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out above and beyond the rest. Uncle Toby, who still suffers with the wound received in the French wars, yet so patient of injuries that he would not harm a fly,

- Uncle Toby, the innocent victim of the wily Widow Wadman,- Uncle Toby and his body servant Corporal Trim - as much a part of Uncle Toby as is the latter's wig or stick, this amiable, honest, brave, sentimental Uncle Toby is one of the best-drawn characters in eighteenth century fiction. Sterne completed his story but a year before his death. One other work, The Sentimental Journey, is marked by the same peculiar qualities which distinguish Tristram Shandy; an arti ficial sentiment pervades them both.

Wakefield.

In 1766, when Laurence Sterne was just putting final touches upon Tristram Shandy, there The stole quietly into the ranks of English fiction Vicar of a genuine novel, a book more notable and more important, far, than that of Sterne in its influence upon modern fiction. This was Goldsmith's clever story The Vicar of Wakefield - our first real novel of domestic life. "There are an hundred faults in this thing," said Goldsmith, with naïve shrewdness, in his preface; "but," he added, " a book may be very amusing with numerous errors, or it may be very dull without a single absurdity." The novel proved his assertion. There is no lack of life interest in this panorama of an English home, with its little epic of struggle and triumph through the experiences of common life. The patient vicar, who endures his share of trouble with fortitude and faith, is an attractive figure to novel readers still. It is a family record, quietly humorous, in its simple routine; with its sensations and its crises also, but without brutality, without indecency, to mar the wholesome current of its course. In spite of technical faults in the construction of the plot, this book

had a strong influence on subsequent works. In Germany it produced a great impression upon Goethe and his contemporaries. Its appearance really marks an epoch in English fiction, for it opened an entirely new field to the novelist and supplied a model for what we now regard as the best expression of his art.

Bibliography.

For general reference in the historical study of the novel, Masson's British Novelists and their Styles, Tuckerman's History of Prose Fiction, and Dunlop's History of Fiction are standard works. The English Novel, by Walter Raleigh (Scribners), and The Development of the English Novel, by Wilbur L. Cross (Macmillan), are the most helpful of recent books upon this subject. The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare, by J. J. Jusserand (Putnam), is a most interesting discussion of the period indicated. The later development is covered in William Forsythe's Novels and Novelists of the Eighteenth Century. Simonds' Introduction to the Study of English Fiction (Heath) contains a brief historical review, and also illustrative selections from the story-tellers from the time of the Anglo-Saxons down to that of Sterne. The Art of Fiction, by W. D. Howells, The Novel: What It Is, by F. Marion Crawford, and The Experimental Novel, by Emile Zola, are interesting essays by the novelists themselves.

In biography, the student will find lives of Defoe, Fielding, Sterne, and Goldsmith in the English Men of Letters Series; of Smollett and Goldsmith in the Great Writers Series. H. D. Traill's The New Fiction, and Other Essays contains an essay upon Samuel Richardson, and also one on The Novel of Manners. There is a critical study of Richardson in Leslie Stephen's Hours in a Library. In the September, 1893, number of the Century Magazine there is an article by Mrs. Oliphant upon The Author of Robinson Crusoe; and in Scribner's Magazine for the same date a paper by Austin Dobson on Richardson at Home. Sir Walter Scott's

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Lives of the Novelists includes sketches of Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne. Thackeray's English Humourists gives a vivacious picture of these men and of their age. Saintsbury's Introduction to the Works of Henry Fielding and the chapter on Fielding in G. B. Smith's Poets and Novelists should be read. There is a life of Smollett by David Hannay, and one of Sterne by H. D. Traill.

IV. ESSAYISTS OF THE SECOND HALF.

1709-84.

