having eyed his brother-I don't know you, said he, bluntly, but at the same time held up his little mouth to kiss him again. Dick, says my lady, put your laced hat upon Harry, that we may see how it becomes him, which he immediately did; but Harry, feeling an unusual encumbrance on his head, took off the hat, and, having for some time looked contemptuously at it, he cast it from him with a sudden and agile jerk, as he used to cast flat stones to make ducks and drakes in the mill-pond. The hat took the glasses and decanters in full career; smash go the glasses, abroad pours the wine on circling laces, Dresden aprons, silvered silks, and rich brocades; female screams filled the parlour; the rout is equal to the uproar; and it was long ere most of them could be composed to their places. In the meanwhile, Harry took no kind of interest in their outcries or distresses; but spying a large Spanish pointer, that just then came from under the table, he sprung at him like lightning, seized him by the collar, and vaulted on his back with inconceivable agility. The dog, wholly disconcerted by so unaccustomed a burden, capered and plunged about in a violent manner; but Harry was a better horseman than to be so easily dismounted: whereon the dog grew outrageous, and, rushing into a group of little misses and masters, the children of the visitants, he overthrew them like nine-pins; thence proceeding with equal rapidity between the legs of Mrs Dowdy, a very fat and elderly lady, she instantly fell back with a violent shriek, and, in her fall, unfortunately overthrew Frank the foxhunter, who overthrew Andrew the angler, who overthrew Bob the beau, who closed the catastrophe. Our hero, meantime, was happily dismounted by the intercepting petticoats, and fairly laid, without damage, in the fallen lady's lap. From thence he arose at his leisure, and strolled about the room with as unconcerned an aspect as if nothing had happened amiss, and as though he had neither art nor part in this frightful discomfiture. When matters were once more, in some measure, set to rights-My heavens! exclaimed my lady, I shall faint! The boy is positively an idiot; he has no apprehension or conception of places or things. Come hither, sirrah, she cried, with an angry tone; but, instead of complying, Harry cast on her a look of resentment, and sidled over toward his nurse. Dicky, my dear, said my lady, go and pretend to beat his foster-mother, that we may try if the child has any kind of ideas. Here her ladyship, by ill fortune, was as much unadvised as her favourite was unhappy in the execution of her orders; for while Dick struck at the nurse with a counterfeited passion, Harry instantly reddened, and gave his brother such a sudden push in the face, that his nose and mouth gushed out with blood. the roar; my lady screamed out, and, rising and running at Harry with all imaginable fury, she caught him up as a falcon would truss a robin, turned over his petticoats, and chastised him with all the violence of which her delicacy was capable. Our hero, however, neither uttered cry nor dropped a tear; but, being set down, he turned round on the company an eye of indignation, then cried -Come away, mammy, and issued from the assembly. Harry had scarce made his exit when his mother exclaimed after him-Ay, ay, take him away, nurse! take him away, the little wretch, and never let me see his face more!

Dick set up

I shall not detain my reader with a tedious detail of the many and differing opinions that the remaining

company expressed with regard to our hero; let it suffice to observe, that they generally agreed that, though the boy did not appear to be endowed by nature with a single faculty of the animal rationale, he might, nevertheless, be rendered capable, in time, of many places of very honourable and lucrative employment. Mr Meekly alone, though so gentle and complying at other times, now presumed to dissent from the sense of the company. I rather hold, said he, that this infant is the promise of the greatest philosopher and hero that our age is likely to produce. By refusing his respect to those superficial distinctions which fashion has inadequately substituted as expressions of human greatness, he approves himself the philosopher; and by the quickness of his feelings for injured innocence, and his boldness in defending those to whom his heart is attached, he approves himself at once the hero and the man.

The Gentleman.

Friend. This, I presume, must be some very respectable personage, some extraordinary favourite of yours; since, within a few lines, you style him three or four times by your 'most venerable of all titles, the title of a gentleman.'

