Shandy is unique in English literature—­it stands sui generis for all time.  There is scarcely any consecutive narrative, and what there is is used merely as a peg on which to hang endless digressions.  But while there are many faults of taste and morals, there are also genuine humor and pathos, and without Walter Shandy, Dr. Slop, the Widow Wadman, Yorick, Uncle Toby, and Corporal Trim, English literature would certainly be very much the poorer.

Hugh Kelly (1739-1777), born in Dublin, was the son of a publican and himself became a staymaker, a trade from which he developed through the successive stages of attorney’s clerk, newspaper-writer, theatrical critic, and essayist, into a novelist and playwright.  His novel, Memoirs of a Magdalen (1767), was translated into French.  His first comedy, a sentimental one entitled False Delicacy (1768), achieved a remarkable success on the stage and was even a greater success in book form, 10,000 copies being sold in a year, so that its author was raised from poverty to comparative affluence.  In addition, it gave him a European reputation, for it was translated into German, French, and Portuguese.  Strange to say, his later comedies, A Word to the Wise, A School for Wives, and The Man of Reason, were practically failures, and the same is true of his tragedy, Clementina.  Kelly ultimately withdrew from stage work, and for the last three years of his life practised as a barrister without, however, achieving much distinction in his new profession.

Charles Coffey (d. 1745), an Irishman, was the author of several farces, operas, ballad operas, ballad farces, and farcical operas, the best known of which was The Devil to Pay, or the Wives Metamorphosed (1731).

Henry Brooke (1703?-1783), a county Cavan man and the son of a clergyman, was educated at Trinity College, Dublin, and afterwards studied law in London.  Becoming guardian to his cousin, a girl of twelve, he put her to school for two years and then secretly married her.  Of his large family of twenty-two children, three of whom were born before their mother was eighteen years old, but one survived him.  Appointed by Lord Chesterfield barrack-master at Mullingar, Brooke afterwards settled in Co.  Kildare.  It was there that he wrote his celebrated work, The Fool of Quality, or the History of the Earl of Moreland (5 vols., 1766-1770), which won the commendations of men so widely different as John Wesley and Charles Kingsley.  It is, indeed, a remarkable book, combining, as it does, many of the characteristics of Sterne, Mackenzie, Borrow, and George Meredith.  It is not very well known nowadays, but it will always bear, and will well repay, perusal.  Brooke also wrote a poem on Universal Beauty (1735) and the tragedies Gustavus Vasa (1739), the production of which was forbidden in London but which was afterwards staged in Dublin as The Patriot, and The Earl of