serious ; ' nay, the very word " sentimental " 
 itself, though in Sterne's day, of course, it had acquired 
 but a part of its present disparaging signiiicance, is a sufl&- 
 cient proof of that. But there are, nevertheless, plenty 
 of passages, both in Tristram Shandy and the Sentimental 
 Journey, where the intention is wholly and unmixedly 
 pathetic — where the smile is not for a moment meant 
 to compete with the tear, which are nevertheless, it must 
 be owned, complete failures, and failures traceable with 
 much certainty, or so it seems to me, to the artistic error 
 above-mentioned. 
 
 In one famous case, indeed, the failure can hardly be 
 described as other than ludicrous, The figure of the dis- 
 traught Maria of Moulines is tenderly drawn ; the acces- 
 sories of the picture — her goat, her dog, her pipe, her 
 song to the Virgin — though a little theatrical perhaps, 
 are skilfully touched in ; and so long as the Sentimental 
 Traveller keeps our attention fixed upon her and them 
 the scene prospers well enough. But after having 
 bidden us duly note how " the tears trickled down her 
 
 ' Surely it was not so meant, for instance, in the passage about 
 the (Usohligeante, which had been " standing so many months 
 nnpitied in the comer of Monaien»- Desseiu's coach-yard. Much, 
 indeed, was not to be said for it, but something might ; and when 
 a few words will rescue Misery out of her distress, I hate the man 
 who can be a churl of them." " Does anybody," asks Thackeray 
 in strangely matter-of-fact fashion, " believe that this is a real 
 sentiment ? that this luxury of generosity, this gallant rescue of 
 Misery — out of an old cab — is genuine feeling ? " Nobody, we 
 should say. But, on the other hand, does anybody — or did any- 
 body before Thackeray — suggest that it was meant to pass for 
 genuine feeling ? Is it not an obvious piece of mock pathetic ? 
 
158 STEEXE. £chap. 
 
 cheeks," th.e Traveller continues : " I sat down close 
 by her, and Maria let me wipe them away as they 
 fell, with my handkerchief. I then steeped it in my 
 o'^vn — and then in hers — and then in mine — and then 
 I wiped hers again ; and as I did it, I felt such un- 
 describahle emotions within me as I am sure could not 
 be accoimted for from any combinations of matter and 
 motion." The reader of this may well ask himself in 
 wonderment whether he is really expected to make a 
 third in the lachrymose group. We look at the passage 
 again, and more carefully, to see if after all we may not 
 be intended to laugh, and not to cry at it ; but on finding, 
 as clearly appears, that we actually are intended to cry at 
 it, the temptation to laugh becomes almost irresistible. 
 We proceed, however, to the account of Maria's wanderings 
 to Eome and back, and we come to the pretty passage 
 which follows : — 
 
 How she had borne it, and how she had got supported, she 
 could not tell ; but God tempers the winds, said Maria, to the 
 shorn lamb. Shorn indeed ! and to the quick, said I ; and 
 wast thou in my own land, where I have a cottage, I would take 
 thee to it, and shelter thee ; thou shouldst eat of my own bread 
 and drink of my own cup ; I would be kind to thy Sylvio ; in 
 aU thy weaknesses and wanderings I would seek after thee, and 
 bring thee back. When the sun went down I would say my 
 prayers; and when I had done thou shouldst play thy evening- 
 song upon thy pipe : nor would the incense of my sacrifice be 
 woi-se accepted for entering heaven along with that of a broken 
 heart." 
 
 But then follows more whimpering : — 
 
 Nature melted within me [continues Sterne] as I said this j 
 and Maria observing, as I took out my handkerchief, that it 
 was steeped too much already to be of use, would needs go wash 
 
X.] HUMOUK AND SENTIMENT. 159 
 
 it in tte stream. And where will you dry it, Maria P said I. 
 I'll dry it iu my bosom, said she ; 'twill do me good. And is 
 your heart still so warm, Maria ? said I. I touched upon the 
 string on which hung all her sorrows. She looked with wistful 
 disorder for some time in my face ; and then, without saying 
 anything, took her pipe and played her service to the Virgin. 
 
 Wliicli are we meant to look at — the sorrows of Maria 1 
 or tlie sensibilities of tlie Sentimental Traveller ? or tlie con- 
 dition of the pocket-handkerchief? I think it doubtful 
 whether any writer of the first rank has ever perpetrated 
 so disastrous a literary failure as this scene ; but the main 
 cause of that failure appears to me not doubtful at all. 
 The artist has no business within the frame of the picture, 
 and his intrusion into it has spoilt it. The method adopted 
 from the commencement is ostentatiously objective : we 
 are taken straight into Maria's presence, and bidden to 
 look at and to pity the unhappy maiden as described by 
 the Traveller who met her. No attempt is made to place 
 us at the outset in sympathy with Jiim ; he, until he thrusts 
 himself before us with his streaming eyes, and his drenched 
 pocket-handkerchief, is a mere reporter of the scene before 
 him, and he and his tears are as much out of place as if he 
 were the compositor who set up the type. It is not merely 
 that we don't want to know how the scene affected him, 
 and that we resent as an impertinence the elaborate 
 account of his tender emotions ; we don't wish to be 
 reminded of his presence at all. Por as we can know 
 nothing (effectively) of Maria's sorrows except as given 
 in her appearance, the historical recital of them and their 
 cause being too curt and bald to be able to move us — the 
 best chance of moving our compassion for her is to make 
 the illusion of her presence as dramatically real as possible ; 
 a chance which is therefore completely destroyed when 
 
160 STERNE. - [chap. 
 
 the author of the illusion insists on thrusting himself 
 between ourselves and the scene. 
 
 But in truth this whole episode of Maria of Moulines 
 was, like more than one of Sterne's efforts after the 
 pathetic, condemned to failure from the very conditions 
 of its birth. These abortive efforts are no natural growth 
 of his artistic genius ; they proceed rather from certain 
 morbidly stimtdated impulses of his moral nature which 
 he forced his artistic genius to subserve. He had true 
 pathetic power, simple yet subtle, at his command ; but 
 it visited him unsought, and by inspiration from without. 
 It came when he was in the dramatic and not in the 
 introspective mood ; when he was thinking honestly of 
 his characters and not of himself. But he was un- 
 fortunately too prone — and a long course of moral self- 
 indulgence had confirmed him in it — to the habit of 
 caressing his own sensibilities ; and the result of this 
 was always to set him upon one of those attempts to be 
 pathetic of malice prepense of which Maria of Moulines 
 is one example, and the too celebrated dead donkey of 
 Nampont another. "It is agreeably and skilfully done, 
 that dead jackass," writes Thackeray ; " like M. de 
 Soubise's cook on the campaign, Sterne dresses it, and 
 serves it up quite tender, and with a very piquante sauce. 
 But tears, and fine feeHngs, and a white pocket-hand- 
 kerchief, and a funeral sermon, and horses and feathers, 
 and a procession of mutes, and a hearse with a dead 
 donkey inside. Psha ! Mountebank ! I'll not give thee 
 one penny-piece for that trick, donkey and all." That 
 is vigorous ridicule, and not wholly undeserved ; but 
 on the other hand, not entirely deserved. There is less 
 of artistic trick, it seems to me, and more of natural foible, 
 about Sterne's literary sentiment than Thackeray was 
 