Author. Sir, I would not hold three words of conversation with any man who did not deserve the appellation of gentleman by many degrees better than this man does. Friend. Why, then, do you write or speak with such acknowledged impropriety?

Author. I think for myself, but I speak for the people. I may think as I please, for I understand my own thoughts; but, would I be understood when I speak to others also, I must speak with the people; I must speak in common terms, according to their common or general acceptation. There is no term in our language more common than that of gentleman; and, whenever it is heard, all agree in the general idea of a man some way elevated above the vulgar. Yet, perhaps, no two living are precisely agreed respecting the qualities they think requisite for constituting this character. When we hear the epithets of a 'fine gentleman, a pretty gentleman, much of a gentleman, gentleman-like, something of a gentleman, nothing of a gentleman,' and so forth; all these different appellations must intend a peculiarity annexed to the ideas of those who express them; though no two of them, as I said, may agree in the constituent qualities of the character they have formed in their own mind. There have been ladies who deemed a bag-wig, a tasselled waistcoat, new-fashioned snuff-box, and swordknot, very capital ingredients in the composition of-a gentleman. A certain easy impudence acquired by low people, by being casually conversant in high life, has passed a man through many companies for-a gentleman. In the country a laced hat and long whip make-a gentleman. With heralds, every esquire is indisputably -a gentleman. And the highwayman, in his manner of taking your purse, may, however, be allowed to have much-of the gentleman.

Friend. As you say, my friend, our ideas of this matter are very various and adverse. In our own minds, perhaps, they are also undetermined; and I question if any man has formed to himself a conception of this character with sufficient precision. Pray-was there any such character among the philosophers?

Author. Plato, among the philosophers, was 'the most of a man of fashion;' and therefore allowed at

the court of Syracuse to be-the most of a gentleman. But, seriously, I apprehend that this character is pretty much upon the modern. In all ancient or dead languages we have no term any way adequate whereby we may express it. In the habits, manners, and characters of old Sparta and old Rome, we find an antipathy to all the elements of modern gentility. Among those rude and unpolished people, you read of philosophers, of orators, patriots, heroes, and demigods; but you never hear of any character so elegant as that of a pretty gentleman. When those nations, however, became refined into what their ancestors would have called corruption; when luxury introduced, and fashion gave a sanction to certain sciences, which cynics would have branded with the ill-mannered appellations of debauchery, drunkenness, gambling, cheating, lying, &c., the practitioners assumed the new title of gentlemen, till such gentlemen became as plenteous as stars in the milky way, and lost distinction merely by the confluence of their lustre. Wherefore, as the said qualities were found to be of ready acquisition, and of easy descent to the populace from their betters, ambition judged it necessary to add further marks and criterions for severing the general herd from the nobler species-of gentlemen. Accordingly, if the commonalty were observed to have a propensity to religion, their superiors affected a disdain of such vulgar prejudices, and a freedom that cast off the restraints of morality, and a courage that spurned at the fear of God, were accounted the distinguishing characteristics of a gentleman. If the populace, as in China, were industrious and ingenious, the grandees, by the length of their nails and the cramping of their limbs, gave evidence that true dignity was above labour or utility, and that to be born to no end was the prerogative of a gentleman. If the common sort by their conduct declare a respect for the institutions of civil society and good government, their betters despise such pusillanimous conformity, and the magistrates pay becoming regard to the distinction, and allow of the superior liberties and privileges of a gentleman. If the lower set show a sense of common honesty and common order, those who would figure in the world think it incumbent to demonstrate that complaisance to inferiors, common manners, common equity, or any thing common, is quite beneath the attention or sphere of a gentleman. Now, as underlings are ever ambitious of imitating and usurp ing the manners of their superiors, and as this state of mortality is incident to perpetual change and revolution; may happen, that when the populace, by encroaching on the province of gentility, have arrived to their ne plus ultra of insolence, debauchery, irreligion, &c., the gentry, in order to be again distinguished, may assume the station that their inferiors had forsaken, and, however ridiculous the supposition may appear at present, humanity, equity, utility, complaisance and piety, may in time come to be the distinguishing characteristics of -a gentleman.

it

Friend. From what you have said, it appears that the most general idea which people have formed of a gentleman is that of a person of fortune, above the vulgar, and embellished by manners that are fashionable in high life. In this case, fortune and fashion are the two constituent ingredients in the composition of modern gentlemen; for, whatever the fashion may be, whether moral or immoral, for or against reason, right or wrong, it is equally the duty of a gentleman to conform.

