lly, there is in this greatest master of one of its most
terrible forms, _quelque chose d'infini_, and the refreshment which
he offers varies unceasingly from the lightest froth of pure
nonsense, through beverages middle and stronger to the most drastic
restoratives--the very strychnine and capsicum of irony.

But what, above all, attracts Mr. Saintsbury in Swift, Fielding and
Johnson is their eminent manliness. He is an enthusiast within limits for
the genius of Sterne and the genius of Horace Walpole. But he loves them
in a grudging way. He is disgusted with their lack of muscle. He admits of
the characters in _Tristrom Shandy_ that "they are ... much more
intrinsically true to life than many, if not almost all, the characters of
Dickens," but he is too greatly shocked by Sterne's humour to be just to
his work as a whole. It is the same with Walpole's letters. Mr. Saintsbury
will heap sentence after sentence of praise upon them, till one would
imagine they were his favourite eighteenth-century literature. He even
defends Walpole's character against Macaulay, but in the result he damns
him with faint praise quite as effectively as Macaulay did. That he has an
enviable appetite for Walpole's letters is shown by the fact that, in
speaking of Mrs. Toynbee's huge sixteen-volume edition of them, he
observes that "even a single reading of it will supply the evening
requirements of a man who does not go to bed very late, and has learnt the
last lesson of intellectual as of other enjoyment--to enjoy _slowly_--for
nearer a month than a week, and perhaps for longer still." The man who can
get through Horace Walpole in a month of evenings without sitting up late
seems to me to be endowed not only with an avarice of reading, but with an
avarice of Walpole. But, in spite of this, Mr. Saintsbury does not seem to
like his author. His ideal author is one of whom he can say, as he does of
Johnson, that he is "one of the greatest of Englishmen, one of the
greatest men of letters, and one of the greatest of _men_." One of his
complaints against Gray is that, though he liked _Joseph Andrews_, he "had
apparently not enough manliness to see some of Fielding's real merits." As
for Fielding, Mr. Saintsbury's verdict is summed up in Dryden's praise of
Chaucer. "Here is God's plenty." In _Tom Jones_ he contends that Fielding
"puts the whole plant of the pleasure-giver in motion, as no
novel-writer--not even Cervantes--had ever don