drawing-rooms, and was, one may suppose, as absolutely indifferent to omens of coming difficulties as any of the freethinking or free-living abbés who were his most congenial company. Horace Walpole was no philosopher, but he shook his head in amazement over the audacious scepticism of French society. Sterne, so far as one can judge from his letters, saw and heard nothing in this direction; and one would as soon expect to find a reflection upon such matters in the 'Sentimental Journey' as to come upon a serious discussion of theological controversy in 'Tristram Shandy.' Now and then some such question just shows itself for an instant in the background. A negro wanted him to write against slavery; and the letter came just as Trim was telling a pathetic story to Uncle Toby, and suggesting doubtfully that a black might have a soul. 'I am not much versed, Corporal,' quoth my Uncle Toby, 'in things of that kind; but I suppose God would not have made him without one any more than thee or me.' Sterne was quite ready to aid the cause of emancipation by adding as many picturesque touches as he could devise to Uncle Toby, or sentimentalising over jackdaws and prisoners in the 'Sentimental Journey;' but more direct agitation would have been as little in his line as travelling through France in the spirit of Arthur Young to collect statistics about rent and wages. Sterne's sermons, to which one might possibly turn with a view to discovering some serious opinions, are not without an interest of their own. They show touches of the Shandy style and efforts to escape from the dead level. But Sterne could not be really at home in the pulpit, and all that can be called original is an occasional infusion of a more pungent criticism of life into the moral commonplaces of which sermons were then chiefly composed. The sermon in 'Tristram Shandy' supplies a happy background to Uncle Toby's comments; but even Sterne could not manage to interweave them into the text.