matter, divisible ad infinitum. They have been dividing and subdividing for some centuries past, and the subdivisions are as likely to be subdividing for ever; insomuch that law, thus divisible, debateable, and delay. able, is become a greater grievance than all that it was intended to redress. I lately asked a pleasant gentleman of the coif if he thought it possible for a poor man to obtain a decree, in matter of property, against a rich man. He smiled, and answered according to scripture, that with man it was impossible, but that all things were possible to God.' I suppose he meant that the decrees of the courts of Westminster were hereafter to be reversed. 6 Edward Moore (1712–57), author of Fables for the Female Sex, was a native of Abingdon in Berkshire, son of a Dissenting minister. He was for some years a linen-draper, but having failed in business, adopted literature as a profession. He wrote several plays, of which The Foundling (1748) and Gil Blas (1751) were not successes, whereas The Gamester (1753) was translated into French, Dutch, and German, and is still sometimes performed. The prologue and some of the best parts of it were by Garrick, who played in it. Moore, under the name of Adam Fitz-adam, edited a series of essays called The World (1753–56), for which he himself wrote only some sixty out of two hundred and ten numbers, the rest being by patrons and wits such as Lyttelton, Chesterfield, Soame Jenyns, and Horace Walpole. Moore's poem, The Trial of Selim the Persian, is largely flattery of Lyttelton. The Fables of Moore rank next to those of Gay, but are inferior to them both in choice of subject and in poetical merit; they are rather didactic. The three last are by Henry Brooke. Goldsmith thought that justice had not been done to Moore as a poet: 'It was upon his Fables he founded his reputation, but they are by no means his best production.' His (prose) tragedy of the Gamester, even apart from Garrick's additions, is a much better bit of work, and some of his verses-such as the following-are finished with greater care. The Happy Marriage. How blest has my time been, what joys have I known, Through walks grown with woodbines, as often we stray, To try her sweet temper sometimes am I seen, What though on her cheek the rose loses its hue, Ye shepherds so gay, who make love to ensnare And cheat with false vows the too credulous fair; In search of true pleasure, how vainly you roam! To hold it for life, you must find it at home. As a jeu d'esprit, the following is sprightly enough, and not without some basis in truth: A Hymn to Poverty. O Poverty! thou source of human art, And every charm to Farinelli's song. By thee the lawyer pleads. The soldier's arm It is a curious fact that Moore died while the last number of the collected edition of his periodical, the World, which described the fatal but imaginary illness of the author, was passing through the press. He was Isaac Bickerstaffe, play-writer, was born in Ireland about 1735, and at eleven became page to Lord Chesterfield, the Lord-Lieutenant. afterwards an officer of marines, but was dismissed the service, and in 1772 had to flee the country on a capital charge. Nothing is certainly known regarding his after-life, but he is supposed to have died on the Continent in or soon after 1812. Of his numerous pieces, produced between 1766 and 1771, the best known is The Maid of the Mill. He constantly works into his plays all manner of proverbial sayings, familiar scraps from the poets, and tags of every kind. In The Sultan we have: Let men say whate'er they will, Woman, woman rules them still. 'We all love a pretty girl-under the rose' is a song in Love in a Village.-There is no known connection between this playwright, odd though it seems, and the nom-de-guerre of 'Isaac Bickerstaffe' used by Swift in his attacks on Partridge the bookseller and quack concoctor of prophecy almanacs (1707-9). Swift took the name, he said, from a locksmith's sign in Longacre; and with Swift's assent Steele adopted the pseudonym for the eponymous hero of his Tatler, started in 1709 while the pamphlet-war was still being waged. It is of course quite natural to suppose that in any Dublin family of the name of Bickerstaffe the Tatler's Christian name might have been given to a boy born a few years after Steele's death. Laurence Sterne,* a clergyman of most unclerical disposition, followed in his profession the most notable recent members of his family, though not his father, who was a captain in the army. The Sternes were a family of good antiquity, who bore as crest the bird celebrated by their son, the starling; and Sterne's great-grandfather Richard, a strong Cavalier, was first Master of Jesus College, Cambridge, then Bishop of Carlisle, and Archbishop of York from 1664 till his death in 1683. His sons obtained establishments as squires and ecclesiastics in the district; and the third son married an heiress, Mary Jaques of Elvington near York. This pair had a large family, of which Roger was the second. He married Agnes, the daughter or step-daughter of a sutler named Nuttle (N.B.'He was in debt to him,' says the graceless offspring of this union); and