We pre

In the present volume Mr. Flanders has presented us with the lives and times of two of our Chief Justices. sume the next series will include those of Ellsworth, Cushing, and Marshall. The history of these three men cannot but give ample scope for the exercise of his abilities. If the labor be performed with a skill commensurate with that of which we have already had a sample, it will leave little to be desired. His first volume is indeed one of no ordinary interest, and of far more than ordinary trustworthiness. We do not observe in it, from beginning to end, a single misapplied fact or inaccurate date. His language is clear and forcible, his reasoning philosophical and sound. Many of the questions he discusses particularly such as concern the local politics of the day, in New York and Carolina, and in the Congress of the nation are new to the public and are well handled. A pleasing feature of his pages is the portraiture (as it may be called) of various leading personages of the time. The sketches of Arthur Lee, of Hamilton and Galloway, of Adams, and of Gadsden, for instance, are gems of their kind. One or two imperfections of expression and of verbal arrangement we had indeed noted down for animadversion; but with so much. that is excellent, to dwell on them now would be but picking at straws. We take leave of Mr. Flanders in the confident expectation of hearing from him again with as much pleasure and as much profit as we have now received at his hands.

ART. IV.― The Works of LAURENCE STERNE. Illustrated by STROTHEAD. In four volumes. London.

DURING the past year an elaborate biographical sketch in the Quarterly Review, and the severe comments of the most popular living satirist, in his Lectures on the English Humorists, have brought Sterne's authorship and character again into discussion. The new incidents revealed in the former, and the indiscriminate harshness of the latter, attract us to the subject;. for the effect of both is to excite anew compassion for the NO. 169.

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errors of Sterne, and to raise our estimate of the genius which could triumph in spite of them. Mr. Thackeray is a much better limner than analyst; the picturesque rather than the philosophical element is his forte; he can draw a character far better than he can weigh and judge one. To compare Sterne with Dickens is as absurd as to draw a parallel between Rubens and Hogarth. There is nothing in common in the objects, the inspiration, or the age of these writers. They represent totally diverse phases of humanity, and eras of literature. We agree with Thackeray, that Sterne is too much given to "dreary double-entendre," that he is often artificial and forced; but we cannot assent to the declaration that he is only a jester; on the contrary, it is easy to trace some of the richest streams of English humor to his example. The character of Uncle Toby, and the domestic scenes at Shandy Hall, are so quaint, natural, and humane in their very eccentricities, that the hint was undoubtedly thus given to a less exceptionable school of writers in a kindred vein.

There is a peculiar incongruity in the associations which the name of Laurence Sterne excites. He represents several very distinct and inharmonious phases of character. There is the Prebendary of York and the Vicar of Sutton in the Forest and of Stillington, - most respectable designations; there is mirthful, plaintive, quaint Yorick, with his fancy and humor, his amorous trifling, his rollicking table-talk, and his vagrant sentimentalism; then the affectionate father of Lydia Sterne, a character worthy of esteem and love; again he appears as a fashionable preacher, a standard author, and a "loose fellow about town," whom it is somewhat disreputable to praise, and even about whose literary merits modesty is often instinctively silent; publishing alternately a volume of Tristram Shandy and a volume of sermons, the man of the world and the priest making a simultaneous appeal to the reading public. Yet, withal, those of us who, in some old sunny, rural home, early became familiar with that long array of little volumes, in obsolete type, and found them here and there exhaling the mellow breath of a gentle, pensive mood, embodied in most apt and graceful phraseology, must confess a kindliness for the author, however we may condemn his

freedom of speech, and resent his abuse of the canons of taste and the integrity of feeling.

Inclined as English writers are to literary biography, and constant as has been the revival of memorials and critiques of their standard authors, since the establishment of the leading reviews, Sterne has proved an exception. That he was born at Clonmel in Ireland, November 24, 1713, and died in London, March 18, 1768; that he preached, dined out, visited the Continent, published books, left debts, one daughter, and the fame of rare gifts and doubtful conduct, is the sum of what we know of the man, except from his writings. Time has added little to the sparse details recorded in his own sketch; and the scattered and meagre notices of his career have not been gathered and arranged with the reverential and loving care bestowed on whatever throws light upon such intellectual benefactors as Milton and Goldsmith. The feeling which prompts such tributary labor has been chilled, in this instance, by a consciousness that Sterne so violated the proprieties of life and the harmonies of character, as to afford a subject too perverse for hearty eulogium, and too imperfect for entire sympathy. The parish register of Sutton contains data, in his handwriting, from which we learn such unimportant items, as that at one time he planted an orchard, and at another the parsonage was destroyed by fire. In a work entitled the Memoires d'un Voyageur qui se repose, by M. Dutens, which appeared in London in 1806, occurs the following anecdote, which affords a vivid idea of his social peculiarities:

"Nous étions au temps de l'anniversaire du Roi d'Angleterre. Milord Tavistock invita la peu d'Anglois qui étoient à Paris à dîner avec lui, pour le célébrér. Je fus de la partie, où je ne trouvai de ma connoissance que ceux avec que j'étois venu à Paris. Je fus assis entre Milord Berkeley et le fameux Sterne, auteur de Tristram Shandy, regardé comme la Rabelais de l'Angleterre. On fut fort gai pendant le dîner et l'on but à l'Anglaise et selon le jour. La conversation vint à tomber sur Turin, où plusieurs de la compagnie alloient; sur quoi M. Sterne m'addressant la parole, demande si j'y connoissois Monsieur Dutens; je lui dis qu'oui et même fort intimement. Tout la compagnie se prit à rire; et Sterne, qui ne me croyoit si prês de lui, s'imagina ce Monsieur

D. devoit être un homme assez bizarre, puisque son nom seul faisoit rire ceux qui l'entendoient. 'N'est ce pas un homme singulier?' ajouta il tout de suite; 'Oui,' repris-je, 'un original.'"

Upon this hint, Sterne drew an imaginary, and by no means flattering, portrait of his neighbor, and related many amusing stories about him, unconscious, the while, that these inventions were heard by their good-natured subject. He did not discover the identity of his auditor with M. Dutens until the company separated, when he made ample apologies, which were graciously accepted. All wits have a mode of their own. Addison, we are told by Swift, would flatter the opinions of a man of extreme views on any subject, until he betrayed him into absurdity; Lamb had a way of startling literal people by humorous sallies; Hook was a genius in practical jokes; and Sterne, it appears, used to draw fancy portraits of real characters, to divert his boon companions. Had his accidental victim, in the instance related, been other than an urbane Frenchman, who could make allowance for a spirituelle invention, even though it somewhat compromised his own dignity, the "Rabelais d'Angleterre" might have been forced to protect himself from a duel under the very cloth whose immunities he so little deserved. A similar instance is recorded by Dr. Hill, who says that at a dinner-party the professional talk of a pedantic physician wearied the company and annoyed the host, when "good-humored Yorick fell into the cant and jargon of physic, as if he had been one of Radcliffe's travellers," and told such a ridiculous story of curing himself of an adhesion of the lungs by leaping fences, as restored the guests to mirthfulness.

The alleged insensibility of Sterne, the man, may be ascribed, in part, to his extreme frankness. He calls discretion "an understrapping virtue," and seems to have been singularly deficient in caution and reserve. He gave expression to the alternations of his mood and feelings with a reckless disregard to the effect of such inconsistency. At the University, we are told, he "amused himself by puzzling the tutors," and "left Cambridge with the character of an odd man, who had no harm in him, and had parts if he would use them." Thence he went to "the lap of the Church in a small

village in Yorkshire," and, " as he advanced in literary fame, left his livings to the care of his curates," and preferred “luxurious living with the great." The following charitable epitaph well describes such a man:

"Wit, humor, genius, hadst thou, all agree;

One grain of wisdom had been worth the three."

His patient courtship shows that he was truly in love with his wife; their marriage, in the face of inauspicious circumstances, proves that they were both in earnest; and his frank acknowledgment, a year after, that he was tired of his conjugal partner, argues no uncommon experience, but a rare and unjustifiable candor. His letters to Mrs. Draper, however wrong in the social code, and unprincipled in a married divine, were undoubtedly sincere. His first efficient stroke as a lay writer consisted of a satire to oust the monopolist of a situation which one of his friends desired, and so successful was it that the incumbent offered to resign if the publication was suppressed. His parental affection has never been questioned; no one can doubt that his heart was devoted to, and engrossed with, his daughter Lydia. Inconstancy is one thing, insincerity quite another. The critics of Sterne invariably confound the two; and, because he was so unreliable in his attachments, and not proof against a succession of objects, they endeavor to discredit his pathos as artificial. As well might we seek to invalidate Bacon's philosophy because it failed to elevate him above sycophancy, or Scott's romantic genius in view of his material ambition, or Byron's love of nature on account of his dissipation.

Science, of late years, has thrown new light on the apparent contradictions of human nature, by investigating the laws of temperament, and the relation of the nervous system to intellectual development. A whole category of phenomena has been recognized by acute observation directed to susceptible organizations; and whoever is thus prepared will find no difficulty in explaining the incongruities so obvious between Sterne the man and Sterne the author. His will and intelligence were continually modified by physical causes. He lacked hardihood, and was peculiarly alive to magnetic