Sterne: a study; to which is added The journal to Eliza

Front matter

p

LIBRARY

OF THE

Preface

Sterne's Archbishop of Benevento abridged a treatise which had employed fifty years of his life to the sheet-size of a Rider's Almanac. The prelate set a good example, which 1 have tried to follow. But miniatures of big subjects, if they are to be adequate, involve the compass of larger portraits. The outlines can be reduced, but not the quintessence of character.

This book is a study. It seeks to interpret the problem of the man, to vitalise him and his companions. It does not pretend to be a formal biography, though new facts, as well as old, pervade it.

More than anyone, Sterne demands this treatment, for the romance of him seems only half alive. Professor Cross's careful volume supplies many aids, but much also has been missed. It is striking that no biographer should have yet realised that Mrs Sterne was Mrs Montagu's cousin, or have tracked the lights cast by that celebrity's correspondence on her and on Sterne himself. These enable us to make Sterne's wife a speaking figure, while they help to explain her husband. So with Catherine de Fourmentelle, the " dear, dear Jenny " of his Tristram, which holds persistent traces of her elusive presence. From other neglected clues too (however slender) she has been reconstructed here. So again with Mrs Vesey, the belle of the blue-stockings. Sterne's devotion to her began far earlier than has been

Vlll

PREFACE supposed, and many a hint has escaped notice. So, once more, with Sterne's known letters, which have been left dishevelled, but are now related to their times, circumstances, and psychological bearings. And in Sterne's books themselves much of significance has been overlooked. Everywhere I have striven to make his voice, and still more his accent, audible. His temperament was his art, and in an unknown letter he told Garrick that his works were a picture of himself. In presenting his nature I have dwelt on features hitherto unperceived. His unnoticed " Reverie of the Nuns " supplies the key to an organisation so dreamily self-centred that the outside world seemed merely its counterpart.

Fresh matter assists these pages. The full meaning of Mrs Draper's long communication to Mrs James (in the British Museum) may be so considered. Two important letters, printed years ago in the Archivist, are now utilised with others. Three or four new autograph letters have also proved serviceable, while the entire "Journal to Eliza," transcribed at the end, speaks for itself.

At least five of the portraits are of new impression. The crayons of Sterne and his wife by Francis Cotes, the fine presentment of him in youth which forms the frontispiece, the characteristic one from a rare engraving that corrects Reynolds's delineation, and another taken during his Italian journey, will be of novel interest.

My best thanks are due to Mr Blake Wirgman for permitting his picture to be reproduced, and to Mr Vincent O'Sullivan and their owner the Rev. G. W. Blenkin, Prebendary of Lincoln, for enabling me to present the likenesses of Sterne and his wife which Nathaniel Hawthorne paid a pilgrimage to see. And, further, I am much indebted to Mr H. H. Raphael and to Mr Broadley for allowing me to use the letters in their possession.

PREFACE ix

Sterne created signal characters. In his detachment and emergence, his pathetic irony and humour, he is modern. So in style. He has handed down a succession of widespread influence. He was a master-impressionist, and an arch-Bohemian. His true home is a fantastic inland : the great highways of literature lie outside it. " For Bohemia (cried my Uncle Toby) being totally inland, it could have happened no otherwise. "

WALTER SICHEL.

January 1910.

ADDENDUM

P. 141, fifth line from foot of page.— "Descended to Bowood " and " through the statesman " are mistakes. The portrait was bought by Lord Holland, and acquired, at the sale of his pictures in 1840, by Lord Shelburne's son, the third Marquis of Lansdowne, for the sum of five hundred guineas. It is now at Lansdowne House. Lord Ronald Gower in his Joshua Reynolds (p. 40) has quoted an unpublished letter in which Sterne says that the painter presented him with the picture "as a tribute . . . that his heart wished to pay to my genius. That man's way of thinking and manners are at least equal to his pencil." Professor Cross (p. 201) says that the likeness was undertaken "at the request of" Lord Ossory.

P. 163, line 26, delete "bride's."

Contents

CHAP.

I. 4- 5- 6

7- 8.

io. ii.

12. !3-

OF STERNE, APART FROM HIS " LIFE

OF STERNE'S LIFE, APART FROM STERNE

ELIZABETH LUMLEY AND THE JESTER'S COURTSHIP

THE COURTSHIP RESUMED .....

