BOOKS.

MR. FITZGERALD'S NEW LIFE OF STERNE.*- MORE than thirty years ago Mr. Fitzgerald wrote a life of Sterne which exhibited a large amount of research and a

number of critical estimates that were of doubtful value.

The arrangement of his materials was not judicious, and many of the opinions expressed were based on questionable evidence. Literature, however, owed much to him for doing what had not been done before, and now he has produced a biography founded on the previous work, but which " is in great part rewritten, and contains much fresh material."

This material, though it includes a long and strangely worded letter in which Sterne vindicates his conduct to his mother, does not in any respect raise our opinion of the humourist's moral character. Indeed, Mr. Fitzgerald admits that he has been obliged to modify the too favourable opinion he entertained of Sterne; that he was something more than the mere " philanderer " he described himself to be, and that his journal, which is still unpublished, " is fatally damaging, exhibiting a repulsive combination of Pharisaical utterances and lax principle." Unfor- tunately the biographer in his rewritten "Life " is not careful to maintain a consistent view of Mr. Sterne, as he persists in calling him. On one page we read that Sterne was " the most affectionate of husbands," and on another that he was "kind, careful, and thoughtful," which may in one sense be admitted since he never left his wife without money; but how do this kindness and affection agree with the statements made later on in Sterne's own letters and journal P The "warm and affectionate heart" for which the biographer gives him credit is displayed in frequent flirtations with married and single women, and in contemptuous com- ments on his wife. Sterne confessed that he must ever have some Dulcinea in his head, and Mr. Fitzgerald observes that "throughout his life he carefully nourished some gentle passion—it harmonised and allured the soul and made him comfortable and happy." He adds, that "in Mr. Sterne's case his ' amorous propensities,' as Johnson called them, were not found within harmless limits." This is true, but like the passages freely quoted from Sterne's confessions, and like several of the biographer's own statements, it belies the estimate given of his conduct as a married man. Thus Mr. Fitzgerald's "most affectionate of husbands" writes to "Eliza," not choosing to remember that she had a husband living, " My wife cannot live long, and I know not any one I should like so well for her substitute as yourself ; " and again he says, "Not Swift so loved his Stella, Scarron his Main- tenon, or Waller his Sacharissa as I will love and sing thee, my wife elect. All these names, eminent as they were, shall give place to thine, Eliza." " With incredible folly and lack of decency," says Mr. Fitzgerald, " he reminds his flame that Mrs. Sterne had recently a paralytic stroke," and he observes that Sterne': journal leaves him " with scarcely a shred of character; it is a pitiful, undignified display of meanness, deception, and disloyalty."

• Th. Life of Laurence Stern.. By Percy Fitagerald. S vols. London: Downey and Co.

What then becomes of the marital affection with which he has credited Sterne ? " The fellow," Bishop Warburton wrote, " is I fear an irrecoverable scoundrel; " but War- burton is said previously to have gone round the bench of Bishops and recommended Sterne to them as the English Rabelais—which led Walpole to suggest that they had never heard of such a writer—and that pugnacious Bishop had also expressed his pleasure, in what Mr. Fitzgerald calls " a manly epistle," at hearing " so very advantageous an account of his moral character," and was pleased to make his acquaintance. There is a queer story about Sterne's relations with the Bishop, who, before making his acquaintance, sent him a purse of gold, which recalls the present from the Duchess of Marlborough to Pope; but when Sterne observes that all the Bishops sent their compliments to him, the statement, if only partially correct, displays the unhappy state of the Church of England and of her rulers in that age of spiritual deadness. Sterne on friendly terms with the Bishops I—a clergyman whose intimate friends in England were among the most disreputable of men, who when in Paris found his choicest companion in the younger Crebillon, and who of all writers, as Mr. Train has justly said, is "the most permeated and

penetrated with impurity of thought and suggestion." The publication of the earlier volumes of Tristram Shandy, how-

ever, did appear to cause a little excitement in clerical circles, and one clergyman, who was also a friend, even ventured to administer a bit of serious counsel. "Get your preferment first," he said, " and then write and welcome." The pious advice was unheeded.

