Sterne's "Tristram Shandy."

231 his marriage Sterne grew very tired of his wife, and neglected her shamefully. She brought him a small fortune, and soon after his marriage a friend of hers presented him with the living of Stillington, in Yorkshire. At this period of his life, Sterne relates that he had very good health, and amused himself by books, painting, fiddling, and shooting. At Skelton Castle, the library of his friend John Hall Stevenson, author of some tales the indecency of which is much more apparent than the wit, he found a large library, containing many old and curious books, in turning over which he amassed that store of out-of-the-way, if superficial and often secondhand, erudition which he was fond of parading. He was in no hurry to appear as an author. Two sermons preached at York were his only publications, till, in 1759, he astonished the whole reading public by the first two volumes of "Tristram Shandy." They were originally published at York, and were reprinted in London early in 1760.

By "Tristram Shandy" Sterne was elevated from the posi tion of an obscure Yorkshire parson to that of a metropolitan lion of the first magnitude. When he went up to London, invitations to dinner showered thickly upon him, and he was welcomed in all societies of rank and fashion as the humorous, eccentric, sentimental "Mr. Yorick," who had bestowed on them that inestimable boon-a new sensation. Gray says in one of his delightful letters, that at dinners which were honoured by Sterne's presence, the company were invited a fortnight before. "Any man who has a name," said Johnson in a conversation recorded by Boswell, "or who has the power of pleasing, will be very generally invited in London. The man Sterne, I have been told, has had engagements for three months." "And a very dull fellow, too," replied Goldsmith, with perhaps a touch of jealousy. "Why, no, sir," said Johnson. Sterne wisely took advantage of his popularity to publish two volumes of sermons, which, as the production of the author of "Tristram Shandy," attracted an amount of attention which would certainly never have been vouchsafed to them on account of their intrinsic merits. "They are in

the style," says Gray, "I think most proper for the pulpit, and show a strong imagination and a sensible heart; but you see him often tottering on the verge of laughter, and ready to throw his periwig in the face of his audience." Any one who from the latter part of this account may be induced to look over Sterne's sermons with the view of finding in them passages which recall "Tristram Shandy," will assuredly be disappointed. For the most part, they are barren and commonplace enough. To the two volumes of sermons published in 1760 Sterne afterwards added other four. The remaining seven volumes of "Tristram Shandy" appeared at intervals between 1761 and 1767. The latter volumes did not create the same sensation as the former ones: the novelty of the thing had worn off, and the numerous affectations and eccentricities of style began to repel rather than to attract. In 1764 Sterne went to Italy to recover his health, which had become greatly impaired. He returned in 1767, and in the following year published his Sentimental Journey," giving an account, in his peculiar fashion, of his recent travels and of a former visit to France. The "Sentimental Journey" was received with the same rapturous avidity as the first volumes of "Tristram Shandy;" but Sterne was not destined to enjoy any longer the applause which was so sweet to him. He died in London on the 18th of March 1768, much in the manner in which he had wished to die-in hired lodgings and attended by strangers.

Sterne's figure was tall and slight, his face pale and haggard, his general expression penetrating, scrutinising, and satirical. His moral nature, which had, it is to be feared, always something rotten about it, was too weak to endure uninjured the continuous course, trying to all but very strong minds, of flattery and dissipation which his success as an author brought upon him. "He degenerated in London," said David Garrick, "like an ill-transplanted shrub; the incense of the great spoiled his head and their ragouts his stomach. He grew sickly and proud, an invalid in body and mind." In his writings the most tender-hearted and sentimental of men, he was in his conduct heartless, hypo

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critical, and unprincipled. "He preferred," as Byron said, "whining over a dead ass to relieving a living mother." His tainted character communicated itself in part, as it could not but do, to his books. Fielding and Smollett are coarse, but they are never indecent purely for the sake of indecency, as Sterne is. He mars his finest passages by an obscene insinuation or a ribald jest. Like Swift, he had in his nature an inherent love for allusions to subjects which most people are glad to banish from their thoughts. His affectation and his alleged plagiarisms from other writers are of little or no consequence in comparison with the dark stream of pollution. which runs through his books. It was this grievous defect which caused Thackeray to exclaim, "The man is a great jester, not a great humourist." Never was a more thoroughly wrong-headed judgment uttered. Sterne is not only a great humourist, he is one of the greatest of all humourists. "Sterne comes next," writes Carlyle in his Essay on Richter, after mentioning Shakespeare, Swift, and Ben Jonson, "our last specimen of humour, and, with all his faults, our best; our finest, if not our strongest ; for Yorick, and Corporal Trim, and Uncle Toby have yet no brother but in Don Quixote, far as he lies above them." In a style full of tenderness and sweetness he brings before us a series of family portraits, all original, all well marked, and all so delineated that one cannot but love them. The elder Shandy, with his irritability, his pedantry, and his theory about Christian names; Uncle Toby, full of loving-kindness and gentleness to all created beings, harmless and credulous as a child; Corporal Trim, devoted, faithful, and vigilant, are characters so full of graciousness and humanity that for their sake we can readily afford to forgive Sterne much. When we read about Uncle Toby and his bowling-green, with its fortifications, its ammunition, and its counterscarps, we feel inclined to mount behind him and ride his hobby along with him. Many of the best parts of "Tristram Shandy" devoted to Uncle Toby and Corporal Trim are reminiscences of Sterne's youth, when, following his father's regiment, he must have heard thousands of stories

