whether in this country or in France. These passages are taken, the first from Tristram Shandy, the second from A Sentimental Journey:

"Though my father persisted in not going on with the discourse, yet he could not get my Uncle Toby's smoke-jack out of his head. Piqued as he was at first with it, there was something in the comparison at the bottom which hit his fancy; for which purpose, resting his elbow upon the table, and reclining the right side of his head upon the palm of his hand, but looking first steadfastly in the fire, he began to commune with himself and philosophise about it. But his spirits being wore out with the fatigues of investigating new tracts, and the constant exertion of his faculties upon that variety of subjects which had taken their turn in the discourse, the idea of the smoke-jack soon turned all his ideas upside down, so that he fell asleep almost before he knew what he was about.

"As for my Uncle Toby, his smoke-jack had not made a dozen revolutions before he fell asleep also. Peace be with them both! Dr. Slop is above stairs: Trim is busy in turning an old pair of jack-boots into a couple of mortars to be employed in the siege of Messina next summer, and is this instant boring the touch-holes with the point of a hot poker: all my heroes are off my hands; 'tis the first time I have had a moment to spare, and I'll make use of it, and with my preface."

"When we had got within half a league of Moulins, at a little opening in the road leading to a thicket, I discovered poor Maria sitting under a poplar ; she was sitting with her elbow in her lap, and her head leaning on one side within her hand; a small brook ran at the foot of the tree.

"I bid the postilion go on with the chaise to Moulins, and La Fleur to bespeak my supper; and that I would walk after him.

"She was dress'd in white, and much as my friend described her, except that her hair hung loose, which before was twisted within a silk net. She had, superadded likewise to her jacket, a pale green ribband which fell across her shoulder to the waist; at the end of which hung her pipe. Her goat had been as faithless as her lover; and she had got a little dog in lieu of him, which she had kept tied by a string to her girdle; as I looked at her dog, she drew him towards her with the string. Thou shalt not leave me, Sylvio' she said. I looked in Maria's eyes, and saw she was thinking more of her father than of her lover or her little goat; for as she uttered them the tears trickled down her cheeks."

6

The present writer is obliged to record an opinion at variance with what is usual among critics when he confesses a great pre

ference for the Sentimental Journey over Tristram Shandy. In the earlier book, no doubt, the humour, which is sometimes worthy of Shakespeare, is superlatively fine, where it makes itself felt; but this is at intervals, through splendid oases in what is now little better than a desert of oddity, dulness, and indelicacy. In the Sentimental Journey the wit is perhaps less brilliant, but it is more evenly distributed, and there is not a dull page in the book. There is an extraordinary completeness of impression here, a delicacy of light and colour, an artistic reserve, which were totally wanting, perhaps wilfully excluded, from Tristram Shandy. Sentiment, it may be said, has gained on humour, and few English critics have any patience with Sterne's sentiment. It is, however, the very blood in the veins of his style, and to disregard it seriously is to fail to comprehend the author. There is no writer with whom it is more necessary to be in intellectual sympathy than Sterne. We must think of him as he was, with his thirst for enjoyment, for colour, for mental and physical sunlight, bound down to the proprieties by his cassock of an English clergyman, standing, as he says, "at the window in my dusty black coat, and looking through the glass to see the world in yellow, blue, and green, running at the ring of pleasure." He is much more himself, much happier and more inimitable, when he is surveying French life in this wistful and indulgent humour, than when he is riding the hobby-horses of his crotchets, and boring us with Slawkenbergius. In his latest work the theme is slight enough, but the absence of cant, the apparent artlessness, the freaky and childish oscillation between laughter and tears, the quickness of observation in little things, in which last quality Sterne is absolutely unrivalled, combine to delight all who are not too solemn to be pleased.

The style of Sterne is more strongly marked than that of any of his contemporaries. In such examples as the episode of Nameth (in Tristram Shandy), and the story of Maria, it is a sort of essence evidently distilled word by word, phrase by phrase, with infinite attention to artistic beauty and melody.

In other cases he seems to be so unaffected as to aim at no style at all, but the careful reader will generally suspect this artlessness to be the result of labour. He had evidently studied the French writers of the age very carefully, and had adopted many of their roseate graces. It has to be added, in the briefest sketch of this very difficult writer, that his extraordinary originality did not guard him against that snare of the indolent, plagiarism, in which he was a terrible sinner; that his delicacy of style and feeling do not prevent his being, not indeed gross like Smollett, but scandalously prurient; like Aretino, il ricane dans l'ombre; and finally, that his sentimentality is commonly only skin-deep, and adopted more for purposes of intellectual selfindulgence than for philanthropy. Critics of the present day, however, are scarcely ready enough to perceive how civilising a thing this conscious tenderness was in an age and country that were still in many ways brutally barbaric. It is easy in analysing Sterne to point out faults and shortcomings; it is harder to give a suggestion of his marvellous charm as an artist, and of the enduring beauty of his pathetic humour.

The success of the great masters of realistic fiction created a demand for novels, and a great number were produced by minor hands only to be forgotten. The solitary instance in which anything like reputation was gained by one of these imitators was in the case of Charles Johnstone (?-1800), whose Chrysal, or the Adventures of a Guinea, originally in two volumes, attracted great attention in 1760. This savage and gloomy book, which, perhaps, took its form from a reminiscence of Addison's "Adventures of a Shilling," in the Tatler, was a very clever following of Smollett in his most satiric mood. It was several times reprinted before the author completed it by publishing two volumes more in 1765. In 1759 Dr. Samuel Johnson produced his didactic romance, Rasselas. A little later, in 1764, Horace Walpole inaugurated the medieval school of fiction, which was to culminate in Walter Scott, with his Castle of Otranto. In 1766 appeared Henry Brooke's Fool of Quality, and that ever fresh and ever charming

masterpiece, Goldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield. Henry Mackenzie, inspired by Sterne, opened his series of melancholy romances with The Man of Feeling in 1771, the year of Smollett's death. We shall speak of the most important of these works in dealing with their respective authors; several of them still hold a prominent place in literature. But they are merely satellites in attendance on the three great lights of eighteenth-century fiction, on Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett, and when the third of these departed, the art of novel-writing ceased to progress, in any large sense, until it was taken up forty years afterwards by Jane Austen and Sir Walter Scott.

CHAPTER IX

JOHNSON AND THE PHILOSOPHERS

A CRITIC Who is certainly unprejudiced has called Bishop Butler "the most patient, original, and candid of philosophical writers." The second quarter of the eighteenth century was not rich in contributions to religious literature, but it is to the glory of the Church of England that it possessed this singularly interesting man. The enthusiasm and direct ardent rhetoric of the seventeenth century were now things of the past. The very struggle between orthodoxy and the Deists was no longer novel; in the prosaic and mathematical theology of Clarke, stuck full of intellectual diagrams, it had ceased to be a spirit of warmth or movement. It is difficult to be convinced that on one side or the other there had been of late any great doctrinal fervour of faith or disbelief. The last of the genuine old Deists was Thomas Chubb (1680-1747), the tallow-chandler, a writer of little dignity. The orthodox theologians, in spite of their indignant and perpetual protestations, had really resigned so much that the creed of the English Church was becoming unnerved. The proper stimulant required by the religious mind of the country was given on one side by the new Puritans, by Law and Wesley and Whitefield, and on the other by an Anglican philosopher of extraordinary force and genius. So much had gradually been admitted to be doubtful that the scribbling bishops were ready to let Pilate's question pass virtually unanswered; Butler came, and revealed a