in the universities; in the entire political and economic system of the State.
One is quite unprepared to understand Sterne in his times unless one sees his crack-brained humor as a product, more or less unconscious—a product, by reaction, of the brutal insensibility of generation after generation of upstanding, two-fisted, go-getting Englishmen, whose cities stank with unchanneled slops, whose gin-sodden peasants toiled like cattle, whose children were wasted in mines, whose prisons were crowded with fever-stricken victims driven there by debt and starvation, whose slave ships sailed blithely from Africa to the Indies with hundreds of blacks bound head to foot on the decks and dying in their chains.
It was time for a little "sensibility," high time.
In his "English Humorists," 1851-'53, Thackeray delivered a famous harsh lecture on Sterne as a man who would neglect his dying mother to weep over a dead ass. In 1864 Walter Bagehot, reviewing Percy Fitzgerald's "Life of Sterne," wrote an essay on "Sterne and Thackeray" in which he piquantly argued that "in spite of many superficial differences, there was one fundamental and ineradicable resemblance between the two"—namely, their exacerbated sensibility. Bagehot's essay is, however, in spite of suppressed struggling sympathies, "eminently Victorian," and is now as completely out of date as Thackeray's.
The "Life of Laurence Sterne" is as indisputably Dean Cross's as the "Life of Henry Fielding" is his. Since his "Development of the English Novel," 1899, he has been growing steadily more intimate with the subject from year to year through a quarter of a century. In 1904 he edited the Works of Sterne, to-
