To find fault with his two famous books is almost contemptibly easy. The plagiarism which, if not found out at once, was found out very soon, is the least of these: in fact hardly a fault at all. The indecency, which _was_ found out at once, and which drew a creditable and not in the least Tartuffian protest from Warburton, is a far more serious matter--not so much because of the licence in subject as because of the unwholesome and sniggering tone. The sentimentality is very often simply maudlin, almost always tiresome _to us_, and in very, very few cases justified by brilliant success even in its own very doubtful kind. Most questionable of all, perhaps, is the merely mechanical mountebankery--the blanks, and the dashes, and the rows of stops, the black pages and the marbled pages which he employs to force a guffaw from his readers. The abstinence from any central story in _Tristram_ is one of those dubious pieces of artifice which may possibly show the artist's independence of the usual attractions of story-telling, but may also suggest to the churlish the question whether his invention would have supplied him with any story to tell; and the continual asides and halts and parenthetic divagations in the _Journey_ are not quite free from the same suggestion. In fact if you "can see a church by daylight" you certainly want no piercing vision, and no artificial assistance of light or lens, to discover the faults of this very unedifying churchman. But he remains, for all that, a genius; and one of the great figures in our history. There is to his credit in general, as has been already pointed out, the great asset of having indicated, and in two notable instances patterned, the out-of-the-way novel--the novel eccentric, particular, individual. There is to that credit still more the brilliancy of the two specimens themselves in spite of their faults; their effectiveness in the literature of delight; the great powers of a kind more or less peculiar to the artist which they show, and the power, perhaps still greater, which they display in the actually general and ordinary lines of the novel, though adapted to this extraordinary use.