son, nor to describe the disgust of a few "immaculate" imaginations like Dr. Goldsmith's and Richardson's, nor the efforts of a few savage critics and shocked clericals to "Nicodemus" Sterne into nothing. The controversy between those who feel intensely and those who hardly feel at all still rages, and is probably destined to rage as long as two sorts of men recur in society.
But to the fashionable mid-eighteenth century in general, sentimentalism came like rain from heaven after a long dry summer. It was such a joy to weep again, and this country parson Sterne had invented a way of weeping copiously over little things; so that, all the time, one could be half smiling through one's tears; and it hardly hurt at all. No wonder he tickled the bluestockings and the great worldly ecclesiastics and the ministers of state; and became the vogue in Paris and the friend of Diderot; and penetrated into Germany and won the plaudits of Goethe and Lessing and later the enthusiastic homage of that kindred spirit, Heinrich Heine.
Sterne was a sensitive, intuitive person. He felt the winds of revolutionary change in European feeling before they had begun to blow. His type of consciousness ran ahead of his age. Sentimentalism seemed merely the fashionable return to superficial emotion. More deeply considered, it indicated "humanitarianism," the discovery of the individual, democracy, the French Revolution, Catholic Emancipation, Prison Reform, the liberation of black slaves and the Reform Bills. More deeply considered, it meant a revolt against the venality, the nepotism, the inefficiency, the selfishness and the obvious rottenness of the ancient regime—in the Church, out of which Sterne emerged;
