consenting; and, in any case, is not necessarily to be believed upon a matter of fact. One’s resentment is embittered by the manner in which Eugenius makes the continuation. It is notorious that Sterne never made a statement that could definitely incriminate himself. It was his whole art to leave everything to his readers’ imagination, and to put upon them the odium of the obvious interpretation. An admission on his part would have been fatal not only to himself, but to the style and intention of his work, which may be described as skating upon thin ice. Eugenius, however, in spite of all the intimacy which he says subsisted between himself and Mr. Sterne, was so far from having appreciated the elementary quality of the _Journey_ that in completing the very incident on which Book Two breaks off, he falls into the blunder of committing Sterne to a “criminal” confession. I need not say what the confession is; it is the obvious deduction to be drawn from the description provided by Sterne himself. And it is precisely on this account that I am certain Sterne would never have made it. STERNE ON LOVE IN FRANCE.—One of my correspondents must have been reading Sterne at the same time that I was being annoyed by Eugenius, for he has written to remind me of Sterne’s opinion of Love as it is understood in France. “The French,” wrote Sterne, “have certainly got the credit of understanding more of Love, and making it better than any other nation upon earth; but for my own part I think them arrant bunglers, and in truth, the worst set of marksmen that ever tried Cupid’s patience.” My correspondent recalls the fact from the dark backward and abysm of time that, in a discussion of Stendhal, I expressed the same opinion; and he has, no doubt, supplied the parallel in order to gratify me. Gratifying it is, in one sense, to find oneself confirmed in a somewhat novel opinion—which, moreover, was thought to be original as well—by an observer of the penetration of Sterne. But it is less gratifying when one reflects that Sterne was the last person in the world to have the right to talk about Love at all. What should a genuine as well as a professed sentimentalist have to say of Love more than that in its practice the French were not sentimental enough for him? But it is not the defect of sentimentality that stamps Love as understood in France with the mark of inferiority, but the presence of too much egoism—a fault Sterne would never have observed. ENGLISH STYLE.—The same correspondent copies out for me Quincey’s “fine analysis of Swift’s style,” as follows:—