BOOKS.

A NEW LIFE OF STERNE.* OUE first word must be one of congratulation to Professor

Cross upon the difficult feat he has accomplished in writing, on the other side of the Atlantic, a biography which has had to be pieced together from authorities accessible for the most

part only in England. His task would have been, as he admits, "much more difficult without the aid of Mr. Sidney

Lee's excellent bibliography "; we may venture to go further, and say that without the aid of Mr. Lee's excellent outline in the Dictionary of National Biography Professor Cross would have found his success very different from what it is. With that outline to guide him, he has been able to fill in the picture and here and there to correct, as he claims, some traditional errors which he has found still lurking there. However, the only error to which he calls attention concerns the Political Romance, a skit better known as the "History of a warm watch-coat." This skit Mr. Cross has ascertained to have been first printed in 1759, and not ten years later, as is generally supposed. The chapter dealing with the story of the quarrel among the Cathedral officials at York which led up to this first effort of Sterne's wit is one of the best and most original in Professor Cross's volume. But every page bears witness to the scrupulous care with which he has verified his authorities and consulted every likely source of information. There must be a slip on p. 318, where a person whom Sterne calla Lord Maynard is said to have been a Baronet; and Mr. Cross does not seem to understand that it was necessary for Sterne to be described as a chaplain to some nobleman in order to hold two livings in plurality. It does not follow that he discharged any chaplain's duties.

The most serious defect in the book as a biography is the persistent glossing over of the more discreditable incidents in

Sterne's life. Mr. Cross's reading of Sterne's disposition, for we can hardly speak of his "character," is not very different

from that of most modern critics. According to one compact summary of epithets, he was "a volatile, self-centred, morally apathetic man of genius, who was not destitute of generous instincts." His temperament was easily excitable to tears or laughter, and quickly responsive to feminine influence ; and by and by he learned to keep his finger on his emotional pulse for literary purposes. This sensibility, combined with his rare gift of humour, and his still rarer gift of self- expression, made him the writer of genius that he undoubtedly was. And speaking of him simply as a writer, it is possible to follow Mr. Cross in the apology for Sterne's "follies and indiscretions" which he adapts from Charles Lamb's apology for the Restoration dram% and say that "the everlasting humour of the man saves him; it lifts him out of the world of moral conventions into a world of his own making." But Mr. Cross is not only writing a criticism of Tristram Shandy and the Sentimen,tal Journey, he set out to write the "personal history" of Laurence Sterne and therefore the man as much as the writer mud come up for judgment ; and the man did not live in a, world of hia own making. Speaking of "the man Sterne," to use Dr. Johnson's expression, Mr. Cross thus sums up hi general opinion :—

"Such virtues and such vices as Sterne possessed are comprehended in the ideal of old English Knighthood se modified by the spirit of the Renaissance. The virtues of the gentleman in those days were, according to Chapeer, 'Truth and honour, freedom (generosity). and courtesy.'

And all his vices, lying under the pretty concealment of the most perfect manners, were of the flesh may."

But with deference to the Yale Professor of English, the virtues of a gentleman have at no period in England excluded the virtues "of the flesh." Chaucer was the last person to limit gentleness to truth nnd courtesy in word. "Look," he

says- " Look who that is moat vertnous alway, Prive and aeert, awl meet entandeth ay To do the gentle deedes that he can,

• And take him for the greatest gentleman."

And Chaucer "modified by the spirit of the Renaissance" is Spenser, who gives us his picture of a gentleman in The Faery Queens. Sterne's perfect manners are enffieient explanation

• The Life and Vines of Laurence Sterne. By Wilbur L. Cross, Professor of

English in the Sheffield Scientific and School of We f/niyerlity, London; Mac.

inifian Co. [mg. sill. net.] and justification of his social success in London and Parisian society; but they do not entitle a biographer to waive the question whether his private life was or was not scandalous. Mr. Trail, quoting a solemn asseveration of innocence made but a few months before Sterne's death, came to the conclusion that his love affairs were "what is somewhat absurdly called Platonic." On the other side, John Croft, brother of the Squire of Stillington, one of Sterne's livings, makes definite charges, which Mr. Cross neither quotes nor offers grounds for disbelieving, as perhaps he might have done. This is not fair to Sterne, who, it must be remembered, was precluded by his Christian profession from distinguishing between "vices of the flesh" and vices of the spirit.

Mr. Cross has another defence that he sets up occasionally for Sterne the man,—namely, that "manners and morals" were completely different in the later eighteenth century from what they are to-day. "Manners," we may admit, were certainly different. Warburton and other Bishops were among the early patrons of Tristram Shandy ; and Bishop Newton, the editor of Milton, was in a small minority, along with Johnson and Goldsmith, in objecting to its coarseness. But were morals so very different ? There was undoubtedly a "fast set" in London which thought itself above the Seventh Commandment, as, for all we know, there may be to-day ; but the Bishops did not belong to it; and Warburton did not break with Sterne, as Mr. Cross absurdly hints, because Sterne had not followed his literary counsels, but because he had heard unpleasant reports of his private life. Writing to his friend Hurd at the end of 1761, the Bishop says :—" Sterne has published his fifth and sixth volumes of Tristram. They are wrote pretty much like the first and second ; but whether they will restore his reputation as a writer with the publick is another question.—The fellow himself is an irrecoverable scoundrel." On this Mr. Cross comments: "No one who read agreed with Warburton." But Warburton meant his comparison with the early volumes to be a compliment ; and then he proceeded to distinguish between the book and the man. The manners he could tolerate, the morals he could not. It ought to be testimonial enough to Sterne's respect- ability that Dr. Drummond, the Archbishop of York, admitted him to friendship. But when we are informed that Hall- Stevenson, who at his Yorkshire castle imitated the profanities of Medmenham Abbey, also visited at Bishopthorp, and that Sterne confided to the Archbishop his infatuation for Mrs. Draper, we are tempted to ask for his Grace's own testi- monials. "A sensible, worldly man," wrote Horace Walpole, "but much addicted to his bottle."

We have called attention to this weak side of Professor Cross's book because we hope that in a second edition he may see fit to reconsider these indefensible judgments. We should be sorry that so careful a piece of literary work should do anything to debase the moral currency.