FROM "TOM JONES."

The Gothic style of building could produce nothing nobler than Mr. Allworthy's house. There was an air of grandeur in it that struck you with awe, and rivalled the beauties of the best Grecian architecture; and it was as commodious within as venerable without.

It stood on the south-east side of a hill, but nearer the bottom than the top of it, so as to be sheltered from the north-east by a grove of old oaks, which rose above it in a gradual ascent of near half a mile, and yet high enough to enjoy a most charming prospect of the valley beneath.

In the midst of the grove was a fine lawn, sloping down towards the house, near the summit of which rose a plentiful spring, gushing out of a rock covered with firs, and forming a constant cascade of about thirty feet, not

carried down a regular flight of steps, but tumbling in a natural fall over the broken and mossy stones, till it came to the bottom of the rock; then running off in a pebbly channel, that with many lesser falls winded along, till it fell into a lake at the foot of the hill, about a quarter of a mile below the house on the south side, and which was seen from every room in the front. Out of this lake, which filled the centre of a beautiful plain, embellished with groups of beeches and elms, and fed with sheep, issued a river, that, for several miles, was seen to meander through an amazing variety of meadows and woods, till it emptied itself into the sea; with a large arm of which, and an island beyond it, the prospect was closed.

FROM "THE JOURNAL OF A VOYAGE
TO LISBON."

Illustration by T. Hulett to
"Joseph Andrews"

A most tragical incident fell out this day at sea. While the ship was under sail, but making as will appear no great way, a kitten, one of four of the feline inhabitants of the cabin, fell from the window into the water; an alarm was immediately given to the captain, who was then upon deck, and received it with the utmost concern and many bitter oaths. He immediately gave orders to the steersman in favour of the poor thing, as he called it; the sails were instantly slackened, and all hands, as the phrase is, employed to recover the poor animal. I was, I own, extremely surprised at all this; less indeed at the captain's extreme tenderness than at his conceiving any possibility of success; for if puss had had nine thousand instead of nine lives, I concluded they had been all lost. The boatswain, however, had more sanguine hopes, for, having stript himself of his jacket, breeches, and shirt, he leapt boldly into the water, and to my great astonishment in a few minutes returned to the ship, bearing the motionless animal in his mouth.

Sarah Fielding (1710-1768), sister of the more celebrated novelist, was born at East Stour on the 8th of November 1710. Her first and best novel, The Adventures of David Simple, 1744, appeared anonymously, and was attributed to the author of Joseph Andrews, who contributed an interesting preface to the second edition of his sister's book. She was living in lodgings with him during the composition of Tom Jones, and when he married again she withdrew to Bath, where she became a prominent figure in society until her death in 1768. She wrote The Governess, 1749, and other works of didactic entertainment; but David Simple, composed in the company and possibly at the suggestion of her illustrious brother, is her only production of merit. Tom Jones refused admittance by the Noblemans Porter

Pullied as the Ad directs 1701 to I Sibbald Edin

By LAURENCE STERNE the course of fiction was reversed a little way towards Addison and Steele in the two incomparable books which are his legacy to English literature. We call Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey novels, because we know not what else to call them; nor is it easy to define their fugitive and rare originality. Sterne was not a moralist in the mode of Richardson or of Fielding; it is to be feared that he was a complete ethical heretic; but he brought to his country as gifts the strained laughter that breaks into tears, and the melancholy wit that saves itself by an outburst of buffoonery. He introduced into the coarse and heavy life of the eighteenth century elements of daintiness, of persiflage, of moral versatility; he prided himself on the reader's powerlessness to conjecture what was coming next. A French critic compared Sterne, most felicitously, to one of the little bronze satyrs of antiquity in whose hollow bodies exquisite odours

were stored. He was carried away by the tumult of his nerves, and it became a paradoxical habit with him to show himself exactly the opposite of what he was expected to be. You had to unscrew him for the aroma to escape. His unseemly, passionate, pathetic life burned itself away at the age of fiftyfour, only the last eight of which had been concerned with literature. Sterne's influence on succeeding fiction has been durable but interrupted. Ever and anon his peculiar caprices, his selected elements, attract the imitation of some more or less analogous spirit. The extreme beauty of his writing has affected almost all who desire to use English prose as though it were an instrument not less delicate than English verse. Nor does the fact that a

surprising number of his "best passages" were stolen by Sterne from older writers militate against his fame, because he always, makes some little adaptation, some concession to harmony, which stamps him a master, although unquestionably a deliberate plagiarist. This fantastic sentimentalist and disingenuous idealist comes close, however, to Richardson in one faculty, the value which he extracts from the juxtaposition of a variety of trifling details artfully selected so as to awaken the sensibility of ordinary minds.

Laurence Sterne (1713-1768) was the second of the many children of Ensign Roger Sterne of Chudleigh's Foot. He was born on the 24th of November 1713 at Clonmel, where the regiment, just returned from Dunkirk, was disbanded. In less than a year the household was uprooted again, and for the next ten years was on the incessant move from one Irish barracks to another. In 1723 Sterne was sent to school at Halifax, under the protection of some Yorkshire relatives; he stayed there eight years. In the meantime, his father, having been run through the body at the rock of Gibraltar in a duel about a goose, had retired to Jamaica "with an impaired

constitution," and had died there in 1731. Laurence Sterne, still under the care of his Yorkshire cousins, was sent to Jesus College, Cambridge. Here he stayed until he took his B.A., and then in 1736 went to York to live with his uncle, Dr. Jacques Sterne, the archdeacon. He is understood to have "employed his brains" for this " ungrateful person," who nevertheless obtained for him, when he took priest's orders in 1738, the living of Sutton-in-the-Forest and two small prebends. In 1741 Sterne married Miss Elizabeth Lumley, who presently brought him another living, the Vicarage of Stillington. He was therefore not ill provided for, and he lived at Sutton for nearly twenty years, making "books, painting, fiddling, and shooting his chief amusements." He also, having become estranged from his wife, indulged in a long chain of intertwisted flirtations, some of which were of a singularly indiscreet character. The early career of Sterne, however, remains very obscure, and was doubtless very uneventful until he reached the age of forty-six, when he was led by we know not what fortunate impulse to write

the enthusiasm of Garrick, who had been overwhelmed by the humour of Tristram Shandy, and had "promised" the author of it at dinner to numbers of great people. Sterne presently speaks of himself as moving in the suite of Lord Rockingham, and of his rooms as "filling every hour with great people of the first rank, who strive who shall most honour me." There seems to have been a widespread fear that this diabolically daring satirist would hold his contemporaries up to ridicule in ensuing volumes of his work, and prominent persons took grotesque means of preventing this in their individual cases. Bishop Warburton is said to have gone so far as to send Sterne a purse of gold, although he had never set eyes on him; he presently described him to a friend as an "irrecoverable scoundrel." Meanwhile Sterne was continuing the publication of Tristram Shandy, and beginning to issue the Sermons of Mr. Yorick, which ultimately extended to seven volumes (1760-1769). He did not stay in London too long; after three months of lionising he withdrew to Coxwold, "a sweet retirement" which one of his new fashionable friends had given him in 1760, and devoted himself to composition. But his fame and his fortune were not able to conceal even from his light-hearted nature the fact that his health was now seriously impaired. After another brilliant season in London, Sterne was