PET. No more! I am weary of talking, and of thee; and there will be another here anon with whom I would fain have speech. Russian justice is speedy: it is its only virtue. I need delay no longer to go and meet thy murderer. Wilt thou come with me, that I may see thee face to face with him? Thou wilt not? Ha!..

Farewell then! I will go alone. 'Tis a hardy villain whoever he be; and I have ever loved to look upon a brave man.

STERNE AND THACKERAY.

STERNE. Mr. Thackeray, I am much beholden to you for your civility. But perverse as I am, I have a mind to make you but an ill return for it.

THACK. In what way?

STERNE. By telling you what I am thinking.

THACK. I hope, sir, you do not suppose that I have been doing anything else.

STERNE. I should be sorry to suppose so after the flattering things you have said of me. But to give plain speech in exchange for politeness seems like trucking sand for sugar. I was thinking, then, that since you have such a value for me it is strange you was so long in making my acquaintance.

THACK. To tell you the truth, Mr. Sterne, I did not feel sure that an introduction would be agreeable to you.

THACK. Well, I have spoken and written about you and your works in a way which it might not be pleasant for you to know of; and-and I thought that you had probably heard of it.

STERNE. Heard of it? Not I.

THACK. What, Mr. Sterne? You have never heard of my Lectures on the English Humorists?

STERNE. No, indeed; or I should have remembered them for their queer subject. What put you, pray, upon discoursing of the whimsical part of mankind? I should have thought that a serious man like yourself might have been better employed.

THACK. A serious man, Mr. Sterne! I would have you to know that I was a humorist myself, and in the opinion of many, if indeed I may cite it without vanity, a somewhat remarkable humorist too.

STERNE. You amaze me. I have always heard tell of you as a sane and sober writer, without so much as a single maggot in any corner of your brain.

THACK. Oh, I understand you now, sir. You are using the word "humorist" in its old sense as an "eccentric.” It has greatly changed its meaning nowadays, as you will agree, no doubt, when I tell you that among the first of English humorists we now reckon Joseph

Addison.

STERNE. What the dev-ahem! You are jesting with me, sure. Joseph Addison a humorist! the stiffest and most demure of men. I would as soon have thought of applying the name to a bishop.

THACK. It will serve to show you, sir, how greatly the meaning of the word has altered. With us a man may be a humorist without any affectation either of personal or of literary eccentricity. He need neither disregard the proprieties of life nor offend against the decencies of language. . . . I wonder how he will take that.

STERNE. I shall not affect to misunderstand you, Mr. Thackeray. It is at myself that your last words were aimed. I begin now to suspect your reason for hesitating to meet me. You have been serving up for your own generation the envious ill humours of mine-ignorant, I suppose, that in so doing you was repeating not the general opinion of the candid, but the calumnies of a few prudish particulars.

THACK. I am afraid, then, that the prudish particulars have so much increased in number as to become the general. Tristram Shandy is no longer a book for the table of the boudoir. Our age is more-well, I will say more squeamish than your own.

STERNE. My service to your age, then, sir. You must be ripe for canonisation indeed if Captain Toby Shandy is not fit company for you.

THACK. Ah, Mr. Sterne, the good captain is indeed fit company for the noblest and purest of mankind. But unfortunately-if I may be frank with youunfortunately you have made him figure in scenes and situations which even the very innocence of his nature tends to render more immodest.

STERNE. But plague take it, sir! the captain was a man. That unlucky bullet in the trenches at Namur was not so

THACK. There, there, Mr. Sterne. I beg you to check yourself. You are evidently on the point of confirming the most adverse of my criticisms.

STERNE. How do you know that? Why, I vow, Mr. Thackeray, you are as full of unclean thoughts as a

Puritan. 'Tis odd that the noses which profess to carry themselves highest should be always sniffing so near the midden. The old saw has it, I thought, that to the pure all things are pure.

comes from the Bible and refers to the eating of unclean meats. . . . . As to old saws, sir, you laughed freely enough at De mortuis nil nisi bonum, but it is not a whit more absurd than "To the pure all things are pure.' If the saying were true, a man might walk about the streets in the costume of the South Sea Islanders, and protest against the pruriency of the first constable who laid him by the heels. Purity indeed is slow to suspect the presence of the impure, but there are certain demonstrations of it which are as unmistakable to the intelligence as nudity is to the eye.

STERNE. 'Tis true enough, sir; and I would take it as a friendly act, if you would tell me where, in Tristram Shandy or in the Sentimental Journey, I appear thus lightly clad..

THACK. You cannot be serious, Mr. Sterne; I should have to cite passages from every page.

STERNE. So many?

THACK. Nay, sir, you know how wayward a spirit was your Shandyism as you were wont to call it. It was an Ariel that had wholly mastered its Prospero.

STERNE. Your servant, sir. We must be thankful for small mercies it seems and it was obliging of you not to compare my drolleries to Caliban.

THACK. I am incapable of so coarse, and, in some