cheap!  The ancients, indeed, appear not to have possessed that comic quality that we understand as humour, nor can I discover a word which exactly corresponds with our term humour in any language, ancient or modern.  Cervantes excels in that sly satire which hides itself under the cloak of gravity, but this is not the sort of humour which so beautifully plays about the delicacy of Addison’s page; and both are distinct from the broader and stronger humour of Sterne.

[Footnote A:  This friend, it now appears, was Dr. King, of Oxford, whose anecdotes have recently been published.  This curious fact is given in a strange hodge-podge, entitled “The Dreamer;” a remarkable instance where a writer of learning often conceives that to be humour, which to others is not even intelligible!]

The result of Dr. Cheyne’s honest confession was experienced by Sterne, for while more than half of the three kingdoms were convulsed with laughter at his humour, the other part were obdurately dull to it.  Take, for instance, two very opposite effects produced by “Tristram Shandy” on a man of strong original humour himself, and a wit who had more delicacy and sarcasm than force and originality.  The Rev. Philip Skelton declared that “after reading ‘Tristram Shandy,’ he could not for two or three days attend seriously to his devotion, it filled him with so many ludicrous ideas.”  But Horace Walpole, who found his “Sentimental Journey” very pleasing, declares that of “his tiresome ‘Tristram Shandy,’ he could never get through three volumes.”

The literary life of Sterne was a short one:  it was a blaze of existence, and it turned his head.  With his personal life we are only acquainted by tradition.  Was the great sentimentalist himself unfeeling, dissolute, and utterly depraved?  Some anecdotes which one of his companions[A] communicated to me, confirm Garrick’s account preserved in Dr. Bumey’s collections, that “He was more dissolute in his conduct than his writings, and generally drove every female away by his ribaldry.  He degenerated in London like an ill-transplanted shrub; the incense of the great spoiled his head, and their ragouts his stomach.  He grew sickly and proud —­an invalid in body and mind.”  Warburtou declared that “he was an irrecoverable scoundrel.”  Authenticated facts are, however, wanting for a judicious summary of the real character of the founder of sentimental writing.  An impenetrable mystery hangs over his family conduct; he has thrown many sweet domestic touches in his own memoirs and letters addressed to his daughter:  but it would seem that he was often parted from his family.  After he had earnestly solicited the return of his wife from France, though she did return, he was suffered to die in utter neglect.

[Footnote A:  Caleb Whitefoord, the wit once famed for his invention of cross-readings, which, appeared under the name of “Papirius Cursor.”]