Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 098.djvu/275

Rh lecturer, and so satisfy himself that although ever and anon medio de fonte leporum surgit amari aliquid, there is heart as well as brain in the writer's composition, and that simplicity and sincerity and faith are ever reverenced, and unhesitatingly preferred to the loftiest intellectual pretensions as such.

As with clerical sermons, so with laic lectures, there are few one pines to see in print. In the present instance, these who were of Mr. Thackeray's audience will probably, in the majority of cases own to a sense of comparative tameness as the result of deliberate perusal. Nevertheless, the book could he ill spared, as books go. It is fall of sound, healthy, manly, vigorous writing—sagacious in observation, independent and thoughtful, earnest in sentiment, in style pointed, dear, and straight-forward. The illustrations are aptly selected, and the bulky array of foot-notes (apparently by another hand), though not drawn up to the best advantage, will interest the too numerous class to whom "Queen Anne's men" are but clerks in a dead-letter office—out of date, and so out of fashion—out of sight, on upper shelves, and so out of mind, as a thing of nought.

If we cared to dwell upon them, we might, however, make exceptions decided if not plentiful against parts of this volume. That Mr. Thackeray can be pertinaciously one-sided was seen in his "Esmond" draught of the Duke of Marlborough. A like restriction of vision seems here to distort his presentment of Sterne and of Hogarth. We are ready to recognise with Lord Jeffrey the flaws of ostentatious absurdity, affected oddity, pert familiarity, broken diction, and exaggerated sentiment, in "Tristram Shandy;" nor have we any delight in the Reverend Lawrence, whether regarded simply as a man, or as a man in cassock and bands. It is indeed as men rattier than authors—it is indeed biographically rather than critically, that Mr. Thackeray treats the English humorists who come before him. But his dislike of the "wretched worn-out old scamp," as he calls Sterne, extends fatally to the old scamp's literary as well as social characteristics. We are told how the lecturer was once in the company of a French actor, who began after dinner, and at his own request, to sing "French songs of the sort called des chansons grivoises, and which he performed admirably, and to the dissatisfaction of most persons present," and who, having finished these, began a sentimental ballad, and sang it so charmingly that all were touched, and none so much as the singer himself, who was "snivelling and weeping quite genuine tears" before the last bar. And such a maudlin ballad-singer we are instructed was Lawrence Sterne. His sensibility was artistical; it was that of a man who has to bring his tears and laughter, his personal griefs and joys, his private thoughts and feeling, to market, to write them on paper, and sell them for money. "He used to blubber perpetually in his study, and finding his tears infectious, and that they brought him a great popularity, he exercised the lucrative gift of weeping, he utilised it, and cried on every occasion. I own that I don't value or respect much the cheap dribble of those fountains." And so again with the reverend gentleman's jests. "The humour of Swift and