Author. And yet I apprehend that true gentility is altogether independent of fortune or fashion, of time, customs, or opinions of any kind. The very same qualities that constituted a gentleman in the first age of the world, are permanently, invariably, and indispensably necessary to the constitution of the same character to the end of time.

The Lawyer.

It is greatly to be lamented that the learned in our laws are not as immortal as the suits for which they are retained. It were therefore to be wished that an act of parliament might be especially passed for that purpose; a matter no way impracticable, considering the great interest those gentlemen have in the House. In truth, it seems highly expedient that an infinity of years should be assigned to each student of the belles lettres of our laws, to enable them to read over that infinity of volumes which have already been published; to say nothing of the infinity that are yet to come, which will be held equally necessary for understanding the profession, of critically distinguishing and oratorically expatiating on law against law, case against case, authority against authority, precedent against precedent, statute against statute, and argument against reason. In matters of no greater moment than life and death, juries, as at the beginning, are still permitted to enter directly on the hearing and decision; but in matters so sacred as that of property, our courts are extremely cautious of too early an error in judgment. In order, therefore, to sift and boult them to the very bran, they are delivered over to the lawyers, who are equally the affirmers and disputers, the pleaders and impleaders, representers and misrepresenters, explainers and confounders of our laws; our lawyers, therefore, maintain their right of being paid for their ingenuity in putting and holding all properties in debate. Debated properties consequently become the properties of the lawyers, as long as answers can be given to bills, or replies to answers, or rejoinders to replies, or rebutters to rejoinders; as long as the battledores can strike and bandy, and till the shuttlecock falls of itself to the ground. Soberly and seriously speaking, English property, when once debated, is merely a carcase of contention, upon which interposing lawyers fall as customary prize and prey during the combat of the claimants. While any flesh remains on a bone, it continues a bone of contention; but so soon as the learned practitioners have picked it quite clean, the battle is over, and all again is peace and settled neighbourhood.

It is worthy of much pleasantry and shaking of sides to observe that, in intricate, knotty, and extremely perplexing cases, where the sages of the gown and coif are so puzzled as not to know what to make of the matter, they then bequeath it to the arbitration and award of two or three plain men; or, by record, to the judgment of twelve simple honest fellows, who, casting aside all regard to the form of writs and declarations, to the lapse of monosyllables, verbal mistakes and misnomers, enter at once upon the pith and marrow of the business, and in three hours determine, according to equity and truth, what had been suspending in the dubious scales of ratiocination, quotation, altercation, and pecuniary consideration, for three and twenty years. Neither do I see any period to the progress of this evil; the avenue still opens, and leads on to further mischiefs; for the distinctions in law are, like the Newtonian particles of

matter, divisible ad infinitum. They have been dividing and subdividing for some centuries past, and the subdivisions are as likely to be subdividing for ever; insomuch that law, thus divisible, debateable, and delay. able, is become a greater grievance than all that it was intended to redress. I lately asked a pleasant gentleman of the coif if he thought it possible for a poor man to obtain a decree, in matter of property, against a rich man. He smiled, and answered according to scripture, that with man it was impossible, but that all things were possible to God.' I suppose he meant that the decrees of the courts of Westminster were hereafter to be reversed.