One of our modern philosophers has declared that there is no such thing as moral responsibility, and Sterne throughout his eccentric career exhibited this belief in practice. He never appears to have had a conscientious scruple. In his love-letters he did not hesitate, after the manner of Pope, to repeat a fine sentiment which he had used before for another purpose. The author gives some illustrations of this habit, and in doing so has apparently forgotten to revise his proofs, as some of the selected passages are repeated within two or three pages. Mr.

Fitzgerald has many gifts as a man of letters, but accuracy

is not one of them. Occasionally, owing to a contempt for the nominative case, he says what he does not intend to say, as may be seen in Vol. I., p. 22, where he writes of Miss Sterne as if her father's name were Lumley, the maiden name of her mother. And in making some allowance for " Mr. Stern's levities," on the plea that " a certain forcible in- delicacy of phrase and allusion had become almost habitual," he commits an error which a glance at his bookshelves would have rectified. It was of Prior and not of Chaucer that Johnson made the questionable statement that " the author was 'a lady's book," and it was to Prior and not to the poet

of the Wife of Bath's Tale that Goldsmith was indebted for two

gross pieces which he inserted in a kind of " Speaker " in- tended for the use of young readers. Goldsmith, by the way,

not content with criticising Tristram Shandy humorously in his Citizen of the World, called its author " a very dull fellow," the

last fault that could be imputed to Sterne. " Why, no, Sir," was Johnson's honest reply, though there were few men of letters he disliked more heartily than " the man Sterne.' Sterne died without a friend near him in a Bond Street lodging; he was buried, no one knows exactly where, in a now deserted burial-ground near the Marble Arch, and there is a horrid story of the resurrectionists stealing his body for the surgeons; yet Sterne was the wit and wonder of more

than one season. On his first visit to London after the earliest instalment of Tristram Shandy he was beset with

invitations, and " by April 1st was bound for a fortnight in advance." He sat to the famous Sir Joshua, who produced a famous portrait, " now one of the gems of Lansdowne House," and he expected high preferment in the Church. A. moderate amount of discretion might have sufficed in those days to have secured his advancement, but Sterne was never discreet :—

"He was to be seen constantly at Ranelagh Gardens—a place, it need not be said, which the presence of a clergyman scarcely suited. And though its charms might give 'an expansion and gay sensation' to the mind of Doctor Johnson which he never before experienced, such expansions' would be eminently peri- lous to the weaker moral sense of so flighty an ecclesiastic. To the Soho entertainments of the questionable Mrs. Comely he repaired later. Hz was to be seen at Drury Lane where Garrick had given him a box, and there the fashionable amateur Mr. Cradock was in the habit of meeting him behind the scenes. He knew the actors, and was on intimate terms with the actresses."

Garrick said he " degenerated in London like an ill- transplanted shrub," and Sterne's London seasons being of long duration there was ample time for the process. " Seven months in the year," says Mr. Fitzgerald, " from cathedral and parochial duties did not certainly show much clerical ardour and supposed a tolerant and indulgent diocesan. But Mr. Sterne seems now to have laid out the

future programme of his life after this pattern It is to be feared indeed that 'the incense of the great' and his craving for fashionable pleasures had completely put all the serious duties of his profession out of his head." It may be doubted whether the thought of duty had ever entered that head. Sterne was a jester all his life, and a jester, as his biographer admits, with a large share of profanity. Not long before his death Mrs. Carter is said to have strongly repri- manded him for his free conversation at Sir Joshua Rey- nolds's dinner-table, and we may be sure that the rebuke was richly deserved. This was during Sterne's last visit to London, and shortly before the lonely end, of which a footman and a nurse were the only witnesses. The latter is said to have robbed her patient in his dying moments. Sterne died without a will and £1,100 in debt. His friends, before death and after, treated him with characteristic indifference, but a subscription upon a racecourse relieved in some measure the pecuniary position of his wife. These prettily-got-up volumes are a credit to the publishers ; we cannot say that they are likely to increase Mr. Fitzgerald's reputation.