THE BEGINNING OF THE INTERVAL (174I-I759) THE PREACHER ......

THE UNSENTIMENTAL CASE OF STERNE'S MOTHER "THE HISTORY OF A GOOD WARM WATCH-COAT," TOGETHER WITH ONE OF THE BAD WARM "DEMONIACS"

terne's WIF]

OF STERNE, APART FROM HIS WIFE (KITTY DE FOUR-

MENTELLE AND " TRISTRAM " : MARCH I 759 TO

JUNE I760)

THE URBAN PARSON (COXWOLD AND LONDON AGAIN, I76l) ........

sterne's authorship ......

FRENCH LEAVE (THE STAY IN FRANCE : JANUARY I762 TO MAY I764)

I

7 12

50 64

77 98

107 120

160 171 xii CONTENTS

CHAP. PAGE

15. UP TO THE SENTIMENTAL JOURNEY (JUNE I 764 TO

1 6. THE SENTIMENTAL JOURNEY (FRANCE AND ITALY J

17. THE SENTIMENTAL JOURNAL (ELIZA DRAPER : JANUARY

18. THE LAST GASP (FEBRUARY 26 TO MARCH 1 8, 1 768 :

APPENDIX THE JOURNAL TO ELIZA .... 293

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Portrait of Sterne ....... frontispiece

From the original oil-painting in possession of Theodore Blake Wirgman, Esquire.

TO FACE PAGE

From the original portrait in crayons by Frances Cotes, in possession of the Rev. G. W. Blenkin.

From original portrait in crayons by Frances Cotes, in possession of the Rev. G. W. Blenkin.

From an early engraving.

From a mezzotint after the portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds,

Parsonage House, Coxwold, Yorkshire . . . .160

The residetice of the Rev. Laurence Sterne. From an old engraving.

The Interior of Coxwold Church . . . . .162

From a drawing by Miss Florence Holms.

Sterne's Letter to Garrick . . . . . .169

From an old facsimile.

From the old Florentine engraving.

A facsimile page from "The Journal to Eliza" . . 270

Sterne's Daughter with her Father's Bust . . . . 285

From the original engraving in her edition of his letters.

xiii

A STUDY CHAPTER I

A vivid likeness of Laurence Sterne still seems to fail the Georgian portrait gallery. The frame is there, and the wan, pensive, roguish face, with the lips maliciously sentimental. But the soul, about which Sterne declared himself so "positive," the soul which contradicted his actions, is missing. He has been much written about, mapped out, dissected, criticised, but maps and anatomical plans are never portraits. We hear too little of his accents, see too little of his gestures. Even the few sketches of him show small perspective, and views without perspective may be decoration, but they are not pictures. Sterne's own " gerund-grinders " (" Smelfungus " and " Mundungus ") may labour over his " Life," yet what is life without living ? The moles have been busy with the firefly, but the dancing, gleaming thing eludes their patience. Nor have the critics succeeded in capturing him. Even Thackeray, the master who borrowed so many of his strokes, has dwelt on his lubricities, importing the worst of the man into the best of his work ; and about the man, indeed, there is much that is questionable. In this regard Thackeray perhaps should be forgiven no more than

Sterne. But debtors are seldom the fairest judges of their creditors. More almost than any man of genius in the eighteenth century (except perhaps Boswell), Sterne has been alternately flogged and patronised by his inferiors.

When the French commissary of the posts asked Tristram Shandy who he was, he returned the significant answer, " Don't puzzle me." Though Sterne assured his " Eliza " that he was the most " transparent " of men, and wrote to a friend, " I show all," though Heine, comparing him with Jean Paul, says from a true standpoint that Sterne bares himself naked, a riddle to himself and others he was and wished to be. It was part of his philosophy that the most trivial things are enigmas. But we who watch him in his century, that atmosphere of varnished licence and cruel tenderness, need not be so perplexed. We have fresh lights to guide us. He has written himself down on many of his own pages, and his essence rather than his character — the word "character" mates ill with Sterne — is not fleeting, but permanent. For Sterne sums up a modern type, that of the vagabond sentimentalist and fugitive feeler, selfconscious, loose, morbid, errant, artistic, aesthetic to the core. You can watch him, this firefly that fancied himself a star. And though the stars look down on his brief night hour with eternal scorn, we mortals, who flit so often, however highly we aspire, are concerned with his wanderings.