X.] HUMOUE Ai^D SENTIMENT. 161 
 
 ever willing to believe ; and I can find nothing worse, 
 though nothing better, in the dead ass of Nampont than in 
 Maria of Moulines. T do not think there is any con- 
 scious simulation of feeling in this Nampont scene : it 
 Is that the feeling itself is overstrained — that Sterne, 
 hugging as usual his own sensibilities, mistook their 
 value in expression for the purposes of art. The Senti- 
 mental Traveller does not obtrude himself to the same 
 extent as in the scene at Moulines : but a little con- 
 sideration of the scene will show how much Sterne relied 
 on the mere presentment of the fact that here was an 
 unfortunate peasant who had lost his dumb companion, 
 and here a tender-hearted gentleman looking on and 
 pitying him. As for any attempts to bring out by 
 objective dramatic touches, either the grievousness of the 
 bereavement or the grief of the mourner, such attempts 
 as are made to do this are either commonplace, or "one 
 step in advance " of the sublime. Take this for instance : 
 '•' The mourner was sitting upon a stone bench at the 
 door, with his ass's pannel and its bridle on one side, 
 which he took up from time to time, then laid them 
 down, looked at them, and shook his head. He then 
 took the crust of bread out of his wallet again, as if 
 to eat it : held it some time in his hand, then laid it 
 itpon the bit of his ass's bridle — looked wistfully at the 
 little arrangement he had made — and then gave a sigh. 
 The simpHcity of his grief drew numbers about him," 
 &c. Simplicity indeed of a marvellous sort which could 
 show itself by so extraordinary a piece of acting as this ! 
 Is there any critic who candidly thinks it natural — I do 
 not mean in the sense of mere everyday probability, but 
 of conformity to the laws of human character 1 Is it true 
 that in any country, among any people however emotional, 
 
 M 
 
162 STERNE. [chap. 
 
 grief — real, unaffected, un-seKconscious grief — ever did or 
 ever could display itself by such a triek as that of laying 
 a piece of bread on the bit of a dead ass's bridle ? Do 
 we not feel that if -we had been on the point of offering 
 comfort or alms to the mourner, and saw him go through 
 this extraordinary piece of pantomime, we should have 
 buttoned up our hearts and our pockets forthwith ? 
 Sentiment again sails very near the wind of the ludicrous 
 in the reply to the traveller's remark that the mourner 
 had been a merciful master to the dead ass. " Alas ! " the 
 latter says, " I thought so when he was alive, but now that 
 he is dead I think otherwise. I fear the weight of myself 
 and my afflictions have been too much for him." And 
 the scene ends flatly enough mth the scrap of morality. 
 " Shame on the world ! said I to myself. Did we love 
 each other as this poor soul loved his ass, 'twould be 
 something.'' 
 
 The whole incident, in short, is one of those ex- 
 amples of the deliberate-pathetic with which Sterne's 
 highly natural art had least, and his highly artificial 
 nature most, to do. He is nev?\' so unsuccessful as when, 
 after formally announcing as it were that he means to be 
 toiiching, he proceeds to select his subject, to marshal 
 his characters, to group his accessories, and with painful 
 and painfully apparent elaboration to work up his scene 
 to the weeping point. There is no obviousness of 
 suggestion, no spontaneity of treatment about this " Dead 
 Ass " episode : indeed, there is some reason to believe 
 that it was one of those most hopeless of efforts — the 
 attempt at the mechanical repetition of a former triumph. 
 It is by no means improbable at any rate that the dead 
 ass of Nampont owes its presence in the Sentimental 
 Journey to the reception met with by the live ass of 
 
X.] HUMOUR AND SENTIMENT. 163 
 
 Lyons in the seventh, volume of Tristram Shandy. And 
 yet what an astonishing difference between the two 
 sketches ! 
 
 'Twas a poor ass, who had just turned in with a couple of 
 large panniers upon his back, to collect eleemosynary turnip-tops 
 and cabbage-leaves, and stood dubious with his two fore-feet on 
 the inside of the threshold, and with his two hinder feet towards 
 the street, as not knowing very well whether he would go in or 
 no. Now, 'tis an animal (be in what hurry I may) I cannot 
 bear to strike. There is a patient endurance of sufferings 
 wrote so unaffectedly in his looks and carriage, which pleads so 
 mightily for him that it always disarms me, and to that degree 
 that I do not like to speak unkindly to him ; on the contrary, 
 meet him where I will, in town or country, in cart or under 
 panniers, whether in liberty or bondage, I have ever something 
 civil to say to him on mj- part; and as one word begets another 
 (if he has as little to do as I) I genei-ally fall into conversation, 
 with him ; and surely never is my imagination so busy as in 
 framing his responses from the etchings of his countenance — and 
 where those carry me not deep enough, in flying from my own 
 heart into his, and feeling what is natural for an ass to think, 
 
 as well as a man, upon the occasion Come, Honesty ! 
 
 said I, seeing it was impracticable to pass betwixt him and the 
 gate, art thou for coming in or going out ? The ass twisted his 
 head round, to look up the street. Well, replied I, we'll wait a 
 minute for thy driver. He turned his head thoughtfully about, 
 and looked wistfully the opposite way. I understand thee per- 
 fectly, answered I ; if thou takest a wrong step in this affair he 
 will cudgel thee to death. Well, a minute is but a minute, and 
 if it saves a fellow-creature a drubbing, it shall not be set down 
 as ill spent. He was eating the stem of an artichoke as this 
 discourse went on, and in the little peevish contentions of 
 nature betwixt hunger and unsavouriness, had dropped it out of 
 his mouth half a dozen times , and picked it up again. God help 
 thee, Jack ! said I, thou hast a bitter breakfast on't, and many 
 a bitter day's labour, and many a bitter blow, I fear, for its 
 M 2 
 
164 STESNB. [chap. 
 
 wages — 'tis all, all bitterness to thee, whatever life is to others. 
 And now thy mouth, if one knew the truth of it, is as bitter, I 
 dare say, as soot (for he had cast aside the stem), and thou hast 
 not a friend perhaps in all this world that will give thee a, 
 macaroon. In saying this, I pulled out a paper of 'em, which I 
 had just purchased, and gave him one ; and, at this moment that 
 I am telling it, my heart smites me that there was more of 
 pleasantry in the conceit of seeing how an ass would eat a 
 macaroon, than of benevolence in giving him one, which presided 
 in the act. When the ass had eaten his macaroon, I pressed 
 him to come in. The poor beast was heavy loaded, his legs 
 seemed to tremble under him, he hung rather backwards, and 
 as I pulled at his halter it broke short in my hand. He looked 
 up pensive in my face. " Don't thrash me with it ; but, if you 
 wiU, you may." " If I do," said I, " I'll be d d." 
 
 Well might Thackeray say of this passage that, " the 
 critic who refuses to see in it wit, humour, pathos, a 
 kind nature speaking, and a real sentiment, must be hard 
 indeed to move and to please." It is, in truth, excellent ; 
 and its excellence is due to its possessing nearly every 
 one of those qualities, positive and negative, which the 
 two other scenes above quoted are without. The author 
 does not here obtrude himself, does not importune us to 
 admire his exquisitely compassionate nature : on the 
 contrary, he at once amuses us and enlists our sympathies 
 by that subtly humorous piece of self-analysis, in which 
 he shows how large an admixture of curiosity was con- 
 tained in his benevolence. The incident, too, is well 
 chosen. No forced concurrence of circumstances brings it 
 about : it is such as any man might have met with 
 anywhere in his travels, and it is handled in a simple 
 and manly fashion. The reader is with the writer 
 throughout : and tlieir common mood of half-humorous 
 pity is sustained, unforced, but unbroken from first to last. 
 
