bit nowadays of charging against the French, and which is so
much worse than the bluff, outspoken coarseness of a Fielding or
a Smollett. At times the line between Sterne and Charles Lamb is
not so easy to draw in that, from first to last, the elder is an
essayist and humorist, while the younger has so much of the
eighteenth century in his feeling and manner. In these modern
times, when so many essayists appear in the guise of fiction-makers,
we can see that Sterne is really the leader of the
tribe: and it is not hard to show how neither he nor they are
novelists divinely called. They (and he) may be great, but it is
another greatness. The point is strikingly illustrated by the
statement that Sterne was eight years publishing the various
parts of "Tristram Shandy," and a man of forty-six when he began
to do so. Bona fide novels are not thus written. Constructively,
the work is a mad farrago; but the end quite justifies the
means. Thus, while his place in letters is assured, and the
touch of the cad in him (Goldsmith called him "the blackguard
parson") should never blind us to his prime merits, his
significance for our particular study--the study of the modern
Novel in its development--is comparatively slight. Like all
essayists of rank he left memorable passages: the world never
tires of "God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb," and pays it
the high compliment of ascribing it to holy writ: nor will the
scene where the recording angel blots out Uncle Toby's generous
oath with a tear, fade from the mind; nor that of the same
kindly gentleman letting go the big fly which has, to his
discomfiture, been buzzing about his nose at dinner: "'Go,' says
he, lifting up the latch and opening his hand as he spoke to let
it escape. 'Go, poor devil, get thee gone, why should I hurt
thee? The world surely is wide enough to hold both thee and
me'"--a touch so modern as to make Sterne seem a century later
than Fielding. These are among the precious places of
literature. This eighteenth century divine has in advance of his
day the subtler sensibility which was to grow so strong in later
fiction: and if he be sentimental too, he gives us a
sentimentality unlike the solemn article of Richardson, because
of its French grace and its relief of delicious humor.

III

Swift chronologically precedes Sterne, for in 1726, shortly
after "Robinson Crusoe" and a good fifteen years before
"Pamela," he gave the world that unique lucubration, "Gul