Sterne is a writer who less than any one else in the present list
reveals the secrets of his manner and mind to the casual and hasty
reader. "Tristram Shandy" and "The Sentimental Journey" are books to
be enjoyed slowly and lingeringly, with many humorous after-thoughts
and a certain Rabelaisian unction. A shrewd and ironical wisdom,
gentle and light-fingered and redolent of evasive sentiment, is evoked
from these digressive and wanton pages.

At his best Sterne is capable of an imaginative interpretation of
character which for delicacy and subtlety has never been surpassed.
For the Epicurean in literature, his unfailing charm will be found in
his style--a style so baffling in the furtive beauty of its disarming
simplicity that even the greatest of literary critics have been unable
to analyze its peculiar flavour. There is a winnowed purity about it,
and a kind of elfish grace; and with both these things there mixes,
strangely enough, a certain homely, almost Dutch domesticity, quaint
and mellow and a little wanton--like a picture by Jan Steen.

54. JONATHAN SWIFT. TALE OF A TUB.

Swift's mysterious and saturnine character, his outbursts of terrible
rage; his exquisite moments of tenderness; his sledge-hammer blows;
his diabolical irony; form a dramatic and tragic spectacle which no
psychologist can afford to miss.

With the "saeva indignatio" alluded to in his own epitaph, he puts his
back, as it were, to the "flamantia moenia mundi" and hits out,
insanely and blindly, at the human crowd he loathes. His secretive and
desperate passion for Stella, his little girl pupil; his barbarous
treatment of Vanessa--his savage championship of the Irish people
against the Government--make up the dominant "notes" of a character so
formidable that the terror of his personality strikes us with the
force of an engine of destruction.

His misanthropy is like the misanthropy of Shakespeare's Timon--his
crushing sarcasms strike blow after blow at the poor flesh and blood
he despises. The hatefulness of average humanity drives him to
distraction and in his madness, like a wounded Titan, he spares
nothing. To the whole human race he seems to utter the terrible words
he puts into the mouth of God:

"I to such blockheads set my wit,
And damn you all--Go, go, you're bit!"

55. CHARLES LAMB. THE ESSAYS OF ELIA.

Charles Lamb remains, of all English prose-writers, the one whose
manner is the most beautiful. So rich,