Laurence, their eldest son, was born at Clonmel in Ireland on the 24th of November 1713. The peace of Utrecht (1713) for a time deprived Captain Sterne of degrees B.A. (1736) and M.A. (1740)—at the usual time, though he does not seem to have resided, as was still not uncommon, for the whole seven years. He was ordained deacon in the same year in which he took his degree, and priest in 1738, being immediately appointed by his uncle to the benefice of Sutton-in-the-Forest, a few miles from York. Hardly the slightest fact or anecdote exists in reference to his Cambridge sojourn, except that he there made the acquaintance (an agreeable if LAURENCE STERNE. From an Engraving by Fisher after Reynolds. his occupation; but he was soon put on the establishment again, and the family 'followed the drum' in divers parts of England and Ireland for years, many children being born but few surviving, till at last (1731) Captain Roger died in Jamaica of the effects of fever following upon a duel-wound at Gibraltar. Sterne had been sent to school at Halifax in Yorkshire; and though his father's means were always small, and perished with him, his cousin, Sterne of Elvington, and his uncle, Jaques Sterne, who became a powerful pluralist in the archdiocese of York, behaved to the boy with a kindness which was either more amiably given or more amiably taken than in the similar case of Swift. He was admitted to Jesus College (where his relationship to the Archbishop procured him a scholarship) in July 1733, and took his 78 not wholly profitable one) of the future 'Eugenius' -John Hall, who had not yet taken the additional name of Stevenson -a member of the same college and a distant connection of the Sternes. Before he obtained his living he had begun to court, and on Easter Monday 1741 he married, Elizabeth Lumley, who had very good blood, a small fortune, and family influence sufficient to procure her husband the additional living of Stillington. His uncle, whose favour he retained till much later, was able also to give him divers prebendal and other appointments in or connected with the chapter of York. No single one of these endowments was of much value; but, taken together, their income must have been comfortable. It might have been supposed that a man of such intense literary idiosyncrasy as Sterne would have soon turned to writing in the vacant hours of which he must have had so many. For the 'duty' which he says (and doubtless truly) he did was, in the first half of the eighteenth century, of the least exhausting or absorbing kind. But no one of the very few and by no means certain fragments that we have of his is early (putting a sermon or two out of the question); and his own brief account, which there is no reason to question, is that he spent near twenty years' doing the said duty, with 'books, painting, fiddling, and shooting' for his amusements. It is pretty certain that we may add 'flirting;' but even of this we have no * Copyright 1902 by J. B. Lippincott Company to the end of the first line on page 405. certain record till close upon the year 1760, when he 'broke out ten thousand strong' with Tristram Shandy. Hardly the slightest information is available as to the reasons which made a man of nearly fifty thus suddenly become an author, and one of the first rank. He tells us that he wanted money to repair some losses by unlucky farming experiments; we know that for some time he had had access, in the library of Hall Stevenson at Skelton ('Crazy') Castle, to a large collection of out-of-the-way books, especially French of the sixteenth century; and we know further that the success of Richardson, Fielding and Smollett had for some little time past established the novel in something like the old place of the drama, as an appeal to public favour at once fashionable and profitable. The first two volumes of the book were published simultaneously in York and London on New Year's Day 1760; their extraordinary originality (partly genuine, partly artificial) took the town at once, and Sterne, who had gone up to see after the publication, was 'lionised' by society in a manner which was probably as welcome to him as either fame or profit. The pompous and orthodox Warburton gave him (with some not superfluous cautions) a present of money; Lord Falconbridge gave him yet another Yorkshire living-Coxwold ; everybody asked him to dinner. He was encouraged to print some sermons of a tolerably serious kind, and when summer came he returned to Yorkshire determined to repeat his success at the opening of the next year. With rather unusual luck he did so; sold the third and fourth volumes for nearly £400 to Dodsley, and had another season of glory in London as a bachelor. In the third winter, 1761-62, he published the third pair rather earlier (in December), and, obtaining leave of absence from his duties, took his wife and daughter Lydia to France. Here they spent the rest of the winter and the spring in Paris, and nearly two years in the south at Toulouse and elsewhere. Mrs and Miss Sterne, indeed, remained in France for several years; but Sterne came back in the middle of 1764, and got a fourth pair of volumes ready for January 