Do not inquire how far it has been deliberately concocted and stimulated. The man is not only a wonderful artist, but he is right in asserting that his impulses are clear and genuine. Why should not that satisfy us? Are we to set up for so rigid a nature that we are never to consent to sit down with Uncle Toby and take him as he is made? We may wish, if we please, that Sterne had always been in his best, and that his tears flowed from a deeper source. But so long as he really speaks from his heart—and he does so in all the finer parts of the Toby drama—why should we remember that the heart was rather flighty, and regarded with too much conscious complacency by its proprietor? The Shandyism upon which he prided himself was not a very exalted form of mind, nor one which offered a very deep or lasting satisfaction. Happily we can dismiss an author when we please; give him a cold shoulder in our more virtuous moods, and have a quiet chat with him when we are graciously pleased to relax. In those times we may admit Sterne as the best of jesters, though it may remain an open question whether the jester is on the whole an estimable institution. FOOTNOTES: [8] Sterne says in the letter that Hall was over forty; and he was five years older than Hall. _COUNTRY BOOKS_ A love of the country is taken, I know not why, to indicate the presence of all the cardinal virtues. It is one of those outlying qualities which are not exactly meritorious, but which, for that very reason, are the more provocative of a pleasing self-complacency. People pride themselves upon it as upon early rising, or upon answering letters by return of post. We recognise the virtuous hero of a novel as soon as we are told that the cat instinctively creeps to his knee, and that the little child clutches his hand to stay his tottering steps. To say that we love the country is to make an indirect claim to a similar excellence. We assert a taste for sweet and innocent pleasures, and an indifference to the feverish excitements of artificial society. I, too, love the country—if such a statement can be received after such an exordium; but I confess—to be duly modest—that I love it best in books. In real life I have remarked that it is frequently damp and rheumatic, and most hated by those who know it best. Not long ago, I heard a worthy orator at a country school-treat declare to his small audience that honesty, sobriety, and industry, in their station in life, might possibly enable them to become cabdrivers in London. The precise form of the reward was suggested, I fancy, by some edifying history of an ideal cabman; but the speaker clearly knew the road to his hearers' hearts. Perhaps the realisation of this high destiny might dispel their illusions. Like poor Susan at the corner of Wood Street, they would see Bright volumes of vapour through Lothbury glide, And a river flow on through the vale of Cheapside.