One can hardly say as much for another of the much-quoted pieces from the Sentimental Journey—­the description of the caged starling.  The passage is ingeniously worked into its context; and if we were to consider it as only intended to serve the purpose of a sudden and dramatic discomfiture of the Traveller’s somewhat inconsiderate moralizings on captivity, it would be well enough.  But, regarded as a substantive appeal to one’s emotions, it is open to the criticisms which apply to most other of Sterne’s too deliberate attempts at the pathetic.  The details of the picture are too much insisted on, and there is too much of self-consciousness in the artist.  Even at the very close of the story of Le Fevre’s death—­finely told though, as a whole, it is—­there is a jarring note.  Even while the dying man is breathing his last our sleeve is twitched as we stand at his bedside, and our attention forcibly diverted from the departing soldier to the literary ingenuities of the man who is describing his end: 

“There was a frankness in my Uncle Toby, not the effect of familiarity, but the cause of it, which let you at once into his soul, and showed you the goodness of his nature.  To this there was something in his looks, and voice, and manner, superadded, which eternally beckoned to the unfortunate to come and take shelter under him; so that before my Uncle Toby had half finished the kind offers he was making to the father had the son insensibly pressed up close to his knees, and had taken hold of the breast of his coat, and was pulling it towards him.  The blood and spirits of Le Fevre, which were waxing cold and slow within him, and were retreating to their last citadel, the heart, rallied back; the film forsook his eyes for a moment; he looked up wishfully in my Uncle Toby’s face, then cast a look upon his boy—­and that ligament, fine as it was, was never broken.”

How excellent all that is! and how perfectly would the scene have ended had it closed with the tender and poetic image which thus describes the dying soldier’s commendation of his orphan boy to the care of his brother-in-arms!  But what of this, which closes the scene, in fact?

  “Nature instantly ebbed again; the film returned to its place; the
  pulse fluttered—­stopped—­went on—­throbbed—­stopped again—­moved,
  stopped.  Shall I go on?  No.”

Let those admire this who can.  To me I confess it seems to spoil a touching and simple death-bed scene by a piece of theatrical trickery.

The sum, in fact, of the whole matter appears to be, that the sentiment on which Sterne so prided himself—­the acute sensibilities which he regarded with such extraordinary complacency, were, as has been before observed, the weakness, and not the strength, of his pathetic style.  When Sterne the artist is uppermost, when he is surveying his characters with that penetrating eye of his, and above all when he is allowing his subtle and tender