He was the first to strike the note of personal intimacy in

prose fiction. He was its first fantastic, its first master of

pathos ; the first in eighteenth century prose to perceive the

joy, though not the grandeur, of nature, the first to vignette

life. He founded modern impressionism, substituting for

\\ descriptive literature a diary of sensations, and a scale of

\ I cadence for a string of sentences. He went entirely of? the

\1 lines of his environment, contradicting its forms and shocking

I its formality. He was, in the strict sense of the term, an

OF STERNE, APART FROM HIS "LIFE" 3

eccentric. His own words about the elder Shandy fit him well : " The truth was, his road lay so very far on one side from that wherein most men travelled, that every object before him presented a face and section of itself to his eye, altogether different from the plan and elevation of it seen by the rest of mankind — in other words, it was a

different object He saw kings and courts and silks

of all colours in such strange lights ! " Such were the gossamer impressions that Sterne dramatised and christened " Shandean."

But Sterne was more than a channel for these. His essence may be best conveyed by the label of " a detached sensationalist." His personality played on the whole gamut of sensation, but the particular bar that momentarily absorbed him sounded like the whole tune, so poignant was its appeal, so sensitive was his ear. His acute sensationalism indeed precludes him from attaining the highest harmonies. For he could never realise the complete score, so keenly did his favourite notes possess him, the music of his moods. The part detained him from the whole. He was a sequence of interludes, and hence arose his invertebrateness, his lack of centrality ; the mastery of his touch, the limitations of his range. He himself has given us the clue. On one occasion his Parisian admirer, the young Suard, asked him to account for this odd amalgam of the fixed and the fluid — the volatile salt in him, changeful yet consistent. Sterne's answer deserves close attention. He owned, he said, " one of those delicate calibres dominated by the sacred, informing principle of the soul, that immortal flame which at once supports life and consumes it, which sublimes and varies every sensation by unexpected starts." "This creative faculty," he went on, "is named imagination or sensibility according as it gets vent under a writer's pen either in graphic scene-painting, or in the portraiture of the passions." 1 So Sterne sums up his own nature, over-dignifying it perhaps, yet warranted by its flitting phases. The salt has not lost its savour. His vein persists both at home and abroad. It will be found leavening Thackeray, Dickens, and even Carlyle ; in more recent days, notably Robert Louis Stevenson, not to speak of moderns like Mr William Locke and Mr Anthony Hope. Sterne's imprint is visible on some of Goethe, more of Jean Paul, and much of Heine. In France he has imbued Xavier de Maistre, and he has tinged Saintine. He claimed that he " would swim down the gutter of Time " : assuredly he has done so.

And his belongings interest us too : his association with " Count " Steele, the strolling artist who brought young Romney to York and painted the future author ; his wife's kinswoman, the redoubtable Mrs Montagu, whom Sterne always called " cosin " and who to the last returned his devotion ; John Blake, the parson headmaster of York Grammar School, who consulted him on his most private concerns and to whom Sterne addressed an amusing letter about his correspondence ; 2 his fitful, shocking friend, John Hall-Stevenson ; his grotesque comrade, Thomas Bridges of York ; his normal friends at Stillington, the comfortable Crofts ; Fothergill, the wise " F " of his early letters ; and all the setting of the worldly-holy Cathedral circle, with those bickering intrigues after Church perquisites that made it a miniature of London placemanship ; his coquettish daughter Lydia, the self-willed " child of Nature," who might almost have been a creation of his own brain ; his scolding, suffering wife — " a shrill, penetrating sound of itself," he says of the very word — that wife of whom

1 Professor Cross gives this passage (otherwise translated) in his Life and Times of Laurence Sterne. It comes from D. J. Garat's Mdmoires historiques sur la vie de M. Suard, vol. ii. pp. 147-152.

2 This letter (from the autograph collection of Mr H. H. Raphael, M.P.) is introduced post in Chapter VI.

OF STERNE, APART FROM HIS "LIFE" 5

we hear so little and from whom Sterne heard so much ; and all the other frail wives of his capricious fancy — Kitty de Fourmentelle, the sweet singer of York ; the great lady of Paris ; the " Witty Widow " ; his London Queens of Sheba (his own phrase) who came to visit this equivocal Solomon, and ere the last, the proud Lady Percy and the languishing Eliza Draper.

