gentlemen of independent fortunes, who had amused themselves with this pastime for the best part of a century, without having ever felt the least alarm from sickness or disgust."

Are they not still with us?

But

Smollett does not belong to the order of creative minds. They are few and far between. he is not a copyist of other men: his presentation of life is, at least, individualistic and his own. What strikes us is the inequality of his work. Even in those of his books that will live there is a marked and extraordinary disparity of level. But we have to remember that he spent the larger part of his literary life slaving diligently at his desk for a living; and he was one of the few men of his time who drew a competence from the proceeds of his pen only. He snatched at his original work in the intervals of compilation and journalism; and this is not the way in which great books are written. There are many qualities we must not look for in Smollett-sympathetic feeling, poetry, colour; these are words which have scarcely any meaning in connection with his work. Its merits are raciness, strength, clear outline, and effective line-sketches of character, habit, manner, and episode. The conclusion of the whole matter was summarised by Thackeray in a sentence.

"He did not invent much, as I fancy, but had

the keenest perceptive faculty, and described what he saw with wonderful relish and delightful broad humour."

And to this there is nothing to add, except, that if Smollett does not make much difference or add anything to the story of the growth of the novel, he influenced profoundly a greater novelist than himself—Dickens, who knew almost by heart every word in Smollett's novels.

THE NOVELS OF SMOLLETT

The Adventures of Roderick Random, 1748; The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, 1751; The Adventures of Ferdinand, Count Fathom, 1753; The Adventures of Sir Lancelot Greaves, 1761; The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker, 1771.

CHAPTER VI

LAURENCE STERNE (1713-68).

LAURENCE STERNE, because he stands in a class by himself, has been compared to almost everybody Rousseau, Jean Paul Richter, Goethe, Byron, Burton of the Anatomy, Rabelais, Cervantes, Heine, Thackeray, Charles Lamb, Carlyle, Trollope, Dickens, Meredith-and probably the list might be added to indefinitely. In suggesting any comparison every critic has happily landed himself in contradiction and inconsistency. And this is as it should be. Sterne was a digression, a preface without a book, a commentary without a text. He lived in an inconsequent sequence of emotions and jottings from life which sprang from nothing but chance and the impulse of the moment, and led to a conclusion as rounded and finished as The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gent. In the life, personality, and work of Sterne the interstices, the digressions, the notes, the side-issues count for most; though they are tied together by a chain of sentiment.

When the French commissary asked Tristram

Shandy who he was, he answered, "Don't puzzle me." Sterne was inexplicable to himself, and he defies definition from the mere outsider. He lived in moods and phases of emotion, and, according as we catch him first in one pose, and then in another, we may compare him to anybody and everybody. Whether it was a dream, a reverie, a flirtation, a journey, or the writing of Tristram Shandy, Sterne gave himself up, with a kind of intellectual sensualism, to the mood, the sentimental emotion, which each experience aroused.

He

And

Sterne has been better understood in Germany, France, and Italy than in his own country. was a romantic sentimentalist of the mind. it is just here that he stands in marked and striking contrast to almost every other literary figure in England of the eighteenth century proper. If we name Addison, Swift, Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, Goldsmith, Johnson, or any other prosewriter of the time, and ask in what single marked characteristic they were all deficient, the answer is almost instinctive they had no vision, no mystical element, no intellectual romanticism. Sterne stands alone in method, genius, and temperament. Whatever may be his faults we bless this unique and peculiar man when we meet with him in our journey across the eighteenth century. He was a sentimental romantic in an age of prose, reason,

and logic; and, if too much sentiment be bad, a little is not without its uses in this work-a-day world. So far as this aspect of Sterne is concerned, Mr. Walter Sichel puts the whole matter well, when he writes:

"He was the first to strike the personal note in prose-fiction. He was its first fantastic, its first master of pathos; the first in eighteenth century prose to perceive the joy, though not the grandeur, of nature, the first to vignette life. He founded modern impressionism, substituting for descriptive literature a diary of sensations, and a scale of cadence for a string of sentences."

Laurence Sterne, the son of an impecunious officer in the Queen's Army, was born at Clonmel in the year 1713. As a child he was carried from one garrison town to another, till we might imagine that the restless wanderings of his early days implanted the fickle habits of his mind. Sterne used to relate how in childhood he was rescued from a mill-race while the mill was working. Unfortunately for the truth of the tale the same story is told of his grandfather, who was Archbishop of York. After leaving Jesus College, Cambridge, Sterne became Vicar of Sutton, near York; and a prebendal stall in the cathedral followed in due course. His wife brought him the useful fortune, for a clergyman, of an additional living. And, till he was forty-six, Sterne was con