of Roderick Random is natural, inconclusive, but not ridiculous.  Sterne’s matrimonial relations are the most famous of all:  and though posterity has, with its usual charity, constructed a legend for the pair which is probably much worse than the reality, that reality is more than a little awkward.  Mrs. Sterne was a Miss Lumley, of a good Yorkshire family, some, though small, fortune, and more friends who exerted themselves for her husband.  By inexcusable levity, ignorance, misjudgment, or heartless cupidity their daughter Lydia published, after the death of both, letters some of which contain courtship of the most lackadaisical sentimentality and others later expressions (which occasionally reach the scandalous) of weariness and disgust on Sterne’s part.  Other evidence of an indisputable character shows that he was, at least and best, an extravagant and mawkish philanderer with any girl or woman who would join in a flirtation:  and while there is no evidence against Mrs. Sterne’s character in the ordinary sense, and hardly any of value against her temper, she seems (which is perhaps not wonderful) to have latterly preferred to live apart from her husband, and to have put him to considerable, if not unreasonable, expenses by her fancy for wandering about France with the daughter.

Finally, in general character, Richardson seems to have been a respectable person of rather feminine temperament and, though good-natured to his friends, endowed with a feminine spitefulness.  Fielding, though by no means answering to the standard of minor and even major morals demanded

              “by the wise ones,
    By the grave and the precise ones.”

though reckless and disorderly in his ways and habits, appears to have been in the main a thorough gentleman, faithful to truth and honour, fearless, compassionate, intolerant of meanness and brutality and of treachery most of all—­a man of many faults perhaps, but of no really bad or disgusting ones.  Concerning Smollett’s personality we know least of all the four.  It was certainly disfigured by an almost savage pugnacity of temper; by a strange indifference to what ought to be at the lowest the conduct of a gentleman, and by a most repulsive inclination—­perhaps natural, but developed by training—­to the merely foul and nasty.  But he seems to have been brave, charitable though not in the most gracious way, honest, and on the whole a much better fellow than he might generally seem.  Sterne is the most difficult of the four to characterise fairly, because of the unlucky revelations to which we possess no parallel in the case of the other three, and which, if we had them, might probably alter our estimates of a good many now well reputed people.  It is perhaps enough to say that his letters contain many good traits as well as some bad ones; that his unlucky portrait, with its combination of leer and sneer, is probably responsible for much; and that the parts which, as we shall see further, he chose to play, of extravagant humorist and extravagant sentimentalist, not only almost necessitate attitudes which may easily become offensive in the playing, but are very likely, in practice, to communicate something apparently not natural and unattractive to the player.