Sterne is phantasmal. That is at once his distinction as an artist, his drawback as a man. His sentimentality was peculiar. He lived in shadows ; he made a reverie of feeling, and a drama of reverie. This is no generalisation. His dream of the nun " Cordelia/ ' which first figures in these pages, leads up inevitably to the last chapter of his "Journal to Eliza." It forms a pattern to which he fitted the less living creatures of existence. Nothing in or around him seems real, and the unreality is genuine. All are fantoccini in shadow-land. Yet out of these unsubstantial shapes, and by sheer subtlety of stroke, he bodied forth those undying realities, Uncle Toby, Corporal Trim, and the valet La Fleur ; he presented those immortal interludes of poor Le Fevre and the Dancing Maid of Languedoc ; he wove a spider-web of suggestion which, though it entangled nasty flies in its fine-spun filaments, also caught the fresh dew of the morning. He revolutionised style. Moreover, strange as it may appear, ■he exerted a lasting humanitarian influence on our fellowfeeling with dumb animals, unemancipated slaves, misused servants, every victim of bigotry or oppression. And the man who did this was a lanky, spare, meagre, crack-brained parson, a rake at heart, who should never have preached or married, whose ideas (as he owns) were " sometimes rather too disorderly for ... . orders " * ; a consumptive

1 This, Sterne tells us in one of his letters, was an " expression which dropped from the lips of the arch- prelate " (Gilbert of York). He adds that with the quick brain and slippery senses — that perverse acuteness which is the heritage of the hectic and hysterical ; a sort of Rousseauite in a country cassock, tied to a jogtrot parish round till he had reached the age of forty-six, an age which the French call " critical." Here, surely, is a point which Smelfungus misses, a point of much meaning as regards Sterne's long concealment and late activities. He had been married close on twenty years before repute and disrepute opened to his own amazement. He was forty-six when he burst upon the world.

the archbishop " in his private hours " was always " most cordial." Cf. Original Letters of the late Mr Laurence Sterne, Logographic Press, London, 1788, p. 27. In another of these letters he speaks of his own "spare, meagre form" (ibid.\ p. m : he was a tall man, he tells us elsewhere, about six feet high.

Chapter II

of sterne's life, apart from sterne

Sterne was forty-six when he wrote the two first volumes of Tristram Shandy — in other words, he was forty-six when he was born. If he had not been born then, what were his antecedents ?

I suppose that everybody (that is nobody but you and me and Mr Mundungus) knows that he descended from an old East Anglian family — though Sterne denied his Danish blood — a stock which, by dint of espousing heiresses, had drifted into Yorkshire. That the crest of this family was a " Stearne " or starling, which accounts for the famous " I can't get out " episode in the Sentimental Journey. That in Tristram Shandy Sterne speaks of a " great-aunt Dinah " who left a legacy, and whose " black velvet mask " he turns into a new-fangled form of adjuration. That in the same chapter he tells " Eugenius " (his intimate, Hall-Stevenson) how "for these four generations we count no more than one archbishop, a Welsh judge, some three or four aldermen, and a single mountebank," though " in the sixteenth century we boast no less than a dozen alchymists." This first dignitary was his great-grandfather, whose marble effigy in the cathedral Sterne thought so like himself,1 and who had

1 " In the marble whole-length figure which dignifies the monument," Sterne wrote to William Combe, "you will find the likeness stronger" (than in the Jesus College portrait). And he continues : " He was an excellent prelate and an honest man — I have not half his virtues, if report speaks true been a grave archbishop when Charles the comic came, to his throne.

Sterne's father (a younger son of Simon Sterne and Mary, the wealthy granddaughter of Sir Roger Jaques of Elvington) was a luckless, brisk, feckless subaltern in two successive regiments, one of which was the famous " Handisides." This Roger Sterne went about adventuring in the long War of Succession, an unpromoted campaigner who made no stay in any one place, and married the daughter of a camp sutler to pay his debts. Sterne's mother, the vivandiere of the regiment, was born " Agnes Nuttall," and when Roger Sterne took her to wife was the widow of a Captain Hebert, with decent connections in Ireland, and a good-for-nothing son who wasted his substance in that country. The Yorkshire Sternes resented this misalliance, and treated the faithful, vulgar soul with middle-class contempt.