 One can hardly say as much for another of the much 
 
X.] HUMOUR AND SBNTIMENT. 165 
 
 quoted pieces from the Sentimental Journey — the de- 
 scription of the caged starling. The passage is in- 
 geniously worked into its context ; and if we were to 
 consider it as only intended to serve the purpose of a 
 sudden and dramatic discomfiture of the traveller's some- 
 what inconsiderate moralizings on captivity, it would be 
 well enough. But regarded as a substantive appeal to 
 one's emotions, it is open to the criticisms which apply to 
 most other of Sterne's too deliberate attempts at the 
 pathetic. The details of the picture are too much in- 
 sisted on, and there is too much of self-consciousness in 
 the artist. Even at the very close of the story of 
 Lefevre's death, finely told though, as a whole, it is, there 
 is a jarring note. Even while the dying man is breathing 
 his last, our sleeve is twitched as we stand at his bedside, 
 and our attention forcibly diverted from the departing 
 soldier to the literary ingenuities of the man who is 
 describing his end. 
 
 There was a frankness in my uncle Toby, not the effect of 
 familiarity, hut the cause of it, which let you at once into his 
 soul, and showed you the goodness of his nature. To this there 
 was something in his looks, and voice, and manner, superadded, 
 which eternally beckoned to the unfortunate to come and take 
 shelter under him ; so that, before my uncle Toby had half 
 finished the kind offers he was making to the father, had the 
 son insensibly pressed up close to his knees, and had taken hold 
 of the breast of his coat, and was pulling it towards him. The 
 blood and spirits of Le Fevre, which were waxing cold and slow 
 within him, and were retreating to their last citadel, the heart, 
 rallied back ; the film forsook his eyes far a moment ; he looked 
 up wishfully in my uncle Toby's face, then cast a look upon his 
 boy ; — and that ligament, fine as it was, was never broken. 
 
 How excellent all that is ! and how perfectly would 
 the scene have ended had it closed with the tender and 
 
166 STBENE. [oh. x. 
 
 poetic image which thus describes the dying soldier's 
 commendation of his orphan hoy to the care of his 
 hrother-in-arms ! But what of this, which closes the 
 scene in fact 1 
 
 Nature instantly ebbed again ; the film returned to its place ;. 
 the pulse fluttered — stopped — went on — throbbed — stopped 
 again— moved, stopped. Shall I go on ? No. 
 
 Let those admire this who can. To me I confess it 
 seems to spoil a touching and simple death-bed scene by 
 a piece of theatrical trickery. 
 
 The sum in fact of the whole matter appears to be, that 
 the sentiment on which Sterne so prided himself — the 
 acute sensibilities which he regarded with such extra- 
 ordinary complacency, were, as has been before observed, 
 the weakness and not the strength of his pathetic style. 
 When Sterne the artist is uppermost, when he is survey- 
 ing his characters with that penetrating eye of his, and 
 above all when he is allowing his subtle and tender 
 humour to play upon them unrestrained, he can touch the 
 springs of compassionate emotion in us -with a potent and 
 unerring hand. But when Sterne the man is uppermost 
 — when he is looking inward and not outward, contem- 
 plating his own feelings instead of those of his personages, 
 his cunning fails him altogether. He is at his best in 
 pathos, when he is most the humourist : or rather, we 
 may almost say his pathos is never good unless when it is 
 closely interwoven with his humour. In this of course 
 there is nothing at all surprising. The only marvel is, 
 that a man who was such a master of the humorous in its 
 highest and deepest sense, should seem to have so little 
 vmderstood how near together lie the sources of tears and 
 laughter on the very way-side of man's mysterious life. 
 
CHAPTER XL 
 
 CREATIVE AND DRAMATIC POWER PLACE IN ENGLISH 
 
 LITERATURE. 
 
 Subtle as is Sterne's humour, and true as, in its proper 
 moods, is liis pathos, it is not to these but to the parent 
 gift from ■which they sprang, and perhaps to only one 
 special display of that gift, that he owes his immortality. 
 We are accustomed to bestow, so lightly this last hyper- 
 bolic honour — hyperbolic always, even when we are 
 speaking of a Homer or a Shakespeare, if only we project 
 the vision far enough forward through time— that the 
 comparative ease with which it is to be earned has itself 
 come to be exaggerated. There are so many " deathless 
 ones " about — if I may put the matter familiarly — in 
 conversation and in literature, that we get into the 
 way of thinking that they are really a considerable 
 body in actual fact, and that the works which have 
 triumphed over death are far more numerous still. The 
 real truth, however, is, that not only are " those who 
 reach posterity a very select company indeed ;" but most 
 of them have come much nearer missing their destmy 
 than is popularly supposed. Of the dozen or score of 
 writers in one century whom their own contemporaries 
 fondly decree immortal, one-haK perhaps may be re- 
 membered in the next ; while of the creations which were 
 honoured with the diploma of immortality a very much 
 
168 STEENE. [cHAP. 
 
 smaller proportion as a rule survive. Only some fifty 
 per cent, of the prematurely laurel-crowned reach the 
 goal ; and often, even upon tlieir brows there jElutter but 
 a few stray leaves of the bay. A single poem, a solitary 
 drama — nay, perhaps one isolated figure, poetic or dra- 
 matic— avaUs, and but barely avails, to keep the immortal 
 from putting on mortality. Hence we need think it no 
 disparagement to Sterne to say that he lives not so much 
 in virtue of his creative power as of one great individual 
 creation. His imaginative insight into character in 
 general was no doubt considerable ; his draughtsmanship, 
 whether as exhibited in the rough sketch or in the 
 finished portrait, is unquestionably most vigorous : but an 
 artist may put a hundred striking figures upon his canvas 
 for one that will linger in the memory of those who have 
 gazed upon it ; and it is after all, I think, the one figure 
 of Captain Tobias Shandy which has graven itself in- 
 delibly on the memory of mankind. To have made this 
 single addition to the imperishable types of human cha- 
 racter embodied in the world's literature may seem, as has 
 been said, but a light matter to those who talk with light 
 exaggeration of the achievements of the literary artist ; 
 but if we exclude that one creative prodigy among men, 
 who has peopled a whole gallery with imaginary beings 
 more real than those of flesh and blood, we sheJl find that 
 very few archetypal creations have sprung from any 
 single hand. Now, My Uncle Toby is as much the 
 archetype of guileless good nature, of affectionate sim- 
 plicity, as Hamlet is of irresolution, or lago of cunning, or 
 Shylock of race-hatred ; and he contrives to preserve all 
 the characteristics of an ideal type amid surroundings of 
 intensely prosaic realism, with which he himself, more- 
 over, considered as an individual character in a specific 
 
