of Smollett as to his genius, for so free an expression of outraged patriotism was then dangerous, and it is recorded that the poet, when warned of that danger after composing six stanzas of vigorous denunciation, instantly sat down and added a seventh, more bitter and stinging than those which had gone before.

§ 10. LAURENCE Sterne (1713-1768) was a brilliant literary comet. His character was as eccentric as his works, both the one and the other being marked by strange inconsistency, equally attractive to the imagination and incompatible with severe principle. He was born in Ireland, but educated, with the assistance of some relations of his mother's, at Cambridge. Entering the Church, he enjoyed, through their interest, considerable preferment in the north, having long held the living of Sutton, to which he afterwards added a prebend's stall in the Cathedral of York; and he was ultimately advanced to the rich living of Coxwold. His private life was little in harmony with his profession: he appears to have been a fanciful, vain, self-indulgent humorist, perpetually at war with the neighboring clergy, and masking caprice and harshness under a pretence of extreme sensibility. His conduct to his wife was base and selfish. The first two volumes of his novel of Tristram Shandy were published in 1761, and the novelty and oddity of his style instantly raised him to the summit of popularity: two more volumes appeared in the following year, and Sterne became the pet and lion of fashionable London society, where he gratified his morbid appetite for flattery and indulged in a series of half-immoral, half-sentimental intrigues, some of them with married women. He made two tours on the Continent, the first in France, and the second in France and Italy, where he accumulated the materials incorporated in his delightful Sentimental Fourney, intended to form a part of his romance, but which is generally read as an independent work. In this book he personates his favorite character Yorick, a mixture of the humorist and the sentimental observer. The Sentimental Fourney, with all its faults of taste and morality, has the merit of breathing a tone of complacency, candor, and appreciation of the good qualities of foreign nations, equally rare and laudable at a time when Englishmen regarded all other countries, and especially France, with the most narrow-minded prejudice and hostility. Sterne's health had always been precarious; he had all his life been consumptive, and the feverish life of London society broke up a constitution naturally sickly. He died alone and friendless in a Bond Street lodging-house, attended in his last illness by mercenaries, who are said to have plundered him of such trifles as he possessed- — a comfortless and gloomy ending, which he had himself desired.

His works consist of the novel of Tristram Shandy, of the Sentimental Fourney, and of a collection of Sermons, written in the odd and fantastic style which he brought into temporary vogue. It is not an easy task to give an intelligible account of the plan, the merits, and the defects of his writings. Tristram Shandy, though nominally a romance in the biographical form, is intentionally irregular and capri

cious, the imaginary hero never making his appearance at all, and the story consisting of a series of sketches and episodes introducing us to the interior of an English country family, one of the richest collections of oddities that genius has ever delineated. The narrative is written partly in the character of Yorick (Sterne himself), supposed to be a clergyman and a humorist, and partly in that of the phantom-like Tristram; and the most prominent persons are Walter Shandy, a retired merchant, the father of the supposed hero, his mother, his uncle Toby Shandy (a veteran officer), and his servant Corporal Trim. These are all conceived and executed in the finest and most Shaksperian spirit of humor, tenderness, and observation; and they are supported by a crowd of minor yet hardly less individual portraitures - Obadiah, Dr. Slop, the Widow Wadman, Susanna, nay, down to the "foolish fat scullion." Mr. Shandy, the restless, crotchety philosopher, is delineated with consummate skill, and admirably contrasted with the simple benevolence and professional enthusiasm of the unequalled Uncle Toby, a personage belonging to the same category of creative genius as Sancho or as Parson Adams. The characters in Sterne are not delineated descriptively, but rather allusively; and thus the reader incessantly enjoys the pleasure of making out their pleasant and eccentric features, not through the medium of the author, but by himself, as if they were real personages. The conversations, the incidental episodes, all introduce us to the eccentricities and amiable oddities of the persons; and perhaps the very absence of all regular construction, the abrupt transitions, the complete confusion of all order, the exclamations, parenthetical chapters, and the abrupt and interjectional character of the style, contribute to the effect of the whole. In all Sterne's writings there is a great parade of obscure and quaint erudition, which passed off at the time these books appeared, when the elder authors were but rarely studied, as indicative of immense learning; but he is known at present to have been a most unscrupulous plagiarist, pillaging Burton, Rabelais, and the seldom-consulted pages of the old lawyers and canonists. All this, however, tends powerfully to give an original flavor to his style. His humor and his pathos are often truly admirable; and he possesses in a high degree that rare power, found only in the greatest humorists, of combining the ludicrous and the pathetic; but both his humor and his pathos are very often false and artificial, the one degenerating into buffoonery, indecency, and even profanity in more than a single instance, and the other into a morbid and sickly sentimentality. He is always trembling on the verge of an obscene allusion; and many passages, both in Shandy and the Sentimental Fourney, are quite unjustifiable as coming from the pen of a clergyIn this mixture of pruriency and theatrical sentiment Sterne resembles certain of the most brilliant French authors; and even the rapidity and abruptness of his style cause him to be perhaps the only one of our great humorists who can be adequately translated into French. His episodes, as the often-quoted Story of Le Fevre, are related with consummate art and tenderness; but in Sterne- probably

