spirit of wanton profusion. Sterne, by his own showing, must have gone through life like the Walrus, in Through the Looking Glass,
"Holding his pocket handkerchief
Before his streaming eyes;"
and we can detect him every now and then peeping slyly out of the folds, to see what sort of an impression he was making. "I am as weak as a woman," he sighs, with conscious satisfaction, "and I beg the world not to smile, but pity me." Burns, who at least never cried for effect, was moved to sudden tears by a pathetic print of a dead soldier, that hung on Professor Fergusson's wall. Scott was always visibly affected by the wild northern scenery that he loved; and Erskine was discovered in the Cave of Staffa, "weeping like a woman," though, in truth, a gloomy, dangerous, slippery, watery cavern is the last place on earth where a woman would ordinarily stop to be emotional. She might perhaps cry with Sterne over a dead monk or a dead donkey,—he has an equal allowance of tears for both,—but once inside of a cave, her real desire is to get out again as quickly as possible, with dry skirts and an unbroken neck.