Edward Moore (1712-57), author of Fables for the Female Sex, was a native of Abingdon in Berkshire, son of a Dissenting minister. He was for some years a linen-draper, but having failed in business, adopted literature as a profession. He wrote several plays, of which The Foundling (1748) and Gil Blas (1751) were not successes, whereas The Gamester (1753) was translated into French, Dutch, and German, and is still sometimes performed. The prologue and some of the best parts of it were by Garrick, who played in it. Moore, under the name of Adam Fitz-adam, edited a series of essays called The World (1753-56), for which he himself wrote only some sixty out of two hundred and ten numbers, the rest being by patrons and wits such as Lyttelton, Chesterfield, Soame Jenyns, and Horace Walpole. Moore's poem, The Trial of Selim the Persian, is largely flattery of Lyttelton. The Fables of Moore rank next to those of Gay, but are inferior to them both in choice of subject and in poetical merit; they are rather didactic. The three last are by Henry Brooke. Goldsmith thought that justice had not been done to Moore as a poet: 'It was upon his Fables he founded his reputation, but they are by no means his best production.' His (prose) tragedy of the Gamester, even apart from Garrick's additions, is a much better bit of work, and some of his verses-such as the following-are finished with greater care.

The Happy Marriage.

How blest has my time been, what joys have I known,
Since wedlock's soft bondage made Jesse my own!
So joyful my heart is, so easy my chain,
That freedom is tasteless, and roving a pain.

Through walks grown with woodbines, as often we stray,
Around us our boys and girls frolic and play :
How pleasing their sport is! The wanton ones see,
And borrow their looks from my Jesse and me.

To try her sweet temper sometimes am I seen,
In revels all day with the nymphs on the green:
Though painful my absence, my doubts she beguiles,
And meets me at night with complaisance and smiles.

What though on her cheek the rose loses its hue,
Her wit and good-humour bloom all the year through ;
Time still as he flies brings increase to her truth,
And gives to her mind what he steals from her youth.

Ye shepherds so gay, who make love to ensnare And cheat with false vows the too credulous fair; In search of true pleasure, how vainly you roam ! To hold it for life, you must find it at home. As a jeu d'esprit, the following is sprightly enough, and not without some basis in truth:

A Hymn to Poverty.

O Poverty! thou source of human art,
Thou great inspirer of the poet's song!
In vain Apollo dictates, and the Nine
Attend in vain unless thy mighty hand
Direct the tuneful lyre. Without thy aid
The canvas breathes no longer. Music's charms,
Uninfluenced by thee, forget to please;

Thou giv'st the organ sound: by thee the flute
Breathes harmony; the tuneful viol owns
Thy powerful touch. The warbling voice is thine;
Thou gav'st to Nicolini every grace,

And every charm to Farinelli's song.

By thee the lawyer pleads. The soldier's arm
Is nerved by thee. Thy power the gown-man feels,
And urged by thee unfolds heaven's mystic truths. ...
Hail, Power omnipotent! Me uninvoked
Thou deign'st to visit, far (alas!) unfit
To bear thy awful presence. O retire!

At distance let me view thee, lest too nigh
I sink beneath the terrors of thy face!

It is a curious fact that Moore died while the last number of the collected edition of his periodical, the World, which described the fatal but imaginary illness of the author, was passing through the press.

Isaac Bickerstaffe, play-writer, was born in Ireland about 1735, and at eleven became page to Lord Chesterfield, the Lord-Lieutenant. He was afterwards an officer of marines, but was dismissed the service, and in 1772 had to flee the country on a capital charge. Nothing is certainly known regarding his after-life, but he is supposed to have died on the Continent in or soon after 1812. Of his numerous pieces, produced between 1766 and 1771, the best known is The Maid of the Mill. He constantly works into his plays all manner of proverbial sayings, familiar scraps from the poets, and tags of every kind. In The Sultan we have: Let men say whate'er they will, Woman, woman rules them still.

'We all love a pretty girl-under the rose' is a song in Love in a Village.-There is no known connection between this playwright, odd though it seems, and the nom-de-guerre of Isaac Bickerstaffe' used by Swift in his attacks on Partridge the bookseller and quack concoctor of prophecy almanacs (1707-9). Swift took the name, he said, from a locksmith's sign in Longacre; and with Swift's assent Steele adopted the pseudonym for the eponymous hero of his Tatler, started in 1709 while the pamphlet-war was still being waged. It is of course quite natural to suppose that in any Dublin family of the name of Bickerstaffe the Tatler's Christian name might have been given to a boy born a few years after Steele's death.

