Page:Critical Woodcuts (1926).pdf/316

 gether with Fitzgerald's Life, making many revisions and additions of new material. In 1909, after years of laborious research, he produced his own "Life and Times of Laurence Sterne." This work, as he slyly suggests in the preface to the new edition before us, seemed to be the special occasion for two new English biographies within the next two years. By this fresh and thorough revision Dean Cross reclaims what he had previously made his own, bringing the book abreast of the latest discoveries and enriching it with new materials, especially Sterne's Letter Book, printed from the manuscript now in the Morgan Library.

Sterne is not an author for all times or for all ages or for all sorts of people. He is for those who are ripe and perhaps on the verge of being overripe. He made, for example, little appeal to me when I was a young man, though I remember, about 1899, reading "Tristram Shandy" through one golden afternoon, lying behind a screen of boughs in a clear space in the midst of a New England wood, where an eccentric parson had stationed me to wait for partridges, according to his own mild method of hunting them. I grew tired of the book long before the parson came to guide me out of the wood, for I waited till after dark and the parson never returned at all. He was a Shandian fellow—irresponsible; perhaps he had left his partridges to write his sermon. But that was no way to read Sterne, in great gulps. Sterne wrote dainty little chapters, and for a reason. He wrote them for tired business men to read between stations in the subway. Last year I read both "Tristram Shandy" and "A Sentimental Journey" during leaps of the I. R. T.; I found them entrancing and wished for more such alleviants of the rush and jolting of life.