And as for Corporal Trim, he is a host in himself.  There is in the English literary portrait-gallery no other Uncle Toby, there is no other Corporal Trim.  Hazlitt has not exaggerated in saying that the Story of Le Fevre is perhaps the finest in the English language.  My Uncle Toby’s conduct to the dying officer is the perfection of loving-kindness and charity.

THE SENTIMENTAL JOURNEY.—­Sterne’s Sentimental Journey, although charmingly written,—­and this is said in spite of the preference of such a critic as Horace Walpole,—­will not compare with Tristram Shandy:  it is left unfinished, and is constantly suggestive of licentiousness.

Sterne’s English is excellent and idiomatic, and has commended his works to the ordinary reader, who shrinks from the hyperlatinism of the time represented so strongly by Dr. Johnson and his followers.  His wit, if sometimes artificial, is always acute; his sentiment is entirely artificial; “he is always protruding his sensibility, trying to play upon you as upon an instrument; more concerned that you should acknowledge his power than have any depth of feeling.”  Thackeray, whose opinion is just quoted, calls him “a great jester, not a great humorist.”  He had lived a careless, self-indulgent life, and was no honor to his profession.  His death was like a retribution.  In a mean lodging, with no friends but his bookseller, he died suddenly from hemorrhage.  His funeral was hasty, and only attended by two persons; his burial was in an obscure graveyard; and his body was taken up by corpse-snatchers for the dissecting-room of the professor of anatomy at Cambridge,—­alas, poor Yorick!

OLIVER GOLDSMITH.—­We have placed Goldsmith in immediate connection with Sterne as, like him, of the Subjective School, in his story of the Vicar of Wakefield and his numerous biographical and prose sketches; but he belongs to more than one literary school of his period.  He was a poet, an essayist, a dramatist, and an historian; a writer who, in the words of his epitaph,—­written by Dr. Johnson, and with no extravagant eulogium,—­touched all subjects, and touched none that he did not adorn,—­nullum quod tetigit non ornavit.  His life was a strange melodrama, so varied with laughter and tears, so checkered with fame and misfortune, so resounding with songs pathetic and comic, that, were he an unknown hero, his adventures would be read with pleasure by all persons of sensibility.  There is no better illustration of the subjective in literature.  It is the man who is presented to us in his works, and who can no more be disjoined from them than the light from the vase, the beauties of which it discloses.  As an essayist, he was of the school of Addison and Steele; but he has more ease of style and more humor than his teachers.  As a dramatist, he had many and superior competitors in his own vein; and yet his plays still occupy the stage.  As an historian, he was fluent but superficial; and yet the charm of