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not a time when men either shrank from coarseness and vice, or thought that the way to condemn it was to pass it by. Smollett's earlier tales live chiefly for their pictures of sea-life and seamen, so immeasurably more lifelike than anything the romancers were wont to give; his Tom Bowling, indeed, as a real English tar, leaves Robinson Crusoe himself a shade. That his last work, Humphrey Clinker, excelled these in the kindly human sympathy which underlies even its broadest humor, is owing in part to the author's riper age, but possibly also in part to the influence of one whom we treat next, his senior in years, but a tardier competitor for the novelist's laurels.

Laurence Sterne, a wandering soldier's son, and for the greater part of his life an obscure country clergyman, wrote two

Laurence Sterne, 1713-1768.

of the strangest books in literature-Tristram Shandy, which, published in parts between 1760 and 1767, made the author at once a literary lion in London, and A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy (1768), which gave him a posthumous fame abroad. The books are almost literally indescribable. The first does not even give what its title promises, "the life and opinions of Tristram Shandy." The hero is not the hero, and though he is the narrator he does not fairly get himself born until the third book, in the middle of which he writes his preface. It is a plotless farrago of sense and nonsense, license, humor, wit, and wisdom, which becomes a novel, if it does so at all, by its original and vivid portrayal of character. Walter Shandy, the crackbrained philosopher, Corporal Trim, the Widow Wadman, and above all Uncle Toby, the simple-minded veteran of King William's wars, are among the striking portraits that adorn the gallery of early English fiction. The last named has been called by Sir Leslie Stephen the "incarnation of the sentimentalism of the eighteenth century." Sentimentalism, indeed, is the most pervading characteristic of Sterne's work,—at its mawkish worst repelling his readers, but at its best softening his humor into something far more acceptable than the ferocious humor of

Smollett. It is most marked in the Sentimental Journey, which is often preferred to the larger, more eccentric, and more Rabelaisian work. An example will show very clearly the nature of it :—

"We set off afresh, and as she took her third step, the girl put her hand within my arm-I was just bidding her--but she did it of herself with that undeliberating simplicity, which shewed it was out of her head that she had never seen me before. For my own part, I felt the conviction of consanguinity so strongly, that I could not help turning half round to look in her face, and see if I could trace out any thing in it of a family likeness-Tut! said I, are we not all relations?

"When we arrived at the turning up of the Rue de Gueneguault, I stopped to bid her adieu for good and all: the girl would thank me again for my company and kindness-She bid me adieu twice-I repeated it as often; and so cordial was the parting between us, that had it happened anywhere else, I'm not sure but I should have signed it with a kiss of charity, as warm and holy as an apostle.

"But in Paris, as none kiss each other but the men-I did, what amounted to the same thing—

"I bid God bless her."

In this quality of sentimentality it is to be noted that Sterne stood with Richardson, as against Swift, Fielding, and Smollett. But Richardson was no humorist, and Sterne was.

With the names of Smollett and Sterne we may be content to close the history of the eighteenth century novel. Two important works of fiction have not yet been mentioned, Rasselas and-The Vicar of Wakefield; but as they were the incidental productions of men distinguished equally in other fields, the consideration of them falls, with that of their authors, in the succeeding chapter. Henry Mackenzie's The Man of Feeling (1771), which continued Sterne's sentimentalism without his humor, may be quite disregarded. Fiction entered upon a distinct decline. After Smollett's Humphrey Clinker (1771), but a single novel of social life and manners attained to anything like its quality, namely, Miss Burney's sprightly Evelina, which was published in 1778. On the other hand, romances, though of mostly inferior character, came once more into vogue. In 1764 Horace Walpole, the letter-writer, and builder of the famous

"little Gothic castle" at Strawberry Hill, Twickenham, published his famous little "Gothic" or mediæval, romance of The Castle of Otranto, a pretended translation of a black-letter Italian original. Enchanted helmets, trap-doors and spectres, sighing portraits and bleeding statues, are a part of the machinery of the tale, which, the poet Gray reported, made him and his littlehardened Cambridge friends "afraid to go to bed o'nights." It had a number of successors, notably William Beckford's oriental tale of the Caliph Vathek (1784), Mrs. Radcliffe's My.eries of Udolpho (1794), and Matthew Gregory Lewis's The Monk (1795). Finally, the revolutionary social theories that were rife toward the end of the century affected fiction and inspired tales of the type of William Godwin's Caleb Williams (1794). But though all these books were extremely popular, none of them reached greatness. They interest us chiefly as exponents of the reactionary tendency which, on the side of pure romance, was in another century to culminate in the positive genius of the great "Wizard of the North."

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Turning now from our sketch of the rise of the novel, we take up again the thread of miscellaneous prose and poetry where we left it at the death of Swift and Pope. The political history of the time requires little comment. The House of Hanover was firmly established, as it remains to this day. The policies of the nation were chiefly determined by her statesmen, especially Walpole the "Peace Minister," and Pitt the fiery "Patriot" and "Great Commoner." Under the former, while the country apparently stood still, the foundations of free trade were laid and a colonial policy was shaped; under the latter, with Clive extending the British empire over India and Wolfe defending it in America, the nation rose from insularity to her modern position among the great powers of the world. Something of this, of course, is in her literature; but it is to be noted that through this period letters do not keep so close to affairs of state as they had done since the time of the Restoration,

With the rise of the Commons, the spread of culture, and the freedom of the press from political or clerical interference, writers became more independent of both Court and Church. We have seen how the publication of Pope's Homer was significant of the fact that authors were beginning to look for their rewards less to noble patrons than to the reading public. The increasing intrusion of the bourgeois element into literature itself, with its consequent influence on style and the whole range of mental, moral, and artistic standards, is exemplified in Defoe, in Richardson, and above all in the novels of Fielding, who set forth in his characters the average, democratic, unheroic man as scarcely Shakespeare himself in the shadow of feudalism cared to do. We shall henceforth be more and more concerned with the aspirations and passions that throb in the hearts of the common people.

At the same time the social and intellectual ideals of the century did not materially change. There were, on the surface at least, the same deference to conventionality, the same satisfaction with mere excellence of form, the same exaltation of "good sense." Philosophy was much affected by the thinking classes, but intellectual force decreased with imaginative decline, and a rather narrow, specious philosophy was the guide of life. The critical spirit was still rife. Genius was understood to mean talent or propensity, or, at the best, general rather than exalted powers. Reynolds painted real portraits instead of idealized Madonnas or symbolic saints. Garrick, in default of any highly original, creative drama, reinterpreted Shakespeare and Dryden. Nor is it without significance that Doctor Johnson, the great "literary dictator," should to-day be characterized by dictionaries of biography, not first as essayist, or philosopher, or poet, all of which in some degree he was, but as lexicographer. The prevalent respect for well-tried conventions, the calm submission to the dictates of reason, the earnest desire for universal law and order, are all apparent in the labors of this man, valorously working to regulate into precision our language,

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