man.

from his vanity and deficiency of discrimination — there is no medium between excellence and failure. He is an acute and just observer of the little turns of gesture and expression, and makes his characters betray their idiosyncrasies by involuntary touches, just as men do in real life.

§ 11. The most charming and versatile, and certainly one of the greatest writers of the eighteenth century, is OLIVER GOLDSMITH (1728-1774), whose works, whether in prose or verse, bear a peculiar stamp of gentle grace and elegance. He was born at the village of Pallas in the county of Longford, Ireland, in 1728. His father was a poor curate of English extraction, struggling, with the aid of farming and a miserable stipend, to bring up a large family. By the assistance of a benevolent uncle, Mr. Contarine, Oliver was enabled to enter the University of Dublin in the humble quality of sizar. He, however, neglected the opportunities for study which the place offered him, and became notorious for his irregularities, his disobedience to authority, and above all for a degree of improvidence carried to the extreme, though excused by a tenderness and charity almost morbid. The earlier part of his life is an obscure and monotonous narrative of ineffectual struggles to subsist, and of wanderings which enabled him to traverse almost the whole of Europe. Having been for a short time tutor in a family in Ireland, he determined to study medicine; and after nominally attending lectures in Edinburgh, he began those travels for the most part on foot, and subsisting by the aid of his flute and the charity given to a poor scholar — which successively led him to Leyden, through Holland, France, Germany, and Switzerland, and even to Pavia, where he boasted, though the assertion is hardly capable of proof, that he received a medical degree. His professional as well as his general knowledge was of the most superficial and inaccurate character. It was while wandering in the guise of a beggar in Switzerland that he sketched out the plan of his poem of the Traveller, which afterwards formed the commencement of his fame. In 1756 he found his way back to his native country; and his career during about eight years was a succession of desultory struggles with famine, sometimes as a chemist's shopman in London; sometimes as an usher in boardingschools, the drudge of his employers and the butt and laughing-stock of the pupils; sometimes as a practitioner of medicine among the poorest and most squalid population · "the beggars in Axe Lane," as he expressed it himself; and more generally as a miserable and scantily-paid bookseller's hack. More than once, under the pressure of intolerable distress, he exchanged the bondage of the school for the severer slavery of the corrector's table in a printing-office, and was driven back again to the bondage of the school. The grace and readiness of his pen would probably have afforded him a decent subsistence, even from the hardly-earned wages of a drudge-writer, but for his extreme improvidence, his almost childish generosity, his passion for pleasure and fine clothes, and above all his propensity for gambling. At one time, during this wretched period of his career, he failed to

