and Mrs Shandy, of the Widow Wadman, of Dr. Slop, and even minor persons such as Obadiah and Bridget, are depicted with strokes of a masterly vigour. A few of the canvases of Jan Steen have something of the same power to arrest one by their striking animation and fidelity to the life. As a detached fragment few passages in our literature are worthy to compare with the death of Le Fèvre. The effect is instantaneous. In one moment our sympathy is irresistibly arrested. It is the magic of style. As for Uncle Toby, we feel almost at once the desirability of his friendship; we admire the good old soldier, sympathize with his hobby, and take the keenest interest in his campaign against the Widow Wadman, unworthy though she be of his affections. My Uncly Toby, says Hazlitt decisively, is one of the finest compliments ever paid to human nature.

Sterne must rank with Fielding and Dickens in the van of English humourists. Most humourists, like the two just mentioned, can be distinguished as either Cervantic or Rabelaisian; but Sterne was neither. His humour is Sternean. No book so destitute of literary form as Tristram Shandy could possibly be secured against neglect save by humour of a supreme order. That is exactly

what Sterne's humour is. He has been somewhat unfortunate in his critics, who have generally been of a nature congruous with Johnson, stolidly refusing credit to the suffering of a man so long as he is well fed. Thackeray

1 In the character of Parson Yorick, Sterne furnishes some autobiographical details. Eugenius, here and in the Journey, is Hall Stevenson, founder of the Demoniack Club, and formerly one of the celebraters of the messe noire at Medmenham, along with Churchill, Bob Lloyd, Paul Whitehead, and Thomas Potter, author of the scandalous Essay on Woman (1763) which Wilkes had privately printed (see Johnstone, Chrysal, Chapter XVI.),

saw in Sterne not the great humourist, but a jester; a charlatan who brought out his bit of carpet to tumble on, heedless alike of the mirth of the crowd or the pity of the graver bystander. Is Sterne pathetic in the presence of suffering in the brute creation and at the same time guilty of ill-treating his nearest relatives?-his pathos is obviously assumed. Does he weep at the recital of woe by the lips of a stranger, whilst his imprudence is the occasion of deeper misfortune among members of his own family?—be assured that his tears are crocodile tears, springing from no genuine feeling, but mechanically produced as a bit of harlequinade for the delectation of the susceptible reader. These are some of the results which a sentimental method of criticism yields: conclusions which are based in reality upon such fallacies as that conduct is an unfailing criterion of good feeling, or that the man who writes about human nature requires a double portion of human virtue.

Some of Sterne's failings are not, perhaps, of the order to which it is easy to be a little blind; but a perception of them must not interfere with our recognition of his literary greatness. Moral and political people as we are, it should yet be possible for us not to confuse the attributes of a founder of English prose fiction with those of a pioneer of moral progress.

The books referred to in this chapter are the classics," and the four authors-Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne--may be considered as the founders of the English novel. Apart from the great figure of Swift and his prodigious legacy to readers of all nations, no literary product of the eighteenth century in Britain has an equal claim to rank as world literature' with the English novel as shaped by these four masters. Its great points obtained for it its widespread influence; the modern student is in little danger of overlooking its bad points, which are upon the

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surface. There is no denying that the 'classic' novel takes an exceedingly low view of human nature, and it has not been ill described as attempting to play upon life as upon a fiddle without a bridge in the deliberate endeavour to get the most depressing tone possible from the instrument. This is the refined view of the roguery and the exuberant horseplay which abounds in the work of Fielding and Smollett. There is certainly not to be found here either the idealism of the Elizabethan dramatists or the benignity of the great nineteenth-century group of English novelists. The prevalent aim is to show us the seamy side of life, and to 'expose' vice, and there is much of the ironic spirit of Jonathan Wild about the endeavour. In the later half of the eighteenth century, unlike the present day, the philosophers were the optimists, and it was left to the novelists to project the black shadows. Their object seems often to be to show how bad man may be; and in Fielding and Smollett, at least, there is a refreshing absence of cant. Books which conceal so little are necessarily not fit for the perusal of babes and sucklings. They are eminently the books of men living in the world, thoroughly conversant with its miry ways the rough and tumble of the human comedybut saved by their manliness and their strong sense of humour from the crude materialism and brutal nihilism of some modern realists. The fact, important to the literary inquirer, is that these four writers in England first thoroughly fertilized the grand field of the modern novel.

CHAPTER VIII.

MINOR NOVELISTS.

We have dealt with the novels of the great masters, together with Rasselas, which is less a novel than an excursion in imaginative ethics, and the delightful idyll of The Vicar of Wakefield. The latter, indeed, is a story sui generis, which has of necessity had few close imitators, though its influence has been profound and far-reaching. English romance, as we have seen, has gone forth through Richardson, Sterne, and Goldsmith, to conquer the world. Through Rousseau, Diderot, Marmontel, Bernardin de St. Pierre, Goldoni, it has swayed the writers of the Latin speech; while through Wieland, Hermes, Nicolai, and Sebaldus, it has dominated Germany. Goldsmith's direct influence on Herder and Goethe, and later on Jean Paul, was very great, and has never perhaps yet been fully estimated.

We have now to treat briefly of the subordinate fiction, which for the most part is of interest rather to the literary archæologist than to the general reader, however catholic he may be in his tastes.' The first work with which we shall

In the train of the 'proto-novelists' came naturally a host of imitators. Charles Johnstone (1719-1800) produced 1760-5 his Smollettian Chrysal, or the Adventures of a Guinea, and other adaptive minds were soon converting to purposes of satire the adventures of a bank-note and a rupee, of a lady's slipper, and even of a cat and a flea. Smollett was the regular stock-pot of the amateur novelist; but Fielding and Richardson had numerous

have to deal, the John Buncle (1756) of Thomas Amory (1691-1788), an eccentric recluse of Irish descent, though very little known, has the recommendation of being one of the most singular productions in the language. It is a Unitarian romance by an English Rabelais.' Wisdom and mirth take their turn, body and soul are equally attended to. The hero is a great philosopher, mathematician, anatomist, chemist, philologist, and divine, with a good appetite, the best spirits, and an amorous constitution, who sets out on a series of strange adventures to propagate his philosophy, his divinity, and his species, with a charming impartiality, and encounters in the process a succession of accomplished females, adorned with equal wit, beauty, and virtue, who are always ready to discuss all manner of theoretical and practical points with him. Hence a candour greater than the candour of Voltaire's Candide and a modesty equal to that of Colley Cibber.'

From this naïve and unclassifiable fantasia, which is an indispensable adjunct of every book-lover's top shelf, we must pass on to several 'Robinsonaden,' or varieties of the type of voyage imaginaire, such as The Travels and Adventures of William Bingfield, Esquire (1753), or The Life and Adventures of John Daniel (1751), or the better known Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins (1751), by Robert Paltock (1697-1767), an obscure London attorney. Paltock' imitators also, among them R. Cumberland, the dramatist, author of Henry, and Robert Bage (1728-1801), author of Hermsprong (1796). Scott thought the two last-mentioned worthy of a place in his Collection. Their relative position is much lower to-day. Lack of originality and perversion to the baser purposes of the pamphleteer lowered the status of the novel after 1768, until, as Bage himself asserted, it was pretty generally considered as the lowest of all human productions.'

1 Paltock owed something to The World in the Moon of John Wilkins. See The Age of Milton, p. 236.