for the sake of that hussy Vanessa.  Congreve had captivating manners—­of course he had, the dog!  And we all know what that meant in those days.  Dick Steele drank and failed to pay his creditors.  Sterne—­now really I know what Club life is, ladies and gentlemen, and I might tell you a thing or two if I would:  but really, speaking as a gentleman before a polite audience, I warn you against Sterne.

I do not suppose for a moment that Thackeray consciously defamed these men.  The weaknesses, the pettinesses of humanity interested him, and he treated them with gusto, even as he spares us nothing of that horrible scene between Mrs. Mackenzie and Colonel Newcome.  And of course poor Sterne was the easiest victim.  The fellow was so full of his confounded sentiments.  You ring a choice few of these on the counter and prove them base metal.  You assume that the rest of the bag is of equal value.  You “go one better” than Sir Peter Teazle and damn all sentiment, and lo! the fellow is no better than a smirking jester, whose antics you can expose till men and women, who had foolishly laughed and wept as he moved them, turn from him, loathing him as a swindler.  So it is that although Tristram Shandy continues one of the most popular classics in the language, nobody dares to confess his debt to Sterne except in discreet terms of apology.

But the fellow wrote the book.  You can’t deny that, though Thackeray may tempt you to forget it. (What proportion does my Uncle Toby hold in that amiable Lecture?) The truth is that the elemental simplicity of Captain Shandy and Corporal Trim did not appeal to the author of The Book of Snobs in the same degree as the pettiness of the man Sterne appealed to him:  and his business in Willis’s Rooms was to talk, not of Captain Shandy, but of the man Sterne, to whom his hearers were to feel themselves superior as members of society.  I submit that this was not a worthy task for a man of letters who was also a man of genius.  I submit that it was an inversion of the true critical method to wreck Sterne’s Sentimental Journey at the outset by picking Sterne’s life to pieces, holding up the shreds and warning the reader that any nobility apparent in his book will be nothing better than a sham.  Sterne is scarcely arrived at Calais and in conversation with the Monk before you are cautioned how you listen to the impostor.  “Watch now,” says the critic; “he’ll be at his tricks in a moment.  Hey, paillasse!  There!—­didn’t I tell you?” And yet I am as sure that the opening pages of the Sentimental Journey are full of genuine feeling as I am that if Jonathan Swift had entered the room while the Lecture upon him was going forward, he would have eaten William Makepeace Goliath, white waistcoat and all.

Frenchmen, who either are less awed than we by lecturers in white waistcoats, or understand the methods of criticism somewhat better, cherish the Sentimental Journey (in spite of its indifferent French) and believe in the genius that created it.  But the Briton reads it with shyness, and the British critic speaks of Sterne with bated breath, since Thackeray told it in Gath that Sterne was a bad man, and the daughters of Philistia triumphed.