The extreme difficulty I have experienced throughout this chapter in thinking of the technique of these novelists, instead of their material, is a tribute to their power. It is the same with Hogarth. It is impossible to get at the artist for thinking of the life upon his canvases. It is almost impossible to consider Fielding or Smollett as technicians (I have had to do it in their least human books), for thinking of the England that they represented. And now that I am looking about for a concluding paragraph on the work of these two men, when I should be summing up the general characteristics of their craftsmanship, I look at the pile of their books on the table before me, and feel a full and comfortable stomach, and cannot get out of my nose the smell of beer and beef and cheese associated as closely with their pages as lavender with the pages of _Cranford_. What an England it was in their day. Mr. Staytape carried Rory 'into an alehouse, where he called for some beer and bread and cheese, on which we _breakfasted_.' 'Our landlord and we sat down at a board, and dined upon a shin of beef most deliciously; our reckoning amounting to twopence halfpenny each, bread and small beer included.' The bright glances of Mistress Waters 'hit only a vast piece of beef which he was carrying into his plate, and harmless spent their force.' Her sighs were drowned 'by the coarse bubbling of some bottled ale.' Square meals are the best antidotes for sentiment, and in every scene of these novelists there is always some one who has fed too recently to allow any hairsplitting delicacy in the room with him. No confessional disentangling of emotions, but beer, beef, cheese, a good heart, a sound skin, and the lack of these things, are the motives of the masculine novel. A NOTE ON STERNE