A genius of much finer mold was Lawrence Sterne, the author of Tristram Shandy, 1759-1767, and the Sentimental Journey, 1768. Tristram Shandy is hardly a novel:  the story merely serves to hold together a number of characters, such as Uncle Toby and Corporal Trim, conceived with rare subtlety and originality.  Sterne’s chosen province was the whimsical, and his great model was Rabelais.  His books are full of digressions, breaks, surprises, innuendoes, double meanings, mystifications, and all manner of odd turns.  Coleridge and Carlyle unite in pronouncing him a great humorist.  Thackeray says that he was only a great jester.  Humor is the laughter of the heart, and Sterne’s pathos is closely interwoven with his humor.  He was the foremost of English sentimentalists, and he had that taint of insincerity which distinguishes sentimentalism from genuine sentiment, like Goldsmith’s, for example.  Sterne, in life, was selfish, heartless, and untrue.  A clergyman, his worldliness and vanity and the indecency of his writings were a scandal to the Church, though his sermons were both witty and affecting.  He enjoyed the titillation of his own emotions, and he had practiced so long at detecting the latent pathos that lies in the expression of dumb things and of poor, patient animals, that he could summon the tear of sensibility at the thought of a discarded postchaise, a dead donkey, a starling in a cage, or of Uncle Toby putting a house fly out of the window, and saying, “There is room enough in the world for thee and me.”  It is a high proof of his cleverness that he generally succeeds in raising the desired feeling in his readers even from such trivial occasions.  He was a minute philosopher, his philosophy was kindly, and he taught the delicate art of making much out of little.  Less coarse than Fielding, he is far more corrupt.  Fielding goes bluntly to the point; Sterne lingers among the temptations and suspends the expectation to tease and excite it.  Forbidden fruit had a relish for him, and his pages seduce.  He is full of good sayings both tender and witty.  It was Sterne, for example, who wrote, “God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb.”

A very different writer was Oliver Goldsmith, whose Vicar of Wakefield, 1766, was the earliest, and is still one of the best, novels of domestic and rural life.  The book, like its author, was thoroughly Irish, full of bulls and inconsistencies.  Very improbable things happened in it with a cheerful defiance of logic.  But its characters are true to nature, drawn with an idyllic sweetness and purity, and with touches of a most loving humor.  Its hero, Dr. Primrose, was painted after Goldsmith’s father, a poor clergyman of the English Church in Ireland, and the original, likewise, of the country parson in Goldsmith’s Deserted Village, 1770, who was “passing rich on forty pounds a year.”  This poem, though written in the fashionable couplet of Pope, and even containing a few verses contributed by Dr. Johnson—­so that it was not at all in line with the work of the romanticists—­did, perhaps, as much as any thing of Gray or of Collins to recall English poetry to the simplicity and freshness of country life.