While Bolingbroke was manoeuvring the Peace of

Utrecht, he little dreamed that he was contributing to the

birth of a great humourist, and to that charming piece in

Tristram Shandy where Uncle Toby vindicates the virtue of

war. Shortly after the treaty was concluded, and just a year

preceding the birth of Rousseau (Sterne's temperamental

kinsman), Ensign, or " Captain," Sterne had to come home.

And his wife, hasting with him from Dunkirk to Ireland

for the purpose, brought Laurence Sterne into the world

on the twenty-fourth of November 17 13, almost under the

sign of Capricorn. He was her second child. The first had

been Mary, a beauty sacrificed to a Dublin spendthrift, one

Weemans, who beat and bullied her till she died of a

broken heart.1

of us both — and for his sake I hope it does, and for my own I hope it does not." Cf Original Letters of the late Mr Laurence Sterne, Logographic Press, London, 1788, p. 26.

1 Cf Sterne's Fragment of Autobiography, which prefaced his daughter Lydia's edition of his Letters and is a fine specimen of his style.

OF STERNE'S LIFE, APART FROM STERNE 9

Laurence Sterne first saw the light at Clonmel, that " Vale of Honey " which was also a centre of the woollen trade. And throughout his childhood the Irish quarters were the most permanent. Indeed, a collateral branch of the Sternes had settled in Ireland much earlier, had won Church preferment and been associated with Swift.

No rest had Roger Sterne or his wife thenceforward. Child after child appeared, two with fanciful names, and all with frail constitutions — " Joram," " Little Devijeher," and the rest. Only one survived, Catherine, and small affection seems to have subsisted between brother, mother, and sister.

Roger, on the disbanding of his regiment, resought the maternal seat of Elvington, but again the troops were called out, and the nomads set off, with many adventures, to Ireland once more. The Peace of Utrecht and the Hanoverian Succession did not end their wanderings or mend their fortunes. Over Ireland they roved, from garrison to garrison, when the Vigo Expedition, the siege of Gibraltar, and eventually the Triple Alliance sent the regiment off again over seas and lands, the poor undaunted ensign far away, duelling (for a goose) and fighting for his country till, during March 1 731, he drooped and died, a childish imbecile, in Jamaica.

Meanwhile the struggling family were driven from point to point, with hairbreadth escapes by shore and water — to the Isle of Wight, Wales, and over Ireland again. There the boy nearly lost his life in a mill-race — an accident which had happened long before to an ancestor. At the age of eight, the neglected Laurence learned his letters in Dublin Barracks. By the age of ten his father had already removed him from his mother's rather moulting wing and settled him at school near Halifax under the care of a brother, Richard Sterne of Woodhouse Hall. Up to that time Sterne's childhood was a barrack-room ballad, and the barrackwell seems to have been the source from which he drew the dear old soldier and his faithful servant who are still glories of our literature. " If," Sterne tells us in Tristram Shandy, " if when I was a school-boy I could not hear the drum beat but my heart beat with it, was that my fault ? Did I plant the propensity there ? Did I sound the alarm within, or Nature ? " But now all shifted with the scene. Removed at Halifax from his early surroundings, the lad was thrown in upon himself. He proved the usual duncegenius, idle though promising. It was said that he would make his name, and at any rate he has himself told us that he scrawled it on the school-room ceiling.

Such, then, is the genesis of Laurence Sterne, sickly by inheritance, gipsy by nature, forced from the stir of war into the tame humiliations of dependence, homeless by fate, with some ancestral fame on one side and a coarse undercurrent on the other, the sport of circumstance, a bantling of the barracks. Drums and bugles sounded his lullabies, rough soldiers must have tossed the puny boy in their arms, and his mother, I fancy, could use her fists. You would have expected a tough little hero or a hardened little ruffian as the upshot. Not a bit of it ! Nature plays queer tricks with environment. Out of these elements she moulded a dreamy urchin with small relation to his surroundings, who developed into king's jester at the court of Bohemia. Sterne never saw a battle, but the fear and throb of warfare had bitten into his soul. The lawlessness and restlessness of necessity faced a constitution fickle, sensitive, furtive, delicate. He was a waif by birthright, and there is no sustained sentence in any part of his story : rather, it seems all hiatus and parenthesis. In his own words, he was "born for digressions," and perhaps for transgression also. He could rivet himself to nothing. His life and his books were a

OF STERNE'S LIFE, APART FROM STERNE n

casual ward. Does not Tristram Shandy (informed by his uncle) start with a gap ante-natal ? Does not Sterne, in the unquoted verses which he contributed to his " Cousin " Hall-Stevenson's Crazy Tales, descant on " the beautiful oblique " of his method —

" . . . . No one notion But is in form like the designing

Of the peristaltic motion ; Vermicular ; twisting and twining

Going to work Just like a bottle screw upon a cork." *

Does not he tell us, in words which Charles James Fox afterwards appropriated, " I begin with writing the first sentence, and trust to Almighty God for the second " ?