1765, when he repeated his old enjoy ment of success in London, besides drawing subscriptions for a fresh batch of sermons, more in character. In October of this year he went abroad again, extending his journey to Rome and even Naples, and meeting his family in France, but still rot bringing them home with him. In the latter part of 1766 and the early part of 1767 he once more followed his old order of writing, publishing, and going up to London to enjoy the success of an instalment of Tristram-in this case one volume only, the ninth and last. And he then carried on his once admired, now slightly ridiculous, philandering with 'Eliza,' the 'Bramine'-in other words, Mrs Draper, the 'grass-widow' of an Indian functionary. By this time Sterne's health-which in early manhood had been, he says, very good, but about the time of his first successes had broken, so as to give more than pretext for his journeys to the South-was very seriously impaired. His wife and daughter spent the winter with him at York; and he then made, alone, his usual publishing and merry-making expedition to London, with the Sentimental Journey in Tristram's place. It was published on 28th February 1768, and Sterne himself died of consumption on 18th March in his Bond Street lodgings, without any relation, friend, or person of his own degree to look after him. His dead body is said to have been robbed, which is not at all improbable; and his grave in the burial-ground of St George's at Paddington, to have been violated by body-snatchers, which is not at all impossible. His wife, who was left in bad circumstances, did not survive him many years; his daughter married a Frenchman named Medalle, published her father's letters with extraordinary want of decency or want of care, and is said to have atoned for this by being guillotined under the French Revolution. Quite recently details have been published respecting her conduct at school, which show that she must have had not a little of the mischievous wit of her father. Not very much can be said for Sterne's moral character except that he does not seem to have been at all ill-natured; that he had none of the underhand tricks which have rather too often distinguished men of letters, and for which his great contemporaries Pope and Voltaire are specially infamous; that he was most sincerely and unselfishly fond of his daughter; and that, though anything but a good husband in some ways, he seems to have done his utmost to supply his wife liberally, in her independent wanderings, out of means which were certainly far from abundant. How far his exorbitant philanderings transgressed the orbit of admitted morality, as well as that of propriety in the general sense, charity may forbear from deciding in the lucky absence of positive evidence. But unluckily these philanderings, though they are free from the callous brutality which smirches the love-making of the Restoration, are made almost more distasteful to moderns by the sickly sentimentality and the sniggering prurience which pervade both his published and his private writings. These writings themselves, however, are very remarkable things, and may even be called great, though they are by no means faultless. Among their faults, that ugly one which has just been glanced at needs no further mention and admits of no defence; but some others of their characteristics present an interesting though difficult mixture of the attractive and the irritating. In form, the two main works (the Sermons and the few minor pieces need little notice; and the interest of the Letters, though great, is wholly biographical) are, as has been said, novels; but novels of a very peculiar kind. The consecutive narrative interest of Tristram Shandy is almost nil. The book purports to give an account of the hero's life and opinions; but as a matter of fact he rarely appears at all in propria persona, though his birth and the events directly preceding and succeeding it are dealt with at great length. The three principal actors of this comedy are Walter Shandy, Tristram's father, a whimsical humourist and eccentric philosopher of the type which, rightly or wrongly, was already accepted all over Europe as specially English; his wife, a lady as matter-of-fact as her husband is eccentric; and his brother Toby, a veteran of Marlborough's wars, a gentleman to his finger-ends, amiable almost to the angelic, and guileless to a point which is sometimes rather dangerously near the imbecile. Round these gather or disperse, in groupings now vivid, now shadowy, the servants of the Shandy household Dr Slop, a Papist practitioner; Corporal Trim, one of the greatest of the whole company, Uncle Toby's body-servant, admirer, and shrewder analogue; and Mrs Wadman, a wily widow with designs on Toby. But though certain portions, or at least episodes of the action which the whole company of performers may be easily supposed to work out, do actually make their appearance, they are very rarely of much substantive importance, and generally mere occasions for endless digression and rigmarolehumorous, sentimental, pathetic, purely nonsensical, as the thing may strike the writer's fancy and as he conceives