connected with the time when "our troops swore terribly in Flanders," and thus amassed a store of curious anecdotes, which remained in a memory tenacious of such things, and bore good literary fruit after many years.

The leading names in English fiction from the death of Sterne till the time of Sir Walter Scott may be very briefly dealt with. Of Goldsmith, the greatest of them all, soine account is given in the following chapter. Sterne's pathos found a not very successful imitator in Henry Mackenzie, whose "Man of Feeling," published in 1771, is a very lackadaisical novel, though it had many readers at one time. Horace Walpole in his "Castle of Otranto" (1764), and Mrs. Rad cliffe (1764-1823); wrote wild romantic tales, somewhat after the fashion of the old school of romance. Mrs. Radcliffe's works belong to a class of fiction that would now find favour only with children. After having led us to suppose that the wonderful effects which occur in her novels have been produced by supernatural agency, she systematically unravels her own spells, and shows how in reality they were the result of natural causes. William Beckford, whom Byron celebrates as "England's wealthiest son," published in 1784 his little Oriental romance called "Vathek," which is still read, owing to its originality and its fine description of the terrible Hall of Eblis. William Godwin's best novel, "Caleb Williams," which appeared in 1794, was intended to be "a general review of the modes of domestic and unrecorded despotism by which man becomes the destroyer of man." It was thus a "novel with a purpose," one of the first of that bad class; but the moral is not obtrusively thrust forward; indeed, had the author not told us, we should be rather puzzled to say what the moral really is. "Caleb Williams," inartistic though it often be, is a singularly powerful and fascinating novel, which, as Hazlitt says, can never be begun without being finished, or finished without stamping itself upon the memory of the reader. The work of recent times to which it bears the closest resemblance is the "Scarlet Letter" of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Hawthorne was master of an infinitely more

Miss Burney, Miss Edgeworth, &c. 235

polished and flexible style than Godwin, but the characteristics which give both books such a firın hold on the reader are the same. In both, the plot is so slight that it might easily be told in half a page; in both, the marvellous picture of the workings of the human mind, sombre and melancholy though it be, which they present, enchains the imagination of the reader.

Three lady writers, among the earliest of the numerous sisterhood who have obtained distinction as novelists, remain to be mentioned. Fanny Burney (Madame D'Arblay) introduced the fashion of writing studies of society, such as the majority of modern English novels are, by "Evelina," which appeared in 1778. She had, like most women, a keen perception of little traits of character and peculiarities of manner, and described them with sprightliness and a good deal of broad humour. Nor was she destitute of a real though slender vein of pathos. "Evelina" charmed Burke and Johnson, and if it is generally neglected now, that is not owing to its want of merit, but because it has been shelved aside by more modern works, which, though much talked of at present, will probably share its fate when they are a century old. "Cecilia," Miss Burney's second novel, which was published in 1782, is on the whole inferior to "Evelina;" it has not the same subcurrent of tender simplicity. The fame of Miss Edgeworth (1767-1849), an Irish lady, is now mainly grounded on her moral tales for juvenile readers, but her sketches of Irish life, such as "The Absentee," &c., show a shrewd and observant mind. Her chief characteristics are cool good sense, combined with a total absence of anything approaching enthusiasm. In society she was a general favourite, owing to her unassuming manners and freedom from pretension or affectation. A greater novelist than either Miss Burney or Miss Edgeworth was Miss Austen (1775-1817), among whose admirers may be reckoned such men as Macaulay, Archbishop Whately, Scott, and many others of equal celebrity. Her works are "Sense and Sensibility," "Pride and Prejudice," "Emma," "Mansfield Park," "Northanger Abbey," and "Per