identifying her with the "Narcissa" of _Roderick Random_ is natural,
inconclusive, but not ridiculous. Sterne's matrimonial relations are the
most famous of all: and though posterity has, with its usual charity,
constructed a legend for the pair which is probably much worse than the
reality, that reality is more than a little awkward. Mrs. Sterne was a
Miss Lumley, of a good Yorkshire family, some, though small, fortune,
and more friends who exerted themselves for her husband. By inexcusable
levity, ignorance, misjudgment, or heartless cupidity their daughter
Lydia published, after the death of both, letters some of which contain
courtship of the most lackadaisical sentimentality and others later
expressions (which occasionally reach the scandalous) of weariness and
disgust on Sterne's part. Other evidence of an indisputable character
shows that he was, at least and best, an extravagant and mawkish
philanderer with any girl or woman who would join in a flirtation: and
while there is no evidence against Mrs. Sterne's character in the
ordinary sense, and hardly any of value against her temper, she seems
(which is perhaps not wonderful) to have latterly preferred to live
apart from her husband, and to have put him to considerable, if not
unreasonable, expenses by her fancy for wandering about France with the
daughter.

Finally, in general character, Richardson seems to have been a
respectable person of rather feminine temperament and, though
good-natured to his friends, endowed with a feminine spitefulness.
Fielding, though by no means answering to the standard of minor and even
major morals demanded

"by the wise ones,
By the grave and the precise ones."

though reckless and disorderly in his ways and habits, appears to have
been in the main a thorough gentleman, faithful to truth and honour,
fearless, compassionate, intolerant of meanness and brutality and of
treachery most of all--a man of many faults perhaps, but of no really
bad or disgusting ones. Concerning Smollett's personality we know least
of all the four. It was certainly disfigured by an almost savage
pugnacity of temper; by a strange indifference to what ought to be at
the lowest the conduct of a gentleman, and by a most repulsive
inclination--perhaps natural, but developed by training--to the merely
foul and nasty. But he seems to have been brave, charitable though not
in the most gracious way, honest, and on the whole a much better fe