it likely to satisfy or merely to raise the reader's appetite. The Sentimental Journey, on the other hand, though the general characteristics of its method are much the same, consists of rather more uniform beads strung much more closely on a thread which, though shorter, is far more continuous and of stouter texture. Much of it certainly is an embellished and fancifully coloured narrative of Sterne's actual experiences in his two foreign journeys; it can hardly be said that any of the actual incidents is impossible or even highly improbable in itself; and the central figure, subject and object at once, is not merely a pretty obvious portrait of Sterne partly as he was, partly as he would have liked to be, but also one of the most authentic and carefully worked out personages of the world of fiction. The solidity, light as it seems, of the frame of the book is best proved by the scores and hundreds of subsequent books which have been modelled upon it, with a success varying only with the extent of the writer's talent. In both books, however, and especially in Tristram, the very last thing that the author has wished, or has been contented to do, is to follow any single and simple scheme. A constant flicker of variety, not a steady glow of illustration, is what he aims at, and no means are too odd, too apparently childish, too merely mechanical for him. In the original editions of Tristram Shandy one page, instead of being printed, is marbled like the end papers of a bound book, and another is simply blacked all over. Blanks of various dimensions abound; asterisks and points are constant ; dashes come at almost every line. Immediately above this mere machinery come the contortions and oddities of the style itself, a very admirable and, when the author chooses, a very pure style at its best, but constantly fretted by breaks and aposiopeses - now conversational, now grandiloquent, now positively vulgar, lapsing now into regular dialogue with the supposed reader, now into soliloquy; in short, into anything that may sufficiently twist and vary the thread of humdrum narration or exposition. As a yet further means of securing variety and attraction, Sterne resorted to a practice which for some time escaped notice to a large extent, but which, when it was fully exposed many years after his death by the investigations of a Manchester physician, Dr Ferrier, became for a time, and has not altogether ceased to be, the occasion of rather unintelligent censure. Either because, in the long. interval between his youth and the publication of his first book, he had so packed his mind with reading that relief was natural; or from the scarcely less natural diffidence which a late-writing author might feel in his power to interest 'out of his own head;' or (most probable of all) from a certain impishness which took delight in passing off other people's property as his own, Sterne, while by no means stingy of actual quotation and reference, sometimes real, sometimes imaginary, was exceedingly free in borrowing from other writers without any acknowledgment. His chief creditor was Rabelais-a case in which there could be no disguise. But he was also largely indebted to Burton's Anatomy, a treasure which, after being well appreciated for nearly the whole of the seventeenth century, had become one of those neglected by the eighteenth. And he also conveyed from a host of obscurer writers of different times-authors of French fatrasie, like the Moyen de Parvenir, Latin canonists and schoolmen, miscellanists of all kinds from whom something odd could be obtained. Although there may have been unnecessary mystification in his manner of executing these conveyances, it is in his case, as in some if not most others, only those ignorant enough not to suspect or recognise the borrowing who will be ill-judging enough to use harsh language about it. As has been often and most justly said, a writer of Sterne's genius simply cannot steal-because he cannot help making the stolen things his own in the process. He does not kidnap, he adopts; and, in adopting, endows what is adopted with his own position and wealth. Certain limitations, however, are of necessity imposed on a mosaic of this kind: first of all a certain artificiality; and secondly, the exclusion of at least some sources of the touches of nature by which the author succeeds in enlivening the artificial. Sterne could hardly be he certainly never is-sublime; he is never passionate; he is never profound. Pathos and humour are the two great springs upon which he works. Both are real; but the first is to modern tastes perhaps of a more dubious kind than the last. Sterne can be purely pathetic-of that there is no doubt; but his pathos constantly passes into the singular variety of emotion called 'sentiment' or-generally in the country which invented it, and sometimes in England while it was popular-'sensibility.' This may best be described as a cultivated pathos, extremely self-conscious, and working itself up and out according to an elaborate and rather conventional set of rules. It has much to do with the artificial gallantry and bravado of the 'heroic' plays and romances of the previous