fact, but I am ready to believe
that Mr. Fawcett may, with equal sincerity, have said that Sterne was a
godless wretch. We know that Bishop Warburton presented him with a purse
of gold, in rapturous appreciation of his talents, and then in a
different mood described him as "an irrevocable scoundrel." No one else
has ever flourished in literature who has combined such alternating
powers of attraction and repulsion. We like Sterne extremely at one
moment, and we dislike him no less violently at another. He is attar of
roses to-day and asafoetida to-morrow, and it is not by any means easy
to define the elements which draw us towards him and away from him. Like
Yorick, he had "a wild way of talking," and he wrote impetuously and
impudently "in the naked temper which a merry heart discovered." As he
"seldom shunned occasions of saying what came uppermost, and without
much ceremony, he had but too many temptations in life of scattering his
wit and his humour, his gibes and his jests, about him."

So that even if he had been merely Yorick, Sterne would have had
manifold opportunities of giving offence and causing scandal. But lie
was not only a humorist with "a thousand little sceptical notions to
defend," but he was a sentimentalist as well. Those two characteristics
he was constantly mingling, or trying to mingle, since sentimentality
and humour are in reality like oil and wine. He would exasperate his
readers by throwing his wig in their faces at the moment when they were
weeping, or put them out of countenance by ending a farcical story on a
melancholy note. A great majority of Englishmen like to be quite sure of
the tone of what they read; they wish an author to be straightforward;
they dread irony and they loathe impishness. Now Sterne is the most
impish of all imaginative writers. He is what our grandmothers, in
describing the vagaries of the nursery, used to call "a limb of Satan."
Tristram Shandy, in his light-hearted way, declared that "there's not so
much difference between good and evil as the world is apt to imagine."
No doubt that is so, but the world does not like its preachers to play
fast and loose with moral definitions.

The famous sensibility of Sterne was a reaction against the seriousness,
the ponderosity, of previous prose literature in England. We talk of the
heaviness of the eighteenth century, but the periods of even such
masters of solid rhetoric as Johnson and Gibbon are light as thistledown
in co