About this time, Mr. Sterne, the celebrated author, was taken ill at the silk-bag shop in Old Bond Street. He was sometimes called "Tristram Shandy," and sometime "Yorick"; a very great favourite of the gentlemen's. One day my master had company to dinner, who were speaking about him; the Duke of Roxburgh, the Earl of March, the Earl of Ossory, the Duke of Grafton, Mr. Garrick, Mr. Hume, and Mr. James. "John," said my master, "go and inquire how Mr. Sterne is to-day." I went, returned, and said: I went to Mr. Sterne's lodging; the mistress opened the door; I inquired how he did. She told me to go up to the nurse; I went into the room, and he was just a-dying. I waited ten minutes; but in five he said, "Now it is come!" He put up his hand as if to stop a blow, and died in a minute. The gentlemen were all very sorry, and lamented him very much. We have seen Corporal Trim in the kitchen dropping his hat as a symbol of man's quick and humiliating collapse, but I think the attitude of poor Yorick himself lying in his hired chamber, with hand upraised to stop the invisible blow, a work of greater and still more astounding genius. It was devised by the Master of gesture indeed, by him whose puppets move on a wider stage than that of Shandy Hall. J. HENRY SHORTHOUSE Probably few people expected a work of more than mediocre interest when they heard that Mrs. Shorthouse was preparing her husband's _Letters and Literary Remains_ for the the press.[9] The life of a Birmingham merchant, who in the course of his evenings elaborated one rather mystical novel and then a few paler and abbreviated shadows of it, did not, indeed, promise a great deal, and there is something to make one shudder in the very sound of "literary remains." Nor would it have been reassuring to know that these remains were for the most part short essays and stories read at the social meetings of the Friends' Essay Society of Birmingham. The manuscript records of such a club are not a source to which one would naturally look for exhilarating literature, yet from them, let me say at once, the editor has drawn a volume both interesting and valuable. Mr. Shorthouse contributed to these meetings for some twenty years, from the age of eighteen until he withdrew to concentrate his energies upon _John Inglesant_, and it is worthy of notice that his early sketches are, on the whole, better work than the more elaborate essays, such as that on _The Platonism of Wordsworth_, which followed the production of his masterpiece. He was to an extraordinary degree _homo unius libri_, almost of a single thought, and there is a certain freshness in his immature presentation of that idea which was lost after it once received the stamp of definitive expression. Hawthorne, we already knew, furnished the model for his later method, but we feel a pleasant shock, such as always accompanies