less writer, but it is the manner of a first-rate talker; and this of course enhances rather than detracts from the unwearying charm of his wit and humour.

It is by the latter of these qualities—though he had the former in almost equal abundance-that he lives. No doubt he valued himself no less, perhaps even more highly, on his sentiment, and was prouder of his acute sensibility to the sorrows of mankind, than of his keen eye for their absurdities, and his genially satiric appreciation of their foibles. But posterity has not confirmed Sterne's judgment of himself. His passages of pathos, sometimes genuine and deeply moving, too often on the other hand only impress the modern reader with their artificial and overstrained sentimentalism. The affecting too often degenerates into the affected. To trace the causes of this degeneration would be a work involving too complex a process of analysis to be undertaken in this place. But the sum of the whole matter seems to be that the "sentiment" on which Sterne so prided himself -the acute sensibilities which he regarded with such extraordinary complacency-were in reality the weakness and not the strength of his pathetic style. When Sterne the artist is uppermost, when he is surveying the characters with that penetrating eye of his, and above all when he is allowing his subtle and tender humour to play around them unrestrained, he can touch the cords of compassionate emotion in us with a potent and unerring hand. But when Sterne the man is uppermost, when he is looking inward and not outward, contemplating his own feelings and not those of his personages, his cunning fails him altogether. In other words he is at his best in pathos when he is most the humourist; or rather, we may almost say, his pathos is never true unless when it is closely interwoven with his humour.

Still it is comparatively seldom that this foible of Sterne obtrudes itself upon the strictly narrative and dramatic part of his work. It is, generally speaking, in the episodical passages, such, for instance, as the story of the distraught Maria of Moulines, or that incident of the dead donkey of Nampont which Thackeray so mercilessly, though not unfairly, ridiculed, that Sterne most 'lays himself out' to be pathetic; it is in these digressions, as they may almost be called, that he becomes lugubrious “of malice aforethought," so to say; and it is therefore only in such exceptional cases that the expectation is disappointed, and the critical

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judgment offended, by the failures of the kind above described. On the main road of his story-if it can be said to have a main road-he is usually saved from such lapses of artistic taste by his strong dramatic instinct. Perpetual as are his affectations, and tiresome as his eternal self-consciousness, when he is speaking in his own person, often becomes, yet when once this dramatic instinct fairly lays hold of him there is no writer who can make us more completely forget him in the presence of his characters, none who can bring them and their surroundings, their looks and words before us with such convincing force of reality.

But if he makes us see them thus clearly, and thus plainly hear them, it is of course because of the matchless vigour and truth of touch with which their figures are first made to stand forth upon his canvass. And it is in fact the union with Sterne's other rare intellectual and artistic qualities of this rarest gift of all which has won for him his unique place in our literature. Neither wit, nor humour, nor creative power, nor skill of dramatic handling, would have done that for him if it had stood alone. They might, any of them, have made him famous in his time; but, except in conjunction, they could not have raised him to the rank he holds among the classics of English prose fiction. The extravagant Rabelaisian drollery that revels through the pages of Tristram Shandy, the marvellous keenness of eye, the inimitable delicacy of touch to which we owe the exquisite vignettes of the Sentimental Journey, would hardly of themselves have secured the place for Sterne. But it is for ever assured to him in right of that combination of subjective and personal with objective and dramatic humour in which he has never been excelled by any one save the creator of Falstaff. In Mr. Shandy and his wife, in Corporal Trim, in Yorick, and above all in that masterpiece of mirthful, subtle, tenderly humorous portraiture, "My Uncle Toby," Sterne has created imperishable types of character and made them remarkably his own.

H. D. TRAILL.

MY UNCLE TOBY'S SIEGE OPERATIONS

WHEN Corporal Trim had brought his two mortars to bear, he was delighted with his handy-work above measure; knowing what a pleasure it would be to his master to see them, he was not able to resist the desire he had of carrying them directly into his parlour.

Now, to the next moral lesson I had in view, in mentioning the affair of hinges, I had a speculative consideration arising out of it, and it is this.