XI.] CREATIVE AND DRAMATIC POWER. 169 
 
 story, is in complete accord. If any one be disposed to 
 underrate the creative and dramatic power to which, this 
 testifies, let him consider how it has commonly fared with 
 those writers of prose fiction who have attempted to 
 personify a virtue in a man. Take the work of another 
 famous English humourist and sentimentalist, and com- 
 pare Uncle Toby's manly and dignified gentleness of 
 heart with the unreal " gush " of the Brothers Cheeryble, 
 or the fatuous benevolence of Mr. Pickwick. We do not 
 beheve in the former, and we cannot but despise the 
 latter. But Captain Shandy is reality itself, within and 
 without; and though we smUe at his naivete, and may 
 even laugh outright at his boyish enthusiasm for his 
 military hobby, we never cease to respect him for a 
 moment. There is no shirking or softening of the comic 
 aspects of his character ; there could not be, of course, for 
 Sterne needed him more, and used him more for his 
 purposes as a humourist than for his purposes as a senti- 
 mentalist. Nay, it is on the rare occasions when he 
 deliberately sentimentalizes with Captain Shandy, that 
 the Captain is the least delightful ; it is then that the 
 hand loses its cunning, and the stroke strays ; it is then, 
 and only then, that the benevolence of the good soldier 
 seems to verge, though ever so Httle, upon affectation. It 
 is a pity, for instance, that Sterne should, in illustration 
 of Captain Shandy's kindness of heart, have plagiarized 
 (as he is said to have done) the incident of the torment- 
 ing fly, caught and put out of the window with the 
 words " Get thee gone, poor devil ! Why should I harm 
 thee? The world is surely large enough for thee and 
 me." There is something too much of self-conscious 
 virtue in the apostrophe. This we feel is not the real 
 Uncle Toby of Sterne's objective mood ; it is the Uncle 
 
170 STERNE. [chap. 
 
 Toby of the subjectifying sentimentalist, surveying his 
 character through the false medium of his own hyper- 
 trophied sensibilities. These lapses, however, are fortu- 
 nately rare. As a rule we see the worthy Captain only 
 as he appeared to his creator's keen dramatic eye, and as 
 he is set before us in a thousand exquisite touches of dia- 
 logue — the man of simple mind and soul, profoundly 
 unimaginative and unphilosophical, biit lacking not in a 
 certain shrewd common-sense; exquisitely naif, and de- 
 lightfully mal-a-propos in his observations, but always 
 pardonably, never foolishly, so ; inexhaustibly amiabfe, but 
 with no weak amiability ; homely in his ways, but a 
 perfect gentleman withal ; in a word, the most winning 
 and lovable personality that is to be met with, surely, in 
 the whole range of fiction. 
 
 It is, in fact, with Sterne's general delineations of cha- 
 racter as it is, I have attempted to show, with his par- 
 ticular passages of sentiment. He is never at his best 
 and truest — as indeed no writer of fiction ever is or can 
 be — save when he is allowing his dramatic imagination to 
 play the most freely upon his characters, and thinking 
 least about himself. Tliis is curiously illustrated in his 
 handling of what is perhaps the next most successful of 
 the uncaricatured portraits in the Shandy gallery — the 
 presentment of the Eev. Mr. Torick. Nothing can be 
 more perfect in its way than the picture of the " lively, 
 witty, sensitive and heedless parson," in chapter x. of the 
 first volume of Tristram Shandy. "We seem to see the 
 thin, melancholy figure on the rawboned horse — the ap- 
 parition which could "never present itself in the village biit 
 it caught the attention of old and yoimg," so that " labour 
 stood still as he passed, the bucket hung suspended in the 
 middle of the well, the spinning-wheel foigot its round ; 
 
XI.] CREATIVE AND DRAMATIC POWER. 171 
 
 evencliuck-farthingand sliuffle-cap themselves stood, gaping 
 till he was out of sight." Throughout this chapter Sterne, 
 though describing himseM, is projecting his personality 
 to a distance as it were, and contemplating it dramati- 
 cally; and the result is excellent. When in the next 
 chapter he becomes " lyrical " so to speak ; when the 
 reflection upon his (largely imaginary) wrongs impels him 
 to look inward, the invariable consequence follows : and 
 though Yorick's much be-praised death-scene, Avith Euge- 
 nius at his bed-side, is redeemed from entire failure by an 
 admixture of the humorous with its attempted pathos, 
 we ask ourselves with some wonder what the unhappiness 
 — or the death itself, for that matter — is "aU about." 
 The wrongs which were supposed to have broken Yorick's 
 heart are most imperfectly specified (a comic proof, by 
 the way, of Sterne's entire absorption in himself to the 
 confusion of his own personal knowledge with that of the 
 reader) and the first conditions of enlisting the reader's 
 sympathies are left unfulfilled. 
 
 But it is comparatively seldom that this foible of Sterne 
 obtrudes itself upon the strictly narrative and dramatic 
 parts of his work ; and next to the abiding charm and 
 interest of his principal figure, it is by the admirable life 
 and colour of his scenes that he exercises his strongest 
 poweis of fascination over a reader. Perpetual as are 
 Sterne's aifectations, and tiresome as is his eternal self- 
 consciousness when he is speaking in his own person, yet 
 when once the dramatic instinct fairly lays hold of him 
 there is no writer who ever makes us more completely 
 forget him in the presence of his characters — ^none who 
 can bring them and their surroundings, their looks and 
 words, before us with such convincing force of reality. 
 One wonders sometimes whether Sterne himself was 
 
172 STEENB. [chap. 
 
 aware of the liigh dramatic excellence of many of what 
 actors would call his " carpenter's scenes " — ^the mere 
 interludes introduced to amuse us while the stage is being 
 prepared for one of those more elaborate and deliberate 
 displays of pathos or humour, which do not always turn 
 out to be unmixed successes when they come. Sterne 
 prided himseK vastly upon the incident of Lef evre's death ; 
 but I dare say that there is many a modern reader who 
 would rather have lost this highly-wrought piefce of 
 domestic drama, than that other exquisite little scene in 
 the kitchen of the inn, when Corporal Trim toasts the 
 bread which the sick lieutenant's son is preparing for his 
 father's posset, whUe "Mr. Torick's curate was smoking 
 a pipe by the fire, but said not a word good or bad to 
 comfort the youth." The whole scene is absolute life ; 
 and the dialogue between the corporal and the parson, 
 as related by the former to his master, with Captain 
 Shandy's comments thereon, is almost Shakespearean in 
 its excellence. Says the corporal : — 
 
 When the lieutenant had taken his glass of sack and toast 
 he felt himself a little revived, and sent down into the kitchen 
 to let me know that in ahout ten minutes he should be glad if 
 I would step upstairs. I believe, said the landlord, he is going 
 to say his prayers, for there was a book laid on the chair by the 
 hed-side, and as I shut the door I saw him take up a cushion. 
 I thought, said the curate, that you gentlemen of the army, Mr. 
 Trim, never said your prayers at all. I heard the poor gentle- 
 man say his prayers last night, said the landlady, very devoutly 
 and with my own ears, or I could not have believed it. Are you 
 sure of it ? replied the curate. A soldier, an' please your rever- 
 ence, said I, prays as often (of his own accord) as a parson ; and 
 when he is fighting for his king, and for his own life, and for 
 his honour too, he has the most reason to pray to God of any 
 one in the whole world. 'Twas well said of thee. Trim, said my 
 
XI.] PLACE IN ENGLISH LITERATURE. 173 
 
 uncle Toby. But when a soldier, said I, an' please your rever- 
 ence, has heen standing for twelve hours together in the 
 trenches, up to his knees in cold water — or engaged, said I, for 
 months together in long and dangerous marches ; harassed, 
 perhaps, in his rear to-day ; harassing others to-morrow ; de- 
 tached here ; countermanded there ; resting this night out" 
 upon his arms ; heat up in his shirt the next ; henumhed in his 
 joints ; perhaps without straw in his tent to kneel on, [he] must 
 say his prayers how and when he can. I believe, said I — for I 
 was piqued, quoth the corporal, for the reputation of the army — 
 I believe, an't* please your reverence, said I, that when a 
 soldier gets time to pray, he prays as heartily as a parson — 
 though not with all his fuss and hypocrisy. Thou shouldst 
 not have said that. Trim, said my uncle Toby ; for God only 
 knows who is a hypocrite, and who is not. At the great and 
 general review of us all, corporal, at the day of judgment (and 
 not till then) it will be seen who have done their duties in this 
 world, and who have not, and we shall be advanced. Trim, accord- 
 ingly. I hope we shall, said Trim. It is in the Scripture, said 
 my uncle Toby, and I will show it thee in the morning. In the 
 meantime, we may depend upon it. Trim, for our comfort, said 
 my uncle Toby ; that God Almighty is so good and just a 
 governor of the world, that if we have but done our duties in 
 it, it will never be inquired into whether we have done them in 
 a red coat or a black one. I hope not, said the corporal. But 
 go on, said my uncle Toby, with thy story. 
 