Among English men of letters in the second half of the eighteenth century, the dominant figure samuel is that of Samuel Johnson, booksellers' hack, Johnson, parliamentary reporter, writer of the Rambler and the Idler essays, compiler of the great English Dictionary, author of Rasselas and the Lives of English Poets; observer, moralist, and critic; ponderous, sententious, irascible, domineering, honest old Doctor Johnson, the dictator in literary art for his generation; less read, perhaps, than any other great writer of that century, and yet better known to posterity than any other eighteenth century essayist. "The memory of other writers," says Macaulay, "is kept alive by their books; but the memory of Johnson keeps many of his books alive."

Early Life.

Samuel Johnson was born at Lichfield, in Staffordshire, where his father, Michael Johnson, was a stationer and a dealer in books, well reputed for his learning, but eccentric and unlucky in trade. Like Pope, Johnson was a frail, sickly child, afflicted with St. Vitus's dance and tainted with scrofula. He never attained good health; his huge, overgrown frame rolled in his chair, he shuffled and stumbled in his gait, he was always troubled with nervous twitchings which distorted the muscles of his face, and was subject to fits of morbid melancholy which, as he declared, kept him mad half his life. The Lichfield bookseller was

hardly in a position to give his son a university career, but the boy learned Latin in the Lichfield school and browsed among his father's books. A chance discovery of a copy of Plutarch's Lives aroused a passion for classical learning; and, with some assistance, Johnson was sent to Oxford in 1729 and entered as a student in Pembroke College. At the time of his entrance he was distinguished for his familiarity with numerous Latin texts not commonly read; and he soon attracted attention by the excellence of his Latin translations. Aside from his success in this field his stay at the University made little impression. In spite of his ability he was naturally indolent and withal miserably poor. His father's death in 1731 compelled an immediate return to Lichfield, and at twenty-two, his education half completed, penniless, and diseased, he began the long and bitter struggle with circumstance, from which he emerged thirty years later the literary leader of his age.

At first Johnson attempted to teach in a private school in Leicestershire, but failed on account of his peculiarities and physical infirmities. He then tried to make a living by translating for the publishers, and began his contributions to the magazines. At twentyfive he married a Mrs. Porter, widow of a silk merchant; the lady was twenty years his senior, but this singular experiment appears to have been the result of genuine mutual attachment, and was productive only of happiness to both. Eight hundred pounds, which formed the marriage portion, was unwisely invested in starting a private school at their home near Lichfield, which was attended by only three or four pupils, and closed abruptly. In 1737 Johnson made a fresh start, and this time, fixing his hopes upon a literary career, he tramped the dusty road to London. Mrs. Johnson re

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mained behind, but her husband did not journey alone; for by his side there trudged young Davy Garrick, a pupil in the school just closed, a lad of parts, whose youthful brain was filled with dreams of fame and fortune to be won in the great city. A curious couple they must have made: the hulking, awkward frame of the master towering above the graceful, dapper youth at his side. The friendship of this strangely assorted pair is one of the pleasant features of that later period, when fame indeed had come to both, and each was master in his special field.

Writer.

The miseries of the hack-writer at this period have been most vividly pictured by Macaulay. The Life of "Even the poorest pitied him; and they the Poor well might pity him. For if their condition was equally abject, their aspirings were not equally high, nor their sense of insult equally acute. To lodge in a garret up four pairs of stairs, to dine in a cellar among footmen out of place, to translate ten hours a day for the wages of a ditcher, to be hunted by bailiffs from one haunt of beggary and pestilence to another, from Grub Street to St. George's Fields, and from St. George's Fields to the alleys behind St. Martin's Church, to sleep on a bulk in June and amidst the ashes of a glass house in December, to die in an hospital and to be buried in a parish vault, was the fate of more than one writer, who, if he had lived thirty years earlier, would have been admitted to the sittings of the Kitcat or the Scriblerus Club, would have sat in Parliament, and would have been intrusted with embassies to the High Allies." 1

1

The cares and privations of this life, if not its extremes of wretchedness, Johnson knew by experience, through a period of perhaps twenty years. It is only 1 Essay on Samuel Johnson.