century, from which, indeed, it was an almost direct offshoot. It had been practised in France for nearly a hundred years before Sterne's time; but he himself was by far its greatest artist, and his popularity in France itself was almost as great as in England, while his direct influence there was almost greater. But in France there was also growing up, with Rousseau as its prophet, a new kind of sentiment crossed and heightened with the new nature-worship. Of this last, though contemporaries in England like Gray display it, we find scarcely a trace in Sterne, whose donkeys and starlings are brought into direct relation with human sentiment; while the scenes which serve as backgrounds for all the figures are backgrounds and decorations merely. For us therefore his sentiment always, and even his pathos, where he transcends sentiment sometimes, smells too much of the lamp. To no one perhaps does a celebrated caution of Professor Bain's better apply -that both with the embrace and the lachrymal flow the occasion should be adequate and the actuality rare.' It is a question whether even the world-famous deathbed of Le Fèvre does not now require something of distinct effort and preparation in order fully to enjoy it. The great companion scene of the dead donkey is given up even by some who hold to Le Fèvre; and Maria of Moulins (the 'young 'ooman as kept a goat') can at best hold a place between. Only the starling passage perhaps can completely pass muster; and Sterne has by no means improved it by crossing the 's and dotting the 's sentimentally in the subsequent application to the human captive. His humour is safer for those who can appreciate humour-not perhaps a very large class. Some foreign critics, not to the manner born, have even gone so far as to see in Sterne the humourist par excellence, the typical example or exponent of this specially English product. This is of course a mistake, though not an inexcusable one. We have at least half-a-dozen humourists, from Chaucer to Carlyle, who are greater examples of the quality. But Sterne is undoubtedly the chief of no small province in the great kingdom of Humour. What has been said above of his general will apply capitally here to his particular merits and drawbacks. His humour is usually a little, and often extremely, artificial; and he is distinguished from most of the greater humourists (not perhaps from Carlyle, who owed him more than is always recognised) by being unable to let his humorous strokes produce their effect without meddling. He seems to watch himself in the performance of the trick, to introduce fresh twists and touches in the very doing of it. In other words, he is intensely, nervously, feverishly self-conscious; he cannot wear his mask or his motley steadily, but is always shifting the one to peep from behind it, and fiddling with the other to make it set more becomingly and show its colours better. Hence it is possible for Sterne to be, to some moods, a rather teasing writer; but in these moods it is best simply to lay him down. Other things being equal, and the reader well disposed, there is no fear of his failing to give satisfaction by the restless glancing play of his intellect; while the contrasted introduction of feeling supplies again (with a certain allowance) a not disagreeable set-off and escapement. Nor, for those who want somewhat more of the psychological interest in literature, are the shadowings forth of Toby and Trim and the rest in Tristram, of Sterne himself in the Journey, negligible things. The 'gentleman in the black silk smalls' is for thoughts that are not soon exhausted. He is, however, not an easy writer to understand by specimens, nor is he in all respects easy to select from. In one sense no doubt, he is 'made up of extracts.' But these extracts are by no means always so separable as they look: they constantly require the knowledge of a not always contiguous context; and, in the more humorous passages especially, there is always the danger of slipping into one of Sterne's puddles of dirty water, which do not allow themselves to be filled up or blocked out without risk to the comprehension of the whole. More especially is this the case in Tristram Shandy, where the incidents attending the author-hero's birth, and the eccentricities and misfortunes of Dr Slop, and my uncle Toby's wound, and the siege of Namur where it was inflicted, and the fancy sieges in little with which he and Corporal Trim beguiled their halfpay, and the far more formidable siege laid by Widow Wadman to my uncle Toby himself, and the first sketch of the Sentimental Journey sup posed to be made by Tristram and occupying an entire volume-not to mention such pure extravagances as the curse of Ernulphus, and the humours of Yorick and Eugenius and the chapter, and the story of Diego, and a dozen other things -have a genuine metaphysical connection for all their apparent desultoriness and deviation. The Sentimental Journey, much shorter, is also still more closely connected; and the successive tableaux have a real periodic bond like that of an elaborate sentence. Thus it is rather Sterne's manner as a writer, than the complete nature of |