 We might almost fancy ourselves listeniiig to that noble 
 prose colloquy between the disguised king and his soldiers 
 on the night before Agincourt, in Henry V. And though 
 Sterne does not, of course, often reach this level of 
 dramatic dignity, there are passages in abundance in 
 which his dialogue assumes, through sheer force of indi- 
 vidualized character, if not all the dignity, at any rate all 
 the impressive force and simplicity of the "grand style." 
 
 Taken altogether, however, Ms place in English letters 
 
174 STERNE. [CHAP. 
 
 is hard to fix, and. his tenure in human memory hard to 
 determine. Hitherto he has held his own, with the great 
 writers of his era, but it has been in virtue, as I have 
 attempted to show, of a contribution to the literary- 
 possessions of mankind which is as uniquely limited in 
 amount as it is exceptionally perfect in quality. One 
 cannot but feel that, as regards the sum of his titles to 
 recollection, his name stands far below either of those 
 other two which in the course of the last century added 
 themselves to the highest rank among the classics of 
 English humour. Sterne has not the abounding life and 
 the varied human interest of Fielding : and to say nothing 
 of his vast intellectual inferiority to Swift, he never so 
 much as approaches those problems of everlasting con- 
 cernment to man which Swift handles with so terrible a 
 fascination. Certainly no enthusiastic Gibbon of the 
 future is ever likely to say of Sterne's " pictures of human 
 manners," that they will " outlive the palace of the Es- 
 curial and the Imperial Eagle of the House of Austria." 
 Assuredly no one will ever find in this so-called English 
 antitype of the Cure of Meudon, any of the deeper 
 qualities of that gloomy and commanding spirit which 
 has been finely compared to the " soul of Kabelais 
 habitans in siceo.'' Nay, to descend even to minor apti- 
 tudes, Sterne cannot tell a story as Swift and Fielding 
 can tell one : and his work is not assured of life as Tom 
 Jones and Gulliver's Travels, considered as stories alone, 
 would be assured of it — even if the one were stripped of 
 its cheerful humour, and the other disarmed of its savage 
 allegory. And hence it might be rash to predict that 
 Sterne's days will be as long in the land of literary 
 memory as the two great writers aforesaid. Eanked, as 
 he still is, among " EngHsh classics," he undergoes, I 
 
XI.] PLACE IN ENGLISH LITERATUEE. 175 
 
 suspect, even more than an English classic's ordinary 
 share of reverential neglect. Among those who talk 
 about him, he has, I should imagine, fewer readers than 
 Fielding, and very much fewer than Swift. Nor is he 
 likely to increase their number as time goes on, but 
 rather perhaps the contrary. Indeed the only question is 
 whether with the lapse of years he will not, like other 
 writers as famous in their day, become yet more of a mere 
 name. For there is still, of course, a further stage to 
 which he may decline. That object of so much empty 
 mouth-honour, the English classic of the last and earlier 
 centuries, presents himself for classification under three 
 distinct categories. There is the class who are still read 
 in a certain measure, though in a much smaller measure 
 than is pretended, by the great body of ordinarily well- 
 educated men. Of this class, the two authors whose 
 names I have already cited, Swift and Fielding, are 
 typical examples ; and it may be taken to include Gold- 
 smith also. Then comes the class of those whom the 
 ordinarily well-educated public, whatever they may pre- 
 tend, read really very little or not at all : and in. this 
 class we may couple Sterne with Addison, with Smollett, 
 and, except of course as to Robinson Crusoe — unless, 
 indeed, our blase boys have outgrown him among other 
 pleasures of boyhood — with Defoe. But below this there 
 is yet a third class of writers, who are not only read by 
 none but the critic, the connoisseur, or the historian of 
 literature, but are scarcely read even by them, except 
 from curiosity, or '.' in the way of business.'' The type of 
 this class is Eichardson : and one cannot, I say, help 
 asking whether he wiU hereafter have Sterne as a compa- 
 nion of his dusty solitude. Are Tristram Shandy and the 
 Sentimental Journey destined to descend from the second 
 
176 STERNE. [CH. xr. 
 
 class into the third — from the region of partial into that 
 of total neglect, and to have their portion with Clarissa 
 Harlmoe and Sir Charles Grandison ? The imhounded 
 vogue which they enjoyed in their time will not save 
 them : for sane and sober critics compared Richardson in 
 his day to Shakespeare, and Diderot hroke forth into 
 prophetic rhapsodies upon the immortality of his works 
 which to us in these days have become absolutely 
 pathetic iu their felicity of falsified prediction. Seeing, 
 too, that a good three-fourths of the attractions which 
 won Sterne his contemporary popularity are now so much 
 dead weight of dead matter, and that the vital residuum 
 is in amount so small, the fate of Richardson might seem 
 to be but too close behind him. Yet it is difficult to 
 believe that this fate wiU ever quite overtake him. His 
 sentiment may have mostly ceased — it probably has 
 ceased, to stir any emotion at all in these days ; but there 
 is an imperishable element iu his humour. And though 
 the circle of his readers may have no tendency to increase, 
 one can hardly suppose that a charm, which those who 
 still feel it feel so keenly, will ever entirely cease to 
 captivate ; or that time can have any power over a perfume 
 which so wonderfully retains the pungent freshness of its 
 fragrance after the lapse of a hundred years. 
 
 THE END. 
 
 PnilTTES BY GILBEBT Ain> BXTINGTOTT, LIMITED, SX. JOHN'S SQI^ABE, LONDON. 
 
Now publishing, in Crown 8vo, price 2s. dd. each. 
 
 ENGLISH MEN OP LETTERS. 
 
 Edited by JOHN MORLEY. 
 
 "eJ^L^I?"^^]" s"'«- "-British Quakterly Review. 
 iinjoyable and excellent little books "-Academy. 
 
 Johnson. By Leslie Stephen. 
 
 Scott. 13y R. H. HUTTON 
 
 Gibbon. ByJ. c. MoMsoN. 
 
 Shelley. By J. a. Symonds. 
 
 Hume. By Professor Huxley, F.R.S. 
 
 Goldsmith. By William Black. 
 
 Defoe. By W. Minto 
 
 Burns. By Principal Shairp. 
 
 Spenser. By the Very Rev. the Dean op St. Paul's. 
 
 Thackeray. By Anthony Trollope. 
 
 Burke. By John Morley. 
 
 Milton. By IVIark Pattison. 
 
 Hawthorne. By Henry James, Jun. 
 
 Southey. By Professor Dowden. 
 
 Chaucer. By Professor A. W. Ward. 
 
 Bunyaff. By James A. Froude. 
 
 Pope. By Leslie Stephen. 
 
