In his life Sterne, like Swift, exhibited most un-clerical traits of worldliness and in his work there is the refined, suggestive indelicacy, not to say indecency, which we are in the habit nowadays of charging against the French, and which is so much worse than the bluff, outspoken coarseness of a Fielding or a Smollett.  At times the line between Sterne and Charles Lamb is not so easy to draw in that, from first to last, the elder is an essayist and humorist, while the younger has so much of the eighteenth century in his feeling and manner.  In these modern times, when so many essayists appear in the guise of fiction-makers, we can see that Sterne is really the leader of the tribe:  and it is not hard to show how neither he nor they are novelists divinely called.  They (and he) may be great, but it is another greatness.  The point is strikingly illustrated by the statement that Sterne was eight years publishing the various parts of “Tristram Shandy,” and a man of forty-six when he began to do so.  Bona fide novels are not thus written.  Constructively, the work is a mad farrago; but the end quite justifies the means.  Thus, while his place in letters is assured, and the touch of the cad in him (Goldsmith called him “the blackguard parson”) should never blind us to his prime merits, his significance for our particular study—­the study of the modern Novel in its development—­is comparatively slight.  Like all essayists of rank he left memorable passages:  the world never tires of “God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb,” and pays it the high compliment of ascribing it to holy writ:  nor will the scene where the recording angel blots out Uncle Toby’s generous oath with a tear, fade from the mind; nor that of the same kindly gentleman letting go the big fly which has, to his discomfiture, been buzzing about his nose at dinner:  “‘Go,’ says he, lifting up the latch and opening his hand as he spoke to let it escape.  ’Go, poor devil, get thee gone, why should I hurt thee?  The world surely is wide enough to hold both thee and me’”—­a touch so modern as to make Sterne seem a century later than Fielding.  These are among the precious places of literature.  This eighteenth century divine has in advance of his day the subtler sensibility which was to grow so strong in later fiction:  and if he be sentimental too, he gives us a sentimentality unlike the solemn article of Richardson, because of its French grace and its relief of delicious humor.

III

Swift chronologically precedes Sterne, for in 1726, shortly after “Robinson Crusoe” and a good fifteen years before “Pamela,” he gave the world that unique lucubration, “Gulliver’s Travels,” allegory, satire and fairy story all in one.  It is certainly anything but a novel.  One of the giants of English letters, doing many things and exhibiting a sardonic personality that seems to peer through all his work, Swift’s contribution to the coming Novel was above all the use of a certain