Had the parlour-door opened and turned upon its hinges, as a door should do ;—

Or, for example, as cleverly as our government has been turning upon its hinges,—(that is, in case things have all along gone well with your worship,-otherwise I give up my simile)—in this case, I say, there had been no danger, either to master or man, in Corporal Trim's peeping in: the moment he had beheld my father and my uncle Toby fast asleep,-the respectfulness of his carriage was such, he would have retired as silent as death, and left them both in their arm-chairs, dreaming as happy as he had found them: but the thing was, morally speaking, so very impracticible, that for the many years in which this hinge was suffered to be out of order, and amongst the hourly grievances my father submitted to on its account, this was one; that he never folded his arms to take his nap after dinner, but the thoughts of being unavoidably awakened by the first person who should open the door, was almost uppermost in his imagination, and so incessantly stepped in betwixt him and the first balmy presage of his repose, as to rob him, as he often declared, of the whole sweets of it.

'When things move upon bad hinges, an' please your lordships, how can it be otherwise?'

"Pray what's the matter? Who is there?" cried my father,

waking, the moment the door began to creak, "I wish the smith would give a peep at that confounded hinge." "It is nothing, an' please your honour," said Trim, "but two mortars I am bringing in." "They shan't make a clatter with them here," cried my father, hastily. "If Doctor Slop has any drugs to pound, let him do it in the kitchen." "May it please your honour," cried Trim, "they are two mortar-pieces for a siege next summer, which I have been making out of a pair of jackboots, which Obadiah told me your honour had left off wearing." "By heaven!" cried my father, springing out of his chair, as he swore, "I have not one appointment belonging to me, which 1 set so much store by, as I do by these jack-boots: they were our great-grandfather's, brother Toby: they were hereditary." "Then

I fear," quoth my uncle Toby, "Trim has cut off the entail." "I have only cut off the tops, an' please your honour" cried Trim, "I hate perpetuities as much as any man alive," cried my father, "but these jack-boots," continued he (smiling, though very angry at the same time) "have been in the family, brother, ever since the civil wars: Sir Roger Shandy wore them at the battle of Marston-Moor. I declare I would not have taken ten pounds for them." "I'll pay you the money, brother Shandy," quoth my uncle Toby, looking at the two mortars with infinite pleasure, and putting his hand into his breeches pocket as he viewed them, "I'll pay you the ten pounds this moment, with all my heart and soul."

"Brother Toby," replied my father, altering his tone, "you care not what money you dissipate and throw away provided," continued he, "it is but upon a siege." "Have I not a hundred and twenty pounds a year, besides my half-pay?" cried my uncle Toby. "What is that," replied my father hastily, "to ten pounds for a pair of jack-boots? twelve guineas for your pontoons ? half as much for your Dutch drawbridge? to say nothing of the train of little brass artillery you bespoke last week, with twenty other preparations for the siege of Messina. Believe me, dear brother Toby," continued my father, taking him kindly by the hand, "these military operations of yours are above your strength : you mean well, brother, but they carry you into greater expenses than you were first aware of; and take my word, dear Toby, they will in the end, quite ruin your fortune, and make a beggar of you." "What signifies it if they do, brother," replied my uncle Toby, "so long as we know it is for the good of the nation ?"

My father could not help smiling, for his soul—his anger, at the worst, was never more than a spark-and the zeal and simplicity of Trim, and the generous (though hobby-horsical) gallantry of my uncle Toby, brought him into perfect good humour with them in an instant.

"Generous souls! God prosper you both, and your mortarpieces too!" quoth my father to himself.

(From Tristram Shandy.)

THE DEATH OF BOBBY

Now let us go back to my brother's death.

For death it has

Philosophy has a fine saying for everything. an entire set; the misery was, they all at once rushed into my father's head, that 'twas difficult to string them together, so as to make anything of a consistent show out of them. He took them as they came.

"It is an inevitable chance the first statute in Magnâ Chartâ -it is an everlasting act of parliament, my dear brother, all must die.

"If my son could not have died it had been matter of wonder -not that he is dead.

"Monarchs and princes dance in the same ring with us.

"To die, is the great debt and tribute due unto nature: tombs and monuments, which should perpetuate our memories, pay it themselves; and the proudest pyramid of them all, which wealth and science have erected, has lost its apex, and stands obtruncated in the traveller's horizon."

(My father found he got great ease, and went on)—“ Kingdoms and provinces, towns and cities, have they not their periods? And when those principles and powers, which at first cemented and put them together, have performed their several evolutions, they fall back." "Brother Shandy,” said my uncle Toby, laying down his pipe at the word evolutions. "Revolutions, I meant,” quoth my father; by Heaven! I meant revolutions, brother Toby; evolutions is nonsense." "It is not nonsense," said my uncle Toby. "But is it not nonsense to break the thread of such a discourse, upon such an occasion?" cried my father, "do not -dear Toby," continued he, taking him by the hand "do not