Whence, outside the strong after-influences of music and the Bible, he derived his wonderful vocabulary, his rhythm, at once simple and subtle, and the dainty phrasing that interprets the sense, we know not. The artist within him after all may have come from the Irish strain of that common, down-trodden mother. Every quiver of Sterne reflected itself in the troubled pools of emotion. Mere feeling proved his truest experience, and he grew up a perverse child of reverie. He was neurotic. We should, I am afraid, have thought him a horrid boy.

1 " My Cousin's Tale."

Chapter III The Prelude To Sterne^ Wife

The child of reverie ! From earliest years Sterne loved his dreamy communings. " How the wind blows I know not," he sighs in one of his late letters, " and I have not an inclination to walk to my window, where perhaps I might catch the course of a cloud and be satisfied.'' He grew weary, he wrote in another, of " talking to the many " : he liked " conversing with the ancient and the modern dead " — the " mutes " who could not resent his handling. But still more he loved to body forth love-episodes alone. Feeling for feeling's sake, however — the sentimentalism which means feeling without passion — is an opiate which, if habitual, soon deadens the heart. During the last year of his life, Sterne wrote to a friend about the Sentimental Journey that " it will, I dare say, convince you that my feelings are from the heart, and that that heart is not one of the worst of moulds." It was not that originally, but Sterne's titillations had so weakened its framework that it could scarcely serve for common use. " I have torn my whole frame to pieces by my feelings," he confessed at the close.1 And so it might almost be doubted whether Sterne ever owned a heart at all save in his own imaginings. If so, it was in the wrong place ; it lay, not in attachments, but in the flutter of his moods, memories, and pulsations. It was a frisking,

1 Cf. Sterne's Letters, published by his daughter (1775), vol. iii. p. 115.

surface heart. True, no less a judge than the poet Heine has traced his pathetic mirth to depths that were personally tragic. This holds good certainly of "that long disease, his life." But it involves no deep sympathy, and perhaps the most exquisite Tenderers of joy and sorrow have felt things more than they have felt with them. Sterne could feel and express life's ironies to perfection ; he vibrated to every gust like an aeolian harp. Beyond question too, and therein lies his greatness, he loved much of human nature. He loved it in his soul, and he presented it so warmly in his works that Carlyle sums him up in his essay on Jean Paul as " our last specimen of humour, and, with all his faults, our finest, if not our strongest." How deeply Carlyle was dipped in Sterne will appear hereafter.

But Sterne's tragedy was seldom too deep for tears that gushed from a perennial fountain. He smiles wistfully over the wounds which he parades ; and, little as there is in common between Sterne's arabesques and Byron's thunderbolts, in this demand for public pity — the beggar's posture — the two emotionalists are akin.

Sterne's life — his cramped, consumptive life — had neither space nor soil enough for that steadfast love in which the truth of feeling, the felt verity, takes its root. The sweet, sad loveliness of things appealed paramountly 4 to him, and forms his paramount appeal. Loveliness is a truth, but it is not the whole. " Writers of my stamp," he owns, "have one principle in common with painters. Where an exact copying makes our pictures less striking, we choose the less evil, deeming it even more pardonable to trespass against truth than beauty." For sheer and native artistry, Sterne has no rival ; it graces even his rags and tatters. But if this excludes the ugly side of puritanism, the more winning side i*' absent also. Sterne was hedonist : hedonist, if it may so be put, without hedonism, for he was receptive, not active. It was the fact of feeling that enthralled him. What he realised was the pang and the thrill, the pleasure of variegated sensation. His tenderness was more towards others than for them ; he draped it in the mists of sentiment, and he made it vocal through the tremolo of his style. By virtue of the extreme sensitiveness of that style his pity stood soliloquising. But directly it stepped forward it often went after what he has himself termed "that tender and delicious sentiment which ever mixes in friendship where there is a difference of sex." And on that feeling he played his fantasias.