 Byron. By Professor Nichol. 
 
 Cowper. By Goldwin Smith. 
 
 Locke. By Professor Fowler; 
 
 Wordsworth. By F. W. H. Myers. 
 
 Dryden. By G. Saintsbury. 
 
 Landor. By Professor Sidney Colvin. 
 
 De Quincey. By Professor Masson. 
 
 Charles Lamb. By the Rev. Alfred Ainger. 
 
 Bentley. By Professor R. C. Jebb. 
 
 Swift. By Leslie Stephen. 
 
 Dickens. By Professor A. W. Ward. 
 
 Gray. By Edmund W. Gosse. 
 
 Sterne. By H. D. Traill. 
 
 IN PREPARATION. 
 
 Adam Smith. By Leonard H. Courtney, M.K 
 Berkeley. By Professor Huxley. 
 Sir Philip Sidney. By J. A. Symonds. 
 Macaulay. By J. Cotter Morison. (In the press.) 
 Sheridan. By Mrs. Oliphant. {In the press.) 
 
 Other Volumes will follow. 
 
 MACMILLAN & CO., LONDON. 
 
GOLDEN TREASURY SERIES. 
 
 Uniformly printed in iSmo, with Vignette Titles by J. E. MiLLAIS, T. 
 WOOLNER, W. HoLMAN HUNT, Sir NoEL Paton, &c. Pricc ^f. 6{i. each. 
 
 The Golden Treasury of Songs 
 and Lyri.?. Selected by Francis 
 Turner Falgrave. 
 
 The Children's Garland. Se- 
 lected by Coventry Patmore. 
 
 The Book of Praise, Selected by 
 
 Lord Selborne. 
 The Fairy Book; the Best Fairy 
 
 Stories. Selected by the Author of 
 
 '* John Halifax, Gentleman.'* 
 
 The Ballad Book. Edited by 
 William Allingham. 
 
 The Jest Book. Selected by Mark 
 Lemon. 
 
 Bacon's IBssays of Good and 
 Evil. Edited by W. Aldis Wright. 
 
 The Pilgrim's Progress. By 
 John Bunyan. 
 
 The Sunday Book of Poetry. 
 Selected by C. F. Alexander. 
 
 A Book of Golden Beeds. By 
 
 Charlotte M. Yonge. 
 
 The Adventures of Robinson 
 
 Crusoe. Edited by J W. Clark. 
 
 The Republic of Plato. Trans- 
 lated into English, with Notes, byj. Ll. 
 Davis, M.A., and D. J. Vaughan, M.A. 
 
 The Song Book. Words and 
 Tunes from the best Poets and Musicians. 
 Selected by John Hullah. 
 
 La Lyre Francaise. Selected by 
 Gustave Masson. 
 
 Tom Bro*wn*s Schooldays. By 
 An Old Boy. 
 
 A Book of "Worthies. Written 
 anew by Charlotte M. Yonge. 
 
 A Book of Golden Thoughts. 
 By Henry Attwell. 
 
 Guesses at Truth. By Two 
 
 Brothers. 
 
 The Cavalier and his Lady. 
 
 With an Introduction by Edward 
 [enkins, Author of '* Ginx's Baby." 
 
 Theologia Germanica. Trans- 
 lated by Susanna Winkworth. 
 
 Scottish Song. Compiled by 
 
 Mary Carlyle Aitken. 
 
 Deutsche Lyrik. German Lyrical 
 Poems, selected and arranged by Dr. 
 Buchheim. 
 
 Robert Herrick, Selections from 
 the Lyrical Poems of. Arranged with 
 Notes by F. T. Palgrave. 
 
 Poems of Places. Edited by H. 
 
 W. Longfellow. England and Wales. 
 2 Vols. gs. 
 
 Matthew Arnold's Selected 
 
 Poems. Also a large Paper Edition. 
 Crown 8vo, izs. 6d. 
 
 The Story of the Christians and 
 
 Moors in Spain. By C. M. Yonge. 
 
 Charles Lamb's Tales from. 
 
 Shakespeare. Edited by the Rev. A. 
 
 AiNGER. 
 
 Wordsworth's Select Poems. 
 
 Chosen and Edited, with Preface, by 
 Matthew Arnold. Also large Paper 
 Edition. Crown 8vo, gs. 
 
 Shakespeare's Songs and Son- 
 nets. Edited by F. T. Palgrave. 
 
 Selections from Addison. Edited 
 by J. R. Green, M.A., LL.D. 
 
 Poems of Shelley. Edited by 
 Stopford a. Brooke, M.A, Large 
 Paper Edition. Crown 8vo, i2j. 6d. 
 
 Poetry of Byron. Chosen and 
 
 arranged by Matthew Arnold. Large 
 Paper Edition. Crown 8vo, 9* . 
 
 Sir Thomas Browne's Keligio 
 Medici. Edited by W. A. Greenhill, 
 M.D. 
 
 Selections from the Writings o^ 
 
 Walter Savage Landor. Arranged and 
 Edited by Professor Sidney Colvin. 
 
 The Speeches and Table Talk 
 
 of the Prophet Mohammad. Chosen 
 and Translated, with an Introduction 
 and Notes, by Stanley Lane-Poole. 
 
 MACMILLAN & CO., LONDON. 
 
MACMILLAN'S GLOBE LIBRARY. 
 
 Price y. 6d. each, 
 
 " The ' Globe ' Editions are admirable for their scholarly editin". their tvooffranhical 
 excellence, their compendious form, and their cheapness/'-SATTRl^Av Lv.EW "^ 
 A wonderfully cheap and scholarly series."— Vai/y Telegraph. 
 
 Shakespeare's Complete Works. Edited by w. G. Clark, m. a., 
 
 and W. Aldis Wright, M.A. With Glossary. 
 
 ^""tlJ'i.^liV^ "^^E ^OOK OF KING ARTHUR AND OF 
 HIS NOBLE KNIGHTS OF THE ROUND TABLE. The 
 original Edition of Caxton, revised for Modern Use. With Intro- 
 duction, Notes, and Glossary. By Sir E. Strachey. 
 
 Robinson Crusoe. Edited after the Original Editions, with a Bio- 
 graphical Introduction by Henry Kingsley, F.R.G.S. 
 
 Sir Walter Scott's Poetical Works. Edited, with Biographical 
 
 and Cntical Memoir, by F. T. Palgrave. With Introduction and 
 Notes. 
 
 Dry den's Poetical Works. Edited, with a Memoir, Revised Text, 
 and Notes, by W. D. Christie, M.A. 
 
 Cowper's Poetical Works. Edited, with Biographical introduction 
 and Notes, by W. Benham,. B.D., Vicar of Marden. 
 
 Virgil. Rendered into English Prose, with Introductions, Notes, Analysis, 
 and Index. By J. Lonsdale, M.A., and S. Lee, M.A. 
 
 Horace. Rendered into English Prose, with Introductions, Running 
 Analysis, Notes, and Index. By J. Lonsdale, M.A., and S. Lee, M.A. 
 
 Burns' Complete Works. Edited from the best Printed and MS. 
 Authorities, with Memoir and Glossarial Index. By Alexander 
 Smith. 
 
 Goldsmith's Miscellaneous Works. With Biogi-apMcai introduc- 
 tion by Professor Masson. 
 
 Pope's Poetical Works. Edited, with Notes and Introductory 
 Memoir, by Professor Ward, of Owen's College, Manchester. 
 
