He represents, no doubt, a kind of sham sentimentalism with an insincerity which has disgusted many able critics. He was resolved to attract notice at any price--by putting on cap and bells, and by the pruriency which stains his best work. Like many contemporaries he was reading old authors and turned them to account in a way which exposed him to the charge of plagiarism. He valued them for their quaintness. They enabled him to satisfy his propensity for being deliberately eccentric which made Horace Walpole call _Tristram Shandy_ the 'dregs of nonsense,' and the learned Dr. Farmer prophesied that in twenty years it would be necessary to search antiquarian shops for a copy. Sterne's great achievement, however, was not in the mere buffoonery but in the passages where he continued the Addison tradition. Uncle Toby is a successor of Sir Roger, and the famous death of Lefevre is told with inimitable simplicity and delicacy of touch. Goldsmith and Sterne work upon the old lines, but make use of the new motives and materials which are beginning to interest readers, and which will in time call for different methods of treatment. I must briefly indicate one other point. The society of which Garrick was a member, and which was both reading Shakespeare and seeing his plays revived, might well seem fitted to maintain a drama. Goldsmith complains of the decay of the stage, which he attributes partly to the exclusion of new pieces by the old Shakespearian drama. On that point he agrees as far as he dares with Voltaire. He ridiculed Home's _Douglas_, one of the last tragedies which made even a temporary success, and which certainly showed that the true impulse was extinct. But Goldsmith and his younger contemporary Sheridan succeeded for a time in restoring vigour to comedy. Their triumph over the sentimentalists Kelly and Cumberland showed, as Johnson put it, that they could fill the aim of the comedian, namely, making an audience merry. _She Stoops to Conquer_ and _The School for Scandal_ remain among genuine literary masterpieces. They are revivals of the old Congreve method, and imply the growth of a society more decent and free from the hard cynical brutality which disgraced the earlier writers. I certainly cannot give a sufficient reason why the society of Johnson and Reynolds, full of shrewd common sense, enjoying humour, and with a literary social tradition, should not have found other writers capable of holding up the comic mirror. I am upon the verge of a discussion which seems to be endless, the causes of the decay of the British stage. I must give it a wide berth, and only note that, as a fact, Sheridan took to politics, and his mantle fell on no worthy successor. The next craze (for which he was partly responsible) was the German theatre of Kotzebue, which represented the intrusion of new influences and the production of a great quantity of rubbish. After Goldsmith the poetic impulse seems to have decayed entirely.