a passage of his which bears on the whole subject, and shows both his method and the absolute consciousness with which he employed it――to say nothing of the shameless candour with which he laughs at his own trick. Corporal Trim is discoursing to his fellow servants on the death of Tristram’s brother, Master Bobby. ‘Are we not here now?’ continued the Corporal (striking the end of his stick perpendicularly upon the floor, so as to give an emblem of health and stability) ‘and’ (dropping his hat upon the ground) ‘gone in a minute?’ Then Sterne digresses, and repeats――as his manner is. But he comes back――and is good enough to explain: ‘Let us only carry back our minds to the mortality of Trim’s hat,’ he says. ‘Are we not here now――and gone in a moment? There was nothing in the sentence――’twas one of your self-evident truths we have the advantage of hearing every day: and if Trim had not trusted more to his hat than to his head, he had made nothing at all of it.’ And he proceeds: ‘Ten thousand and ten thousand times ten thousand (for matter and motion are infinite) are the ways by which a hat may be dropped on the ground without any effect. Had he flung it, or thrown it, or cast it, or skimmed it, or squirted it, or let it slip or fall in any possible direction under heaven――had he dropped it like a goose, like a puppy, like an ass――or in doing it or even after he had done it, had looked like a fool, like a ninny, like a nincompoop――it had failed, and the effect upon the heart had been lost.’ And he ends――most justifiably――‘Meditate, I beseech you, upon Trim’s hat!’ Trim’s hat may certainly stand as an instance of the value of stage-directions to novel dialogue. Returning to actually spoken words――the real talk between the interlocutors――we may note the great adaptability and elasticity of the dialogue form. The hesitation, the aposiopesis, the interruption, are all ready and flexible devices, apt to convey hints, innuendoes, doubts, objections, apt to convey the sense of a balance inclining now this way, now that, to show one mind feeling its way towards a knowledge of the other, while sedulously guarding its own secrets. Or you may seek the broader effects of comedy with the sudden betrayal of irreconcilable divergence, or of an agreement as complete as it is paradoxical, or of the mutual helplessness which results from total misunderstanding of the one by the other, or, finally, of the well-worn but still effective device――a favourite one in the theatre――of two people talking at cross-purposes, one meaning one thing, the other a different one, and the pair arriving at an harmonious agreement from utterly inharmonious premises――the false accord of a hundred scenes of comedy.