 Spenser's Complete Works. Edited from the original Editions and 
 Manuscripts, with Glossary, by R, Morris, and a Memoir by J. W. 
 Hales, M.A. 
 
 Hilton's Poetical Works. Edited, with introductions, by Professor 
 Masson. 
 
 MACMILLAN & CO-, LONDON. 
 
Messrs. MACMILLAN & CO.'s PUBLICATIONS. 
 
 CHARLES DAP,WIIT. Memorial Notices. By Professor Huxley 
 LL.D., F.R.S., G.J. Romanes, M.A., LL.D., F.R.S., Sec. L.S., 
 Archibald Geikie, LL.D., F.R.S., and W. T. Thiselton Dyer, 
 F. R. S., F.L. S. 'With a Portrait engraved by C. H. Jeens. Crown 8vo., 
 2s. (id. \Just ready. 
 
 MEMOIR OP DANIEL MACMILLAN. By Thomas Hughes, 
 Q.C. With a Portrait engraved on Steel by G. H. Jeens, from a 
 Painting by Lowes Dickinson. Crown 8vo, 4J. dd. 
 
 JEAN FRANCOIS MILLET, Peasant and Painter. Translated 
 from tlie French of Alfred Sensier. With numerous Illustrations. 
 4to, i6j-. 
 
 THREE ENGLISH STATESMEN. A Course of Lectures on the 
 Political History of England. By Gold WIN Smith, M.A., D.C.L. 
 New Edition. Crown 8vo, JJ. 
 
 By DAVID MASSON, M.A., Professor of Rhetoric and English 
 Literatxire in the University of Edinburgh. 
 
 SRUMMOND OP HAWTHORNDEN. The Story of his Life and 
 Writings. With Portrait and Vignette engraved by Jeens. Crown 8vo, 
 lOr. dd. 
 
 WORDSWORTH, SHELLEY, KEATS, and other Essays. 
 Second Edition. Crown 8vo, Sj. 
 
 CHATTEBTON: A Story of the Year 1770. Crown 8vo, 5^. 
 
 THE THREE DEVILS ; Luther's, Milton's, and Goethe's ; 
 
 and other Essays. Crown 8vo, S'f- 
 
 THE LIPE OP JOHN MILTON, Narrated in Connexion with 
 the Political, Ecclesiastical, and Literary History of his Time. 
 Vol. I., 2U. ; Vol. II., i6j. : Vol. IIL, i8j. ; Vols. IV. and V., 32J. 
 Vol. VI. With Portrait. 21^. \_Index Vol. in preparation. 
 
 THE POETICAL WORKS OP JOHN MILTON. With Intro- 
 duction, Notes, and an Essay on Milton's English. With Three 
 Portraits engraved by Jeens. Three Vols. 8vo, 42^. 
 
 A HISTORY OP ENGLISH DRAMATIC LITERATURE, 
 
 to the Death of Queen Anne. By A. W. Ward, M.A., Professor of 
 History and English Literature in Owen's College, Manchester. Two 
 Vols. 8vo, 32J. 
 
 MACMILLAN & CO., LONDON. 
 
Messrs. MACMILLAN & CO.'s PUBLICATIONS. 
 
 Preparing for immediate publication. 
 Uniform with the Eversley Edition of Charles Kingsley's Novels. 
 
 THE WORKS OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 With an Introductory Essay by JOHN MORLEY. In Six Volumes. 
 Globe 8vo, $s. each. 
 
 I. Miscellanies. 4. English Traits : and Representative Men. 
 2 Essays. $• Conduct of Life: and Society and Solitude. 
 
 3. Poems. 6. Letters, and Social Aims, &c. 
 
 SHAKESPEASE PHRASE BOOK, THE. By John Bartlett, 
 Author of " Familiar Quotations. " Globe 8 vo, 12s. (>d. 
 
 LONGER ENGLISH POEMS, with Notes, Philological and 
 Explanatory, with an Introduction on the Teaching of English. 
 Chiefly for Use in Schools. Edited by J. W. Hales, M.A., Professor 
 of English Literature, King's College, London. Fifth Edition. 
 Extra icap. 8vo, 4.?. 6d. 
 
 JOHNSON'S LIVES OF THE POETS. The Six Chief Lives, 
 with Macaulay's " Life of Johnson. " Edited, with a Preface, by 
 Matthew Arnold. Crown 8vo, (>s. 
 
 LETTERS, TRACTS, and SPEECHES on IRISH AEFAIRS. 
 
 By Edmund Burke. Arranged and Edited by Matthew Arnold, 
 with a Preface. Crown 8vo, (>s. 
 
 EDMUND BURKE— A HISTORICAL STXnjY. By John 
 
 MORLEY. Crown 8vo, •js. dd. 
 
 ASSAYS. By the late George Brimley, M.A., Librarian of Trinity 
 
 College, Cambridge. Edited by W. G. Clark, M.A., Fellow and 
 
 Tutor of Trinity College, Cambridge. A New Edition. Globe 8vo, 5^-. 
 
 Contents. — Tennyson's Poems — Wordsworth's Poems — Poetry and Criticism — 
 
 Carlyle's Life of Sterling — " Esmond " — *' Westward Ho ! '' — ^Wilson's *' Noctes Ambro- 
 
 sianse " — Cerate's " Positive Philosophy," &c. 
 
 BUTLER'S HUDIBRAS. Part I. Edited, with Introduction and 
 Notes, by Alfred Milnes, M.A. Fcap. 8vo, 3^. (>d. 
 
 ENGLISH SCHOOL CLASSICS. 
 
 GOLDSMITH. SELECT ESSAYS. Edited, with Introduction 
 and Notes, by Professor C. D. Yonge. Extra fcap. 8vo, is. 6d. 
 
 ** Selected with good tsjte, and annotated with competent skill and knowledge. A 
 capita! book for schools." — Literary Churckvian. 
 
 DRYDEN. SELECT ESSAYS. By the same Editor. Extra fcap. 
 8vo, 2j. dd, 
 
 MACMILLAN & CO., LONDON. 
 
Messrs. MACMILLAN & CO.'s PUBLICATIONS. 
 
 MRS. OLIPH ANT'S NEW WORK. 
 
 THE LITERARY HISTORY OF ENGLAND 
 
 IN" THE EWB OP THE EiaHTEENTH AND BEGIWIXINa 
 
 OP THE WIWETEENTH CEUTITIlTr. 
 
 By Mrs. OLIPHANT, Three Vols. Demy 8vo, 36^. 
 
 ** Her three volumes abound with passages of eloquence and insight, and to the 
 young student of English literature will be of the utmost value as suggesting new points 
 rf view, and stimulating interest and enthusiasm for the subject.'" — Bricis'i Quarterly 
 Review, 
 
 ENGIjISH poets. Selections, with Critical Introductions by various 
 
 Writers, and a General Introduction by Matthew Arnold. Edited by T. H. 
 
 Wahd, M.A. 4 vols. Crown 8vo, ^s. 6d. each- 
 Vol. I. Chaucer to Donne. j Vol. III. Addison to Blake. 
 
 Vol.11. Ben Jonson to Dryden. | Vol IV. Wordsworth to Sidney Dobell. 
 
 A DICTIONARY OP MUSIC AND MXJSICIANS (a.D. 1450-1882). 
 
 By Eminent Writers, English and Foreign. With Illustrations and Woodcuts. 
 
 Edited by George Grove, D.C L. In 3 vols. Parts I. to XIV., 3J. 6^. each; 
 
 Parts XV. and XVI., ^s. Vol. I. A to Impromptu, 21J. Vol. II. Improperia to 
 
 Plain Son^, zis. 
 