pass the examination qualifying him for the humble medical post of a hospital mate; and, under the pressure of want and improvidence, committed the dishonorable action of pawning a suit of clothes lent him by his employer, Griffiths, for the purpose of appearing with decency before the Board. His literary apprenticeship was passed in this severe school - writing to order, and at a moment's notice, schoolbooks, tales for children, prefaces, indexes, and reviews of books; and contributing to the Monthly, Critical, and Lady's Review, the British Magazine, and other periodicals. His chief employer in this way appears to have been Griffiths, and he is said to have been at one time engaged as a corrector of the press in Richardson's service. In this period of obscure drudgery he composed some of his most charming works, or at least formed that inimitable style which makes him the rival, and perhaps more than the rival, of Addison. He produced the Chinese Letters, the plan of which is imitated from Montesquieu's Lettres Persanes, giving a description of English life and manners in the assumed character of a Chinese traveller, and containing some of those little sketches and humorous characters in which he was unequalled; a Life of Beau Nash; and a short and gracefully-narrated History of England, in the form of Letters from a Nobleman to his Son, the authorship of which was ascribed to Lyttleton. It was in 1764 that the publication of his beautiful poem of the Traveller caused him to emerge from the slough of obscure literary drudgery in which he had hitherto been crawling. The universal judgment of the public pronounced that nothing so harmonious and so original had appeared since the time of Pope; and from this period Goldsmith's career was one of uninterrupted literary success, though his folly and improvidence kept him plunged in debt, which even his large earnings could not enable him to avoid, and from which indeed no amount of fortune would have saved him. In 1766 appeared the Vicar of Wakefield, that masterpiece of gentle humor and delicate tenderness; in the following year his first comedy, the Good-natured Man, which failed upon the stage in some measure from its very merits, some of its comic scenes shocking the perverted taste of an audience which admired the whining, preaching, sentimental pieces that were then in fashion. In 1768 Goldsmith composed, as taskwork for the booksellers — though taskwork for which his now rapidly rising popularity secured good payment — the History of Rome, distinguished by its extreme superficiality of information and want of research no less than by enchanting grace of style and vivacity of narration. In 1770 he published the Deserted Village, the companion poem to the Traveller, written in some measure in the same manner, and not less touching and perfect; and in 1773 was acted his comedy She Stoops to Conquer, one of the gayest, pleasantest, and most amusing pieces that the English stage can boast. Goldsmith had long risen from the obscurity to which he had been condemned: he was one of the most admired and popular authors of his time; his society was courted by the wits, artists, statesmen, and writers who formed a brilliant circle round Johnson and Reynolds,—

Burke, Garrick, Beauclerk, Percy, Gibbon, Boswell,

and he became

a member of that famous Club which is so intimately associated with the intellectual history of that time. Goldsmith was one of those men whom it is impossible not to love, and equally impossible not to despise and laugh at: his vanity, his childish though not malignant envy, his more than Irish aptitude for blunders, his eagerness to shine in conversation, for which he was peculiarly unfitted, his weaknesses and genius combined, made him the pet and the laughing-stock of the company. He was now in the receipt of an income which for that time and for the profession of letters might have been accounted splendid; but his improvidence kept him plunged in debt, and he was always anticipating his receipts, so that he continued to be the slave of booksellers, who obliged him to waste his exquisite talent on works hardly thrown off, and for which he neither possessed the requisite knowledge nor could make the necessary researches: thus he successively put forth as taskwork the History of England, the History of Greece, and the History of Animated Nature, the two former works being mere compilations of second-hand facts, and the last an epitomized translation of Buffon. In these books we see how Goldsmith's never-failing charm of style and easy grace of narration compensate for total ignorance and a complete absence of independent knowledge of the subject. In 1774 this brilliant and feverish career was terminated. Goldsmith was suffering from a painful and dangerous disease, aggravated by disquietude of mind arising from the disorder in his affairs; and relying upon his knowledge of medicine he imprudently persisted in employing a violent remedy against the advice of his physicians. He died at the age of forty-six, deeply mourned by the brilliant circle of friends to which his very weaknesses had endeared him no less than his admirable genius, and surrounded by the tears and blessings of many wretches whom his inexhaustible benevolence had relieved. He was buried in the Temple Churchyard, and a monument was erected to his memory in Westminster Abbey, for which Johnson wrote a Latin inscription, one passage of which gracefully alludes to the versatility of his genius: "qui nullum fere scribendi genus non tetigit, nullum quod tetigit non ornavit."

§ 12. In everything Goldsmith wrote, prose or verse, serious or comic, there are a peculiar delicacy and purity of sentiment, tinging, of course, the language and diction as well as the thought. It seems as if his genius, though in its earlier career surrounded with squalid distress, was incapable of being sullied by any stain of coarseness or vulgarity. Though of English descent, he had in an eminent degree the defects as well as the virtues of the Irish character; and no quality in his writings is more striking than the union of grotesque humor with a sort of pensive tenderness, which gives to his verse a peculiar character of gliding melody and grace. He had seen much, and reproduced with singular vivacity quaint strokes of nature, as in his sketch of Beau Tibbs and innumerable passages in the Vicar of Wakefield. The two poems of the Traveller and the Deserted Village will ever be regarded as masterpieces of sentiment and description. The light yet rapid touch with