Laurence Sterne,

a clergyman of most unclerical disposition, followed in his profession the most notable recent members of his family, though not his father, who was a captain in the army. The Sternes were a family of good antiquity, who bore as crest the bird celebrated by their son, the starling; and Sterne's great-grandfather Richard, a strong Cavalier, was first Master of Jesus College, Cambridge, then Bishop of Carlisle,

and Archbishop of York from 1664 till his death in 1683. His sons obtained establishments as squires and ecclesiastics in the district; and the third son married an heiress, Mary Jaques of Elvington near York. This pair had a large family, of which Roger was the second. Hemarried Agnes, the daughter or step-daughter of a sutler named Nuttle (N.B.'He was in debt to him,' says the graceless offspring of this union); and Laurence, their eldest son, was born at Clonmel in Ireland on the 24th of November 1713. The Peace of Utrecht (1713) for a time deprived Captain Sterne of

degrees B.A. (1736) and M.A. (1740)-at the usual time, though he does not seem to have resided, as was still not uncommon, for the whole seven years. He was ordained deacon in the same year in which he took his degree, and priest in 1738, being immediately appointed by his uncle to the benefice of Sutton-in-the-Forest, a few miles from York. Hardly the slightest fact or anecdote exists in reference to his Cambridge sojourn, except that he there made the acquaintance (an agreeable if

his occupation; but he was soon put on the establishment again, and the family 'followed the drum' in divers parts of England and Ireland for years, many children being born but few surviving, till at last (1731) Captain Roger died in Jamaica of the effects of fever following upon a duel-wound at Gibraltar. Sterne had been sent to school at Halifax in Yorkshire; and though his father's means were always small, and perished with him, his cousin, Sterne of Elvington, and his uncle, Jaques Sterne, who became a powerful pluralist in the archdiocese of York, behaved to the boy with a kindness which was either more amiably given or more amiably taken than in the similar case of Swift. He was admitted to Jesus College (where his relationship to the Archbishop procured him a scholarship) in July 1733, and took his

not wholly profitable one) of the future 'Eugenius' -John Hall, who had not yet taken the additional name of Stevenson -a member of the same college and a distant connection of the Sternes. Before he obtained his living he had begun to court, and on Easter Monday 1741 he married, Elizabeth Lumley, who had very good blood, a small fortune, and family influence sufficient to procure her husband the additional living of Stillington. His uncle, whose favour he retained till much later, was able also to give him divers prebendal and other appointments in or connected with the chapter of York. No single one of

these endowments was of much value; but, taken together, their income must have been comfortable. It might have been supposed that a man of such intense literary idiosyncrasy as Sterne would have soon turned to writing in the vacant hours of which he must have had so many. For the 'duty' which he says (and doubtless truly) he did was, in the first half of the eighteenth century, of the least exhausting or absorbing kind. But no one of the very few and by no means certain fragments that we have of his is early (putting a sermon or two out of the question); and his own brief account, which there is no reason to question, is that 'he spent near twenty years' doing the said duty, with 'books, painting, fiddling, and shooting' for his amusements. It is pretty certain that we may add 'flirting;' but even of this we have no

certain record till close upon the year 1760, when he 'broke out ten thousand strong' with Tristram Shandy. Hardly the slightest information is available as to the reasons which made a man of nearly fifty thus suddenly become an author, and one of the first rank. He tells us that he wanted money to repair some losses by unlucky farming experiments; we know that for some time he had had access, in the library of Hall Stevenson at Skelton ('Crazy') Castle, to a large collection of out-of-the-way books, especially French of the sixteenth century; and we know further that the success of Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett had for some little time past established the novel in something like the old place of the drama, as an appeal to public favour at once fashionable and profitable.

