thee out of." Only when "close pent up in the social chimney corner," would Yorick listen to a discourse of this kind. His usual answer was "a pshaw ! - and if the subject was started in the fields, with a hop, skip, and a jump at the end of it." Again, when Yorick is at Calais he represents himself as engaging in a debate with the bad propensities of his nature as to whether he shall invite the fair lady that he has just met at Monsieur Dessein's inn to accept half of his chaise to Paris. Among the bad propensities are Caution and Discretion. And why bad? - Because as much as Avarice or Hypocrisy or any other of the seven deadly sins they prevent the spontaneous act; in Sterne's phrase, they "encompass the heart with adamant."

A man who places the practical virtues among the vices may become difficult to get along with, certainly if he strenuously follows his theory. That was discovered by Mrs. Sterne. If he has a bad heart, he will become a menace to society. But Sterne had not a bad heart. I find in him — Thackeray notwithstanding nothing mean or cowardly. Such qualities as he possessed, whether they be called virtues or vices- he wore upon his

sleeve. They pertained to the flesh only, or as the eighteenth century would say, to the natural man unhampered by social conventions. The Sentimental Journey is a summary of Sterne's one aim in life-a search for "sweet and pleasurable sensations." As might be expected, he avoided everything that could give himself pain or annoyance. On occasion he was generous and kindhearted, but undoubtedly he liked best to let his imagination play with fictitious distress: with the starling that ought to be set free from its cage, or the fly, the hair of whose head should not be injured. He associated with all ranks of men from noisy Yorkshire squires to the great people of fashion, who crowded his London lodging from morning till night. He made friends everywhere and seems to have lost few. This is not the portrait of a bad man. Indeed the career of Sterne has great attractions to the imagination. His gay spirit was more than once the envy of his contemporaries. Monsieur Tollot, a French friend who saw much of Sterne in France, writes to John Hall-Stevenson — to give the gist of the passage — " To everything, however dull and gloomy, that happy mortal lends the color of the rose. Others pursue

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pleasure, but they know not how to enjoy it when it is attained. Sterne drinks the cup to the dregs, and his thirst is still unquenched." Tollot was then taking refuge from wind and rain in "divers glasses of Bourdeaux to make himself gay"; wherefore the imagery. "Cheerily" said Sterne, addressing his spirits after an illness that nearly proved fatal — “ "Cheerily have ye made me tread the path of life with all the burthens of it (except its cares) upon my back; in no one moment of my existence, that I remember, have ye once deserted me, or tinged the objects which came in my way, either with sable, or with sickly green; in dangers ye gilded my horizon with hope, and when DEATH himself knocked at my door-ye bad him come again; and in so gay a tone of careless indifference, did ye do it, that he doubted of his commission." It was this gayety of Sterne, which did not desert him till he came to lie down for the last time in his London lodging, that so attracted Goethe. "Whoever reads him," said the great German, "at once gains an exhilarating sense of joy and freedom."

The lighthearted and heedless Yorick was first and last a humorist. Everything about

you

him — himself, what he did, and what he said, and what he wrote is odd. A fine face surely was Sterne's — a keen glance, and smile ready to break, but "a bale of cadaverous goods" for a body, making him look, said Bagehot aptly, "like a scarecrow with bright eyes." Acts that would condemn in yourself or your nearest friends, you pass over in his case with only a smile, for in them lurks some overmastering absurdity. "Tell a lie to save a lie" - only a humorist could see it that way and put it that way. The ethical aspect of this injunction to a brother in the cloth is lost sight of in the humor of it. The seriousness of Mrs. Sterne's period of insanity, you do not think of at all, for the announcement is so queer:-"she fancied herself the Queen of Bohemia, and Laurie drove her through the stubble field, telling her she was coursing in Bohemia." And when Sterne came to write a book, he produced one not much like any that had ever appeared before - but more of this in another place. I would not say that Sterne is the greatest of humorists, for I don't think that. But he is the best example in modern literature in our literature at least of a

man whose other faculties are overpowered by

a sense of humor. He feels, he imagines, and he at once sees the incongruities of things as ordered by man and nature; but he does not think, nor has he any appreciation of moral values. What to others seems serious or sacred is to him only an occasion for a sally of wit. Sterne was not, we may be sure, indecent or profane because he liked indecency or profanity for their own sake, but because notwithstanding what immaculates may say humor may lie that way. To quote once more a sentence of Yorick's, "he loved a jest in his heart." He could not refrain from questioning in the pulpit a saying of Solomon's, for the antithesis between the wise man of the Hebrews and a York prebendary was too good to lose. Had he taken his text from a minor prophet, there would have been no That I deny, for there would have been no humor in the remark. On this and similar occasions, said Grey, who read him exactly, the preacher was "tottering on the verge of laughter and ready to throw his periwig in the face of his audience." If Sterne parodied the greetings of St. Paul to the Corinthians, it must be remembered that he was writing to a company of wits who passed their leisure in the study of Rabe