mental Journey," in his letters to his various fair ones, in the "Journal to Eliza," he devised for it scores of famous illustrations.
Uncle Toby is sentimental when he carefully puts a fly that has troubled him out at the window, unwilling to hurt a "hair" of its head, being convinced there is room enough in the world for both. The Recording Angel who drops a tear on Uncle Toby's oath in the Book of Life and blots it out is a sentimental angel. Susannah is sentimental when she bursts into a flood of tears at Corporal Trim's dropping his hat to exhibit the transitoriness of life. "God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb" is a sentimental proverb, indicating what Sterne himself would have done, had he been God, and had tempering the wind occasioned him no great inconvenience. A starling in a cage, a dead ass by the roadside, may be the occasion of this new sentimentality. The occasion is nothing; the quantity and quality of feeling evoked are everything. Gefühl ist alles. We luxuriate now in emotion for emotion's sake. We count our tears as they fall, with a consciousness of our resources in feeling which renders the pain itself delicious and elevates it to the level of art.
I think there cannot be a particle of doubt that Sterne was perfectly honest when he wrote, "Praised be God for my sensibility." Whether he was equally honest when he declared that, after all his badinage on the verge of "indelicacy," his heart was as innocent as when in his boyish days he got astride of a stick and galloped away—that is a slightly different question.
There is no space here to recall the way Shandian sentimentalism took fashionable London by storm nor the opposition to it of a few stalwarts like Dr. John-
