d Smollett were of the {209} hearty British "beef-and-beer" school;
their novels are downright, energetic, coarse, and high-blooded; low
life, physical life, runs riot through their pages--tavern brawls, the
breaking of pates, and the off-hand courtship of country wenches.
Smollett's books, such as _Roderick Random_, 1748, _Peregrine Pickle_,
1751, and _Ferdinand Count Fathom_, 1752, were more purely stories of
broadly comic adventure than Fielding's. The latter's view of life was
by no means idyllic; but with Smollett this English realism ran into
vulgarity and a hard Scotch literalness, and character was pushed to
caricature. "The generous wine of Fielding," says Taine, "in
Smollett's hands becomes brandy of the dram-shop." A partial exception
to this is to be found in his last and best novel, _Humphrey Clinker_,
1770. The influence of Cervantes and of the French novelist, Le Sage,
who finished his _Adventures of Gil Blas_ in 1735, are very perceptible
in Smollett.

A genius of much finer mold was Lawrence Sterne, the author of
_Tristram Shandy_, 1759-67, and the _Sentimental Journey_, 1768.
_Tristram Shandy_ is hardly a novel: the story merely serves to hold
together a number of characters, such as Uncle Toby and Corporal Trim,
conceived with rare subtlety and originality. Sterne's chosen province
was the whimsical, and his great model was Rabelais. His books are
full of digressions, breaks, surprises, innuendoes, double meanings,
mystifications, and all manner of odd turns. {210} Coleridge and
Carlyle unite in pronouncing him a great humorist. Thackeray says that
he was only a great jester. Humor is the laughter of the heart, and
Sterne's pathos is closely interwoven with his humor. He was the
foremost of English sentimentalists, and he had that taint of
insincerity which distinguishes sentimentalism from genuine sentiment,
like Goldsmith's, for example. Sterne, in life, was selfish,
heartless, and untrue. A clergyman, his worldliness and vanity and the
indecency of his writings were a scandal to the Church, though his
sermons were both witty and affecting. He enjoyed the titilation of
his own emotions, and he had practiced so long at detecting the latent
pathos that lies in the expression of dumb things and of poor, patient
animals, that he could summon the tear of sensibility at the thought of
a discarded postchaise, a dead donkey, a starling in a cage, or of
Uncle Toby putting a house fly out of the