urney." We may finish his story by anticipation. He
died one of the most tragic deaths recorded in the necrology of genius.
He died in London on March 18, 1768, and he died alone. The wish he
had expressed of expiring at an inn untroubled by the presence of
mourning friends was grimly gratified. In lonely lodgings, beneath the
speculative gaze of a memoir-writing footman and the care of hired
hands, Sterne gasped out the words, "Now it is come!" and so died. He
was buried almost unattended, and his body was stolen from its new-made
grave by resurrectionists, and recognized, when half-dissected, on an
anatomist's table by a horrified friend. So the story goes--not,
indeed, absolutely authentic, but certainly not absolutely without
credit--the melancholy conclusion of an ill-spent life and a splendid,
ill-used intellect.