The first two volumes of the book were published simultaneously in York and London on New Year's Day 1760; their extraordinary originality (partly genuine, partly artificial) took the town at once, and Sterne, who had gone up to see after the publication, was 'lionised' by society in a manner which was probably as welcome to him as either fame or profit. The pompous and orthodox Warburton gave him (with some not superfluous cautions) a present of money; Lord Falconbridge gave him yet another Yorkshire living-Coxwold; everybody asked him to dinner. He was encouraged to print some sermons of a tolerably serious kind, and when summer came he returned to Yorkshire determined to repeat his success at the opening of the next year. With rather unusual luck he did so; sold the third and fourth volumes for nearly £400 to Dodsley, and had another season of glory in London as a bachelor. In the third winter, 1761-62, he published the third pair rather earlier (in December), and, obtaining leave of absence from his duties, took his wife and daughter Lydia to France. Here they spent the rest of the winter and the spring in Paris, and nearly two years in the south at Toulouse and elsewhere. Mrs and Miss Sterne, indeed, remained in France for several years; but Sterne came back in the middle of 1764, and got a fourth pair of volumes ready for January 1765, when he repeated his old enjoyment of success in London, besides drawing subscriptions for a fresh batch of sermons, more in character. In October of this year he went abroad again, extending his journey to Rome and even Naples, and meeting his family in France, but still not bringing them home with him. In the latter part of 1766 and the early part of 1767 he once more followed his old order of writing, publishing, and going up to London to enjoy the success of an instalment of Tristram-in this case one volume only, the ninth and last. And he then carried on his once admired, now slightly ridiculous, philandering with 'Eliza,' the 'Bramine'-in other words, Mrs Draper, the 'grass-widow' of an Indian functionary. By this time Sterne's health-which in early manhood had been, he says, very good, but

about the time of his first successes had broken, so as to give more than pretext for his journeys to the South-was very seriously impaired. His wife and daughter spent the winter with him at York; and he then made, alone, his usual publishing and merry-making expedition to London, with the Sentimental Journey in Tristram's place. It was published on 28th February 1768, and Sterne himself died of consumption on 18th March in his Bond Street lodgings, without any relation, friend, or person of his own degree to look after him. His dead body is said to have been robbed, which is not at all improbable; and his grave in the burial-ground of St George's at Paddington, to have been violated by body-snatchers, which is not at all impossible. His wife, who was left in bad circumstances, did not survive him many years; his daughter married a Frenchman named Medalle, published her father's letters with extraordinary want of decency or want of care, and is said to have atoned for this by being guillotined under the French Revolution. Quite recently details have been published respecting her conduct at school, which show that she must have had not a little of the mischievous wit of her father. Not very much can be said for Sterne's moral character except that he does not seem to have been at all ill-natured; that he had none of the underhand tricks which have rather too often distinguished men of letters, and for which his great contemporaries Pope and Voltaire are specially infamous; that he was most sincerely and unselfishly fond of his daughter; and that, though anything but a good husband in some ways, he seems to have done his utmost to supply his wife liberally, in her independent wanderings, out of means which were certainly far from abundant. How far his exorbitant philanderings transgressed the orbit of admitted morality, as well as that of propriety in the general sense, charity may for bear from deciding in the lucky absence of positive evidence. But unluckily these philanderings, though they are free from the callous brutality which smirches the love-making of the Restora. tion, are made almost more distasteful to moderns by the sickly sentimentality and the sniggering prurience which pervade both his published and his private writings.

These writings themselves, however, are very remarkable things, and may even be called great, though they are by no means faultless. Among their faults, that ugly one which has just been glanced at needs no further mention and admits of no defence; but some others of their characteristics present an interesting though difficult mixture of the attractive and the irritating. In form, the two main works (the Sermons and the few minor pieces need little notice; and the interest of the Letters, though great, is wholly biographi cal) are, as has been said, novels; but novels of a very peculiar kind. The consecutive narrative interest of Tristram Shandy is almost nil. The