 Now Publishing, in Grown 8vo, price 3j. 6d. each. 
 
 THE EHSTGLISia: CITIZE3^T r 
 
 A SERIES OF SHORT BOOKS ON 
 
 HIS RIGHTS AND RESPONSIBILITIES. 
 
 This series is intended to meet the demand for accessible information on the ordinary- 
 conditions, and the current terms, of our political life. The series will deal with the 
 details of the machinery whereby our Constitution works, and the broad lines upon which 
 it has been constructed. 
 
 The follmving are the titles of the Volumes : — 
 
 Central Government. H. D. 
 Traill, D.C.L., late Fellow of St. 
 John's College, Oxford. \_Ready, 
 
 The Electorate and the Iieg-is- 
 lature. Spencer Walpole, Author of 
 "The History of England from 1815." 
 \_Rcady. 
 
 Local Government. M. D. Chal- 
 mers. 
 
 Justice and Police. C. P. Ilbert, 
 Legal Member of Council in India, late 
 Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford ; and 
 F. Pollock, late Fellow of Trinity Col- 
 lege, Cambridge, &c. 
 
 The National Budiret : the Na- 
 tional Debt, Taxes, and Rates. A. J. 
 Wilson. [Ready, 
 
 The State and Education. 
 Henry Craik, M.A. 
 
 The Poor Law. Rev. T. W. 
 FowLE, M.A. yReady. 
 
 The State in Belation to Trade. 
 T. H. Faerar. 
 
 The State in Relation to La- 
 bour. W. Stanley Jevons, LL.D., 
 M.A., F.R.S. IReiUy. 
 
 The State and the Land. F. 
 Pollock, late Fellow of Trinity Col- 
 lege, Cambridge. \Itt the press. 
 
 The State and the Church. Hon. 
 Arthur Elliot, M.P. \Ready. 
 
 Foreign Relations. SpeNCER 
 Walpole, Author of " The History of 
 England from 1815." \Ready. 
 
 India. J. S. Cotton, late Fellow 
 
 of Queen's College, Oxford. 
 
 (2) Colonies and dependen- 
 cies. E. J. Payne, Fellow of 
 University College, Oxford. 
 
 MACMILLAN & CO., LONDON. 
 
CHARLES KINGSLEY'S WORKS. 
 
 Collected Edition, complete in XXVIII. Volumes, in uniform binding. 
 Crown 8vo, 6.r. each. 
 
 Poems. Complete Edition. 
 
 TTeast. A Problem. 
 
 Alton Locke : Tailor and Poet. 
 
 Hypatia ; or, New Foes with an 
 Old Face. 
 
 Olaucus ; or, The Wonders of the 
 Sea Shore. With Illustrations. 
 
 "Westward Ho ! 
 
 Tlie Heroes; or, Greek Fairy 
 Tales for my Children. With Illustra- 
 tions. 
 
 Two Years Ag'O. 
 
 Tlie Water Babies : A Fairy Tale 
 for a Land Baby ""With Illustrations by 
 Sir Noel Paton, R.S.A., &c. 
 
 The Koman and the Teuton. 
 Lectures before the University of Cam- 
 bridge. With Preface by Professor 
 Max MflLLER. 
 
 Hereward the Wake. 
 
 The Hermits. 
 
 Sladam How and Lady Why; 
 
 or, First Lessons in Earth Lore for 
 Children. Illustrated. 
 At Last : A Christmas in the West 
 Indies. With numerous Illustrations- 
 
 Prose Idylls, New and Old. 
 
 With an Illustration. 
 Plays and Puritans; and other 
 
 Historical Essays. 
 Historical Essays. 
 
 Sanitary and Social Essays. 
 Scientific Lectures and Essays. 
 Literary and General Lectures. 
 ViUag'e and Town and Country 
 
 Sermons. 
 Sermons on H'ational Subjects. 
 Sermons for the Times. 
 Good News of God. 
 
 The Gospel of the Pentateuch ; 
 
 and David. 
 The Water of Life, and other 
 
 Sermojis. 
 Discipline, and other Sermons. 
 
 Westminster Sermons. With a 
 Preface. 
 
 ISliscellanies. 2 vols. Crown 8vo, 
 
 1 2 J. 
 Selections from the Writings. 
 
 With Portrait. Crown 8vo, 6s. 
 The Ancien Segrime. Crown 8vo, 
 
 6s. 
 Phaethon ; or, Loose Thoughts 
 
 for Loose Thinkers. Cro%vn 8vo, 2S. 
 Town Geology. Crown 8vo, 5^. 
 Health and Education. Crown 
 
 8vo, 6s, 
 Out of the Deep. Words for the 
 
 Sorrowful. From the writings of 
 
 Charles Kingslev. Extra fcap. Svo, 
 
 3J. 6d. 
 
 " No English author has ever appeared in a more charming form. . . . This is not an 
 Edition de tuxCt but it is that much better thing for work-a-day readers, an edition of 
 admirable taste and most pleasant use." — Pali Mall Gazette. 
 
 Now ready, printed on fine paper, complete in XI. Volumes. 
 Globe Svo, 5J-. each. 
 
 EVERSLEY EDITION. 
 CHARLES KINGSLEY'S NOVELS. 
 
 WESTWABD HO ! 2 vols. YEAST. I vol. 
 
 TWO YEAKS AGO. 2 vols. HEBBWAED. 2 vols. 
 
 HYPATIA. 2 vols. ALTON LOCKE. 2 vols. 
 
 MACMILLAN & CO., LONDOM. 
 
Messrs. MCMILLAN & CO.'s BIOGRAPHICAL SERIES. 
 
 Crown 8vo, uniformly bound, price 6s. each. 
 
 SFIIf OZA : A Study. By the Rev. Dr. James Martineau. With a 
 Portrait Photographed from the Original Painting in the Wolfenbuttel 
 Library. 
 
 CATHERINE AND CBAtTFITRD TAIT, Wife and Son of 
 
 Archibald Campbell, Archbishop of Canterbury : A Memoir. 
 Edited, at the request of the Archbishop, by the Rev. W. BenhAM, 
 B.D. With Two Portraits engraved by Jeens. New and Cheaper 
 Edition. 
 
 BERNABD (ST.). The Life and Times of St. Bernard, Abbot of 
 Clairvaux. By J. C. MORISON, M.A. New Edition. 
 
 CHABIiOTTE BRONTE: A Monograph. ByT. WemyssReid. 
 Third Edition. 
 
 THE LIFE AND WORK OF MARY CARPENTER. By 
 
 J. ESTLIN Carpenter, M.A. With Steel Portrait. 
 
 ST. ANSELM. By the Very Rev. R. W. Church, M.A., Dean of 
 SL Paul's. New Edition. 
 
 GREAT CHRISTIANS OF FRANCE : St. Louis and Calvin. 
 
 By M. GuizoT, Member of the Institute of France. 
 
 ALFRED THE GREAT. By Thomas Hughes, Q.C. 
 
 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES, 1852-75. By Harriet Mar- 
 tineau.' With Four Additional Sketches, and Autobiographical 
 Sketch, Fifth Edition. 
 
 FRANCIS OP ASSISL By Mrs, Oliphant. New Edition. 
 
 VICTOR EMMANUEL II., First King of Italy. By G. S. 
 
 GODKIX. New Edition. 
 
 MACMILLAN & CO., LONDON.