one has been rambling with a discreditable parson, who is so glad to be free from the restraints of his parish or of Mrs. Sterne's company that he is always peeping into forbidden corners, and anxious to prove to you that he is as knowing in the ways of a wicked world as a raffish undergraduate enjoying a stolen visit to London. Goldsmith's idyllic pictures of country life may be a little too rose-coloured, but at least they are harmonious. Sterne's sudden excursions into the nauseous are like the brutal practical jokes of a dirty boy who should put filth into a scent bottle. We feel that if he had entered the rustic paradise, of which Dr. and Mrs. Primrose were the Adam and Eve, half his sympathies would have been with the wicked Squire Thornhill; he would have been quite as able to suit that gentleman's tastes as to wheedle the excellent Vicar; and his homage to Miss Olivia would have partaken of the nature of an insult. A man of Sterne's admirable delicacy of genius, writing always with an eye to the canons of taste approved in Crazy Castle, must necessarily produce painful discords, and throw away admirable workmanship upon contemptible ribaldry. But the very feeling proves that there was really a finer element in him. Had he been thoroughly steeped in the noxious element, there would have been no discord. We might simply have set him down as a very clever reprobate. But, with some exceptions, we can generally recognise something so amiable and attractive as to excite our regret for the waste of genius even in his more questionable passages.