rain a shower of blows upon his (the parson's) carcase," who also "laid hold of one of his ears with his teeth, and bit it unmercifully." I could quote from memory a score more of outrages begun or completed. Savage insults; broken jaws, men on the ground beaten with sticks, the churlish sourness of conversations, the coarse brutality of jests, give an idea of a pack of bull-dogs eager to fight each other, who, when they begin to get lively, still amuse themselves by tearing away pieces of flesh. A Frenchman can hardly endure the story of "Roderick Random," or rather that of Smollett, when he is on board a man-of-war. He is pressed, that is to say, carried off by force, knocked down, attacked with "cudgels and drawn cutlasses," "pinioned like a malefactor," and rolled on board, covered with blood, before the sailors, who laugh at his wounds; and one of them, "seeing my hair clotted together with blood, as it were, into distinct cords, took notice that my bows were manned with the red ropes, instead of my side." Roderick "desired one of his fellow-captives, who was unfettered, to take a handkerchief out of his pocket, and tie it round his head to stop the bleeding; he (the fellow) pulled out my handkerchief, 'tis true, but sold it before my face to a bum-boat woman for a quart of gin." Captain Oakum declares he will have no more sick in his ship, ordered them to be brought on the quarterdeck, commanded that some should receive a round dozen; some spitting blood, others fainting from weakness, whilst not a few became delirious; many died, and of the sixty-one sick, only a dozen remained alive. To get into this dark, suffocating hospital, swarming with vermin, it is necessary to creep under the close hammocks, and forcibly separate them with the shoulders, before the doctor can reach his patients. Read the story of Miss Williams, a wealthy young girl, of good family, reduced to become a prostitute, robbed, hungry, sick, shivering, strolling about the streets in the long winter nights, amongst " a number of naked wretches reduced to rags and filth, huddled together like swine, in the corner of a dark alley," who depend "upon the addresses of the lowest class, and are fain to allay the rage of hunger and cold with gin; degenerate into a brutal insensibility, rot and die upon a dunghill." She was thrown into Bridewell, where, she says, " in the midst of a hellish crew I was sub

8" Peregrine Pickle," ch. xxix.

Ibid. ch. xxiv.

Ibid. ch. xxvii.
Ibid. ch. xxiii.

jected to the tyranny of a barbarian, who imposed upon me tasks that I could not possibly perform, and then punished my incapacity with the utmost rigour and inhumanity. I was often whipped into a swoon, and lashed out of it, during which miserable intervals I was robbed by my fellow-prisoners of everything about me, even to my cap, shoes, and stockings: I was not only destitute of necessaries, but even of food, so that my wretchedness was extreme." One night she tried to hang herself. Two of her fellow-prisoners, who watched her, prevented her. "In the morning my attempt was published among the prisoners, and punished with thirty stripes, the pain of which co-operating with my disappointment and disgrace, bereft me of my senses, and threw me into an ectasy of madness, during which I tore the flesh from my bones with my teeth, and dashed my head against the pavement.” 7 In vain we turn our eyes on the hero of the novel, Roderick Random, to repose a little after such a spectacle. He is sensual and coarse, like Fielding's heroes, but not good and jovial as these. Pride and resentment are the two principal points in his character. The generous wine of Fielding, in Smollett's hands becomes common brandy. His heroes are selfish; they revenge themselves barbarously. Roderick oppresses the faithful Strap, and ends by marrying him to a prostitute. Peregrine Pickle attacks by a most brutal and cowardly plot the honor of a young girl, whom he wants to marry, and who is the sister of his best friend. We get to hate his rancorous, concentrated, obstinate character, which is at once that of an absolute king accustomed to please himself at the expense of others' happiness, and that of a boor with only the varnish of education. We should be uneasy at living near him; he is good for nothing but to shock or tyrannize over others. We avoid him as we would a dargerous beast; the sudden rush of animal passion and the force of his firm will are so overpowering in him, that when he fails he becomes outrageous. He draws his sword against an innkeeper; he must bleed him, grows mad. Everything, even to his generosities, is spoilt by pride; all, even to his gayeties, is clouded by harshness. Peregrine's amusements are barbarous, and those of Smollett are after the same style. He exaggerates caricature; he thinks to amuse us by showing up mouths gap

7" Peregrine Pickle," ch. xxiii.

ing to the ears, and noses half a foot long; he magnifies a national prejudice or a professional trick until it absorbs the whole character; he jumbles together the most repulsive oddities-a Lieutenant Lismahago half roasted by Red Indians; old jacktars who pass their life in shouting and travestying all sorts of ideas into their nautical jargon; old maids as ugly as monkeys, as fleshless as skeletons, and as sour as vinegar; eccentric people steeped in pedantry, hypochondria, misanthropy, and silence. Far from sketching them slightly, as Le Sage does in "Gil Blas," he brings into prominent relief each disagreeable feature, overloads it with details, without considering whether they are too numerous, without recognizing that they are excessive, without feeling that they are odious, without perceiving that they are disgusting. The public whom he addresses is on a level with his energy and his coarseness; and in order to move such nerves, a writer cannot strike too hard.

