The heart which sympathized with the simple grief of a poor old peasant beats in all that Sterne wrote. His letters, whatever their faults, are never cold or ill-humored. Once he complains of his Paris banker's failure to make a remittance, but an apology follows fast upon words hardly peevish enough to demand one. A vein of friendly regard for Stevenson runs through the most Shandean communications to him. The letters to Mr. and Mrs. C., Mr. and Mrs. J., the Garricks, and other friends, friends for life, are as kind as they are soberly expressed; those to his daughter show a fond and anxious father; and those to his wife, a considerate husband, studious of her wants, desirous to spare her feelings, humor her weaknesses, and conform to her wishes, even where they involve his separation from a dearly loved daughter. However little in sympathy with Mrs. Sterne, however unfaithful to her, he never lets fall a harsh word. It is easy to believe the assertion of M. Tollot, that he endured the watchful conjugal eye with la patience d'un ange.

66

The Sentimental Journey preaches the same gospel as the sermons. "My design in it," writes the author to a friend, was to teach us to love our fellow-creatures better than we do; so it turns most upon those gentler passions and affections which aid so much to it." Travelling in this mood, Sterne, though the son of an officer whose life was spent in fighting the French, though his boyhood had been passed among soldiers full of anti-Gallican prejudices, and his later years among Yorkshire Whigs, though at a time of life when the mind is usually insensible to new impressions, yet was able to see the best side of France, and to appreciate the best qualities of her people. Sensitive to the ridiculous, alive to national peculiarities as he was, his book is, nevertheless, almost equally relished upon both sides of the Channel,-the excellence of his portraits, particularly those of Frenchwomen, being acknowledged by all competent critics. With a feeble constitution and a nervous temperament, with languid circulation and a consumptive's cough, Sterne must have keenly suffered from the inconveniences and discomforts of travel,- serious enough in his day,- but he bore them with imperturbable good-humor. Goldsmith wrote from Paris to Reynolds: "One

of our chief amusements here is scolding at everything we meet with, and praising everything and every person we left at home." ("The true English travelling amusement," remarks Irving.) But Sterne says: "I pity the man who can travel from Dan to Beersheba, and cry, 'T is all barren. And so it is, and so is all the world, to him who will not cultivate the fruits it offers. I declare, said I, clapping my hands cheerily together, that was I in a desert I would find out wherewith in it to call forth my affections. . . . . The learned Smelfungus travelled from Boulogne to Paris, from Paris to Rome, and so on; but he set out with the spleen and jaundice; and every object he pass'd by was discolored or distorted. He wrote an account of them; but 't was nothing but an account of his miserable feelings. I met Smelfungus in the grand portico of the Pantheon; he was just coming out of it. 'Tis nothing but a huge cockpit, said he. I popp'd upon Smelfungus again at Turin, in his return home, and a sad tale of sorrowful adventures he had to tell. He had been flay'd alive and bedevilled, and used worse than Saint Bartholomew at every stage he had come at. I'll tell it, cried Smelfungus, to the world. You had better tell it, said I, to your physician." Smelfungus is Smollett, not the last of his tribe. A paragraph from the laudatory notice of his Travels, published in his own review, forms a suitable pendant to Sterne's pleasant satire upon them. "A man of sense," says the "Critical Review," "divested of partiality, reasoning with freedom and candor upon every occurrence, and without the smallest temptation to be biassed, exhibits a naked view of objects and characters, and such a view as must endear England to Englishmen. In short, we hazard nothing in saying that a work of this kind does more service to Great Britain than fifty acts of Parliament for prohibiting French fripperies and foreign commodities, or even forbidding the exportation of fools, fops, and coxcombs."

Tristram Shandy is as amiable a book as the Sentimental Journey. Uncle Toby, "who with his faithful squire are the most delightful characters," says Scott, "in this book, or perhaps in any other," is goodness itself. His humanity, his love of all God's creatures, knows no exceptions.

“A negro has a soul, an' please your Honor,' said the Corporal, doubtingly.

"I am not much versed,' quoth my Uncle Toby,' in things of that kind; but I suppose God would not leave him without one, any more than you or me.'”

"I declare,' quoth my Uncle Toby, my heart would not let me curse the Devil himself with such bitterness.' 'He is the father of curses,' replied Dr. Slop. So am not I,' replied my uncle. But he is cursed and damned to all eternity,' replied Dr. Slop. I am sorry for it,' quoth my Uncle Toby."

6

"I think rather,' replied my Uncle Toby, that 't is we who sink an inch lower. If I meet but a woman with child, I do it.' 'T is a heavy tax upon that half of our fellowcreatures, brother Shandy,' said my Uncle Toby. "T is a piteous burden upon 'em,' continued he, shaking his head. Yes, yes, 't is a painful thing,' said my father, shaking his head, too; but, certainly, since shaking of heads came into fashion, never did two heads shake together in concert from two such different springs.

"God bless

"Deuce take

'em all,' said my Uncle Toby and my fa

ther, each to himself."

"I believe, said I, for I was piqued,' quoth the Corporal, for the reputation of the army; I believe, an' please your reverence, said I, that when a soldier gets time to pray, he prays as heartily as a parson, though not with all his fuss and hypocrisy.' 'Thou shouldst not have said that, Trim,' said my Uncle Toby; for God only knows who is a hypocrite and who is not. At the great and general review of us all, Corporal, at the day of judgment (and not till then), it will be seen who of us have done their duty in this world, and who have not; and we shall be advanced, Trim, accordingly.' 'I hope we shall,' said Trim. 'It is in the Scripture,' said my Uncle Toby, and I will show it thee to-morrow. In the mean time, we may depend upon it, Trim, for our comfort,' said my Uncle Toby,' that God Almighty is so good and just a governor of the world, that if we have but done our duties in it, it will never be inquired into whether we have done them in a red coat or a black one!" "

6

Like master, like man. Corporal Trim's character is mod

elled upon that of Uncle Toby, with a heart as brave and kind, though, as was natural in one in his station in life, with less refinement in his feelings, and less breadth to his humanity. He has a soldier's precision of movement, and an Irish servant's love of hearing his own voice. The chapters embracing his discourse to the kitchen upon Master Bobby's death show at once his garrulity, his sympathizing nature, and his love for Uncle Toby. This kitchen scene also displays Sterne's knowledge of mankind, his dramatic faculty, and the impartiality with which all his characters, from Parson Yorick to "the foolish, fat scullion," are presented, or rather present themselves; for they are not exhibited with critical comments, nor is our sympathy marred by a feeling of our own or of the author's superiority to them. The laugh which Dr. Slop excites is without bitterness. The Widow Wadman's manœuvres are watched with a smile; and if contempt be felt for her toward the close, it is due to our attachment to Uncle Toby, her victim. The elder Shandy's errors come from the head, not the heart," as Sterne was fond of saying about himself. "The essence of his character," said Coleridge," is a craving for sympathy in exact proportion to the oddity and unsympathizability of what he proposes; this coupled with an instinctive desire to be at least disputed with, or, rather, both in one, to dispute and yet to agree, and holding as worst of all to acquiesce without either resistance or sympathy." Yet his irritation at the undeviating acquiescence in hypotheses which she makes no effort to understand of "a wife with such a head-piece, that he cannot hang up a single inference within side of it," is gone in a moment, and his treatment of her is uniformly considerate. "How good all Sterne's characters are!" exclaims Mr. Masson. heart as well as oddity there is in them! One feels that one could have lived cheerfully and freely in the vicinity of Shandy Hall, whereas it is only now and then, among the characters of Fielding and Smollett, that this attraction is felt." "The moral of Tristram Shandy," says Mr. Purnell," is that we are as foolish as our neighbors, and have therefore no right to laugh at them."

"What

A similar disposition to think well of human nature characterizes those parts of Tristram Shandy where Sterne, writVOL. CVII. NO. 220.

3

ing in the first person, records with pleasant egotism the whims and humors of the moment, as well as his less evanescent opinions and sentiments. His nonsense is not a refuge from unpleasant thoughts, but a burst of merriment; his keen observations upon life and manners are not cynical, his humor is as kindly as it is exquisite, and even his irony is of that species which has been called the salt of urbanity. He moves as with wings from topic to topic, always' gracious and joyous. "Every object," writes M. Tollot, "is couleur de rose for this happy mortal, and things which would appear to the rest of the world under a sorrowful and gloomy aspect assume in his eyes a gay and smiling face." The Frenchman adds that his sole pursuit was pleasure, but to those who look a little deeper a more serious purpose discloses itself. "Let me go on," says Sterne in Tristram Shandy, "and tell my story my own way; or if I should seem now and then to trifle upon the road, or should sometimes put on a fool's cap with a bell to it for a moment or two as we pass along, don't fly off, but rather courteously give me credit for a little more wisdom than appears upon my outside; and as we jog on, either laugh with me, or at me, or, in short, do anything, only keep your temper."

Here is the sufficient answer to criticisms upon the artistic form of Sterne's great work. It was to have the freedom of familiar conversation, and the personages, of whom the author was one, interest us less by what they said or did than by what they were. "The digressive spirit of Rabelais and Sterne," observes Coleridge, "is not mere wantonness, but in fact the very form and vehicle of their genius."

Most of Sterne's redundances are explained by his excessive fondness for the old authors, from whom he took what suited him. His learning about noses, for instance, is relevant to nothing but the masks which still make the Carnival hideous in Italy or Spain. Mr. Shandy's remark, "Learned men, Brother Toby, don't write treatises upon long noses for nothing," and Uncle Toby's solution, "There is no cause but one why one man's nose is longer than another's, but because that God pleases to have it so," are worth more than all the rest of the discussion, or than the long tale about Slawkenbergius and the Promontory