as Goldoni fought off the spleen by habitually standing on his guard like a wary fencer, Sterne adopted mirth as a panacea, clutching at the straws on the tide of sorrow with the childish impulse of desperation. "I am fabricating them" (the last volumes of Tristram Shandy), he says, "for the laughing part of the world; for the melancholy part of it, I have nothing but my prayers."

There was a decided taste in Sterne's day for those colloquial treatises, lay sermons, and minor speculations, which, under the name of the British Essayists, form a department of literature peculiar to England; and this taste was united in the uneducated with a love of narrative and fiction, to which De Foe and other raconteurs ministered. The two were admirably combined in Sterne; his writings are made up, in about equal proportions, of speculation and description, - now a portrait, and now a reverie; on one page ingenious argument, on the next, humorous anecdote. Thus something seems provided for every literary palate; and his desultory plan or want of plan became a chief source of his popularity. That he was conscious of an original vein, notwithstanding the abundant material of which he availed himself, may be inferred from his self-complacent query," Shall we for ever make new books, as the apothecaries make new mixtures, by pouring only out of one vessel into another?"

Perhaps the absence of constructive art increased the popularity of Sterne; to many readers there is a charm in the boldness which sets rules at defiance; and the author of Tristram Shandy not only braved that sense of propriety which is an instinct of better natures, but seemed to take a wanton delight in writing a book without any regard to established precedents, either in its arrangement or the development of its subject. He was the reverse of careless, however, in his habits of composition, and, running through all his apparent indifference of mood, there is obvious a trick of art. It is in the use of his materials, rather than in style, that he violates the order of a finished narration. Gathering from the storehouse of a tenacious memory what he had heard of fortifications, camp life, obstetrics, and foreign countries, and linking them together with curious gleanings of erudition, he

gave vitality and interest to the whole by the introduction of several original and well-sustained characters, and occasional passages of skilful dialogue and pathetic story. The result was a mélange whose fragmentary shape and indecent allusions were counterbalanced, though by no means atoned for, by felicitous creations and the graphic limning of still-life. He has candidly given us his own theory of authorship. "Digressions," he says, "are the sunshine; they are the life and soul of reading." Instead of apologizing for an episode, he calls it "a master stroke of digressive skill." "To write a book," he elsewhere observes, "is for all the world like humming a song; be but in tune with yourself, 't is no matter how high or how low you take it."

The best illustration of these traits is the "Sentimental Journey," the author's last, most finished, and most harmonious work. Borrow traversed Spain to distribute the Bible, Inglis to trace the footsteps of Don Quixote; Addison explored Italy for classical localities, Forsyth to investigate her architecture; Beckford revelled in the luxuries of art and climate; English travellers in America have applied microscopic observation to republican defects; some tourists have taken for their spécialité geology, others prison-reform, others physical geography, - -some gossip and some ridicule; but Yorick alone, so far as we are informed, has chased in foreign regions the phantom of sentiment, and sought food for emotion. The very idea of the book combines the humorous and the pathetic, in that conscious, playful way which individualizes Sterne among English authors. To set out upon one's Continental travels predetermined to enfold all experience, however familiar and commonplace, with an atmosphere of sentiment, and to note the sensations, moods, tears, sighs, and laughs which beset a susceptible pilgrim, has in it a comic element, while there was just enough of reality in the states of mind recorded to banish the notion of a mere fancy sketch. "My design in it," said Sterne, "was to teach us to love the world and our fellow-creatures better." He is too little in earnest, too sentimental, in the present acceptation of that word, to have succeeded in this purpose as a man of deeper and less capricious feelings might have done; but, on the

other hand, his book, considered as a literary experiment and a personal revelation, is a psychological curiosity. It admirably shows the difference between a man of sentiment and a sentimental man. The latter character is depicted to the life. Incorrigible to the last in the matter of equivoques and innuendoes, he has deformed this otherwise dainty narrative with indecencies that offer a remarkable contrast to the delicacy of perception and style which has rendered the work a kind of classic in the library of English travels. "What a large volume of adventures may be grasped within this little span of life by him who interests his heart in everything!" This is the text of the Sentimental Journey, and it is founded on a genuine idiosyncrasy. Human nature boasts of more generous, permanent, and profound sensibilities than have to do with such a cosmopolitan and superficial heart; yet its exhibition forms one of those odd and suggestive chapters in life that aid our study of character. The design of the work once approved, no one can complain of the execution, always excepting the violations of propriety in certain of the episodes. A monk asking alms, a widow, servants on holiday, a dwarf whose view of the opera is interrupted by a tall soldier, a man lamenting his dead ass, an imaginary captain, a polite beggar, a crazed peasant-girl, an impoverished knight of St. Louis selling patés, - these, and similar by-way children of misfortune, are the subjects of the wanderer's compassion and reveries, with occasional memories of Eugenius and Eliza, and of his wife and daughter, who serve as permanent resources upon which his emotion falls back when no fresh object presents itself. In the hands of an ordinary writer these would prove ineffective materials; but Sterne has made distinct and rich pictures of them all. If the feeling smacks of affectation, wit embalms and redeems it. We are constantly disposed, as we read, to echo the Count de B's exclamation when Yorick talked him into procuring a passport,-"C'est bien dit"; so easy, colloquial, and often most nicely balanced, is the style. The short chapters are like cabinet pictures, neatly outlined and softly tinted; we carry from them an impression which lingers like a favorite air. How often have authors taken from this work a

valuable hint, and, avoiding its exceptionable qualities, elaborately imitated its word-painting and its atmosphere! It modified the literature of travel, which previously bore marks of utter carelessness, by indicating the artistic capabilities of a species of books that had been deemed mere vehicles of statistical and circumstantial information.

Sterne often quotes Sancho Panza, and invokes the "gentle spirit of sweetest humor, who erst did sit upon the easy pen of his beloved Cervantes"; and it is probable that Don Quixote suggested the Sentimental Journey. As "the Knight of the Rueful Countenance" went forth, with a peasant for a squire, in pursuit of chivalric adventures, so the author sets out, with a French valet, on a crusade of sentiment. The Don saw everything through the lens of knight-errantry, and the susceptible pilgrim beholds the world through the medium of an exaggerated tenderness. The relations of Sancho and La Fleur to their masters are parallel, however diverse their characters. The incidents which Sterne arrays in an imaginative guise are as commonplace in themselves as those which Cervantes uses as materials for his hero's enthusiasm. What the windmills and the way-side inn are to the one, the Remise door and the glove-shop are to the other. In its effect, too, upon the reader's mind, this exaggerated contact of sentiment with every-day life, is as humorous as that of ancient chivalry with modern utilitarianism; an equally salient contrast and a like quaint vein are opened. Speculation, anecdote, the high and the low, the vulgar and the ideal, blend their associations, as in the Spanish romance, so in the "Sentimental Journey"; but all are enveloped in an atmosphere of harmonious feeling and clothed in graceful language. This analogy is increased by the fact, that, as the readers of Don Quixote are enlightened as to the knight's habits by the garrulous squire, so to the valet of the sentimental pilgrim are we indebted for the little authentic information extant regarding Sterne's real state of mind. La Fleur, indeed, was as much an original in his way as his master. A native of Burgundy in the humblest circumstances, he followed the occupation of a drummer for six years, in order to see the world; and an officer of the regiment to which he was attached

obtained for him the situation of a valet to a Milord Anglois, in which capacity he was afterwards employed by Sterne. His wife ran off with an actor, and he felt so much at home in England, that, during the latter part of his life, he was often employed as a courier, and was sent on repeated missions across the Channel. He used to surprise his master in fits of profound melancholy, whence, upon being observed, he would suddenly rouse himself with some flippant expression. He declares that the sight of misery usually affected Sterne to tears; that he was charitable, and used to make frequent notes of his daily experience; and that his conversation with women was "of the most interesting kind, and left them serious if it did not find them so." The incidents so daintily recorded in his travels, La Fleur likewise authenticated; and through him we know that his master busily collected materials for a work on Italy during his tour in that country, although he never could succeed in speaking Italian.

In the history of English literature, there is, now and then, a writer who seems to have caught his tone from the other side of the Channel. The Gallic school was imitated by Pope and Congreve, though in the former it is exhibited rather in style than in range of thought. Brilliancy, artistical refinement, and graceful expression are the characteristics of this class of writers; they deal rather in manners than in passions; fancy usurps with them the place of imagination, wit that of reflection; animal spirits, instead of soul-felt emotions, seem to inspire their muse; they are not often in earnest except in the desire to please; and more ingenious than profound, with more tact than elevation, they offer an entire contrast to the manly, intense, frank utterance of Queen Elizabeth's dramatists and the pure love of nature of the modern bards. Sterne partakes largely of the light graces and the vivacious tone of the best French writers; and one reason of his popularity is the refreshment his countrymen always derive from the less grave and more sprightly attractions of their Continental neighbors. "They order this matter better in France," was a maxim which Sterne's taste and temper made applicable not only to the economy, but to the philosophy, of life, of which his view was the opposite of serious. The foreign perversion