But, at the same time, to civilize this barbarity and to control this violence, a faculty appears, common to all, authors and public: serious reflection intent to observe character. Their eyes are turned toward the inner man. They note exactly the individual peculiarities, and stamp them with such a precise mark that their personage becomes a type, which cannot be forgotten. They are psychologists. The title of a comedy of old Ben Jonson's "Every Man in his Humour," indicates how old and national this taste is amongst them. Smollett writes a whole novel," Humphrey Clinker," on this idea. There is no action in it; the book is a collection of letters written during a tour in Scotland and England. Each of the travellers, after his bent of mind, judges variously of the same objects. A generous, grumbling old gentleman, who employs his spare time by thinking himself ill, a crabbed old maid in search of a husband; a lady's maid, simple and vain, who bravely bungles her spell

8 In "Novels and Novelists," by W. Forsyth, the author says, ch. v. 159: "What is the character of most of these books (novels) which were to correct follies and regulate morality? Of a great many of them. and especially those of Fielding and Smollett, the prevailing features are grossness and licentiousness. Love degenerates into a mere animal passion. The language of the characters abounds in oaths and gross expressions.

The heroines allow themselves to take part in conversations which no modest woman would have heard without a

blush. And yet these novels were the delight of a bygone generation, and were greedily devoured by women as well as men. Are we therefore to conclude that our great-great-grandmothers were less chaste and moral than their female posterity? I answer, certainly not: but we must infer that they were inferior to them in delicacy and refinement. They were accustomed to hear a spade called a spade, and words which would shock the more fastidious ear in the reign of Queen Victoria were then in common and daily use."-TR.

ing; a series of eccentric people, who one after another bring their oddities on the scene-such are the characters: the pleasure of the reader consists in recognizing their humor in their style, in foreseeing their follies, in perceiving the thread which pulls each of their motions, in verifying the connection between their ideas and their actions. When we push this study of human peculiarities to excess we will come upon the origin of Sterne's talent.

Section VII.-Laurence Sterne

Let us figure to ourselves a man who goes on a journey, with a pair of marvellously magnifying spectacles on his eyes. A hair on his hand, a speck on a table-cloth, a fold of a moving garment, will interest him: at this rate he will not go very far; he will go six steps in a day, and will not quit his room. So Sterne writes four volumes to record the birth of his hero. He perceives the infinitely little, and describes the imperceptible. A man parts his hair on one side; this, according to Sterne, depends on his whole character, which is of a piece with that of his father, his mother, his uncle, and his whole ancestry; it depends on the structure of his brain, which depends on the circumstances of his conception and his birth, and these on the hobbies of his parents, the humor of the moment, the talk of the preceding hour, the difficulties of the parson, a cut thumb, twenty knots made on a bag; I know not how many things besides. The six or eight volumes of "Tristram Shandy" are employed in summing them up; for the smallest and dullest incident, a sneeze, a badly shaven beard, drags after it an inextricable network of inter-involved causes, which from above, below, right and left, by invisible prolongations and ramifications, sink into the depths of a character and in the remote vistas of events. Instead of extracting, like the novel-writers, the principal root, Sterne, with marvellous devices and success, devotes himself to drawing out the tangled skein of numberless threads, which are sinuously immersed and dispersed, so as to suck in from all sides the sap and the life. Slender, intertwined, buried as they are, he finds them; he extricates them without. breaking, brings them to the light; and there, where we fancied but a stalk, we see with wonder the underground mass and veg

etation of the multiplied fibres and fibrils, by which the visible plant grows and is supported.

This is truly a strange talent, made up of blindness and insight, which resembles those diseases of the retina in which the over-excited nerve becomes at once dull and penetrating, incapable of seeing what the most ordinary eyes perceive, capable of observing what the most piercing sight misses. In fact, Sterne is a sickly and eccentric humorist, a clergyman and a libertine, a fiddler and a philosopher, who preferred "whining over a dead ass to relieving a living mother," selfish in act, selfish in word, who in everything takes a contrary view of himself and of others. His book is like a great storehouse of articles of vertu, where curiosities of all ages, kinds, and countries lie jumbled in a heap; forms of excommunication, medical consultations, passages of unknown or imaginary authors, scraps of scholastic erudition, strings of absurd histories, dissertations, addresses to the reader. His pen leads him; he has neither sequence nor plan; nay, when he lights upon anything orderly, he purposely contorts it; with a kick he sends the pile of folios next to him over the history he has commenced, and dances on the top of them. He delights in disappointing us, in sending us astray by interruptions and delays. Gravity displeases him, he treats it as a hypocrite: to his liking folly is better, and he paints himself in Yorick. In a well-constituted mind ideas march one after another, with uniform motion or acceleration; in this odd brain they jump about like a rout of masks at a carnival, in troops, each dragging his neighbor by the feet, head, coat, amidst the most general and unforeseen hubbub. All his little lopped phrases are somersaults; we pant as we read. The tone is never for two minutes the same; laughter comes, then the beginning of emotion, then scandal, then wonder, then sensibility, then laughter again. The mischievous joker pulls and entangles the threads of all our feelings, and makes us go higher, thither, in a whimsical manner, like puppets. Amongst these various threads there are two which he pulls more willingly than the rest. Like all men who have nerves, he is subject to sensibility; not that he is really

1 Byron's Works, ed. Moore, 17 vols. 1832: "Life." iii. 127, note.

There is a distinct trace of a spirit similar to that which is here sketched, in a select few of the English writers.

Pultcck's "Peter Wilkins the Flying Man." Amory's "Life of John Buncle," and Southey's Doctor," are instances of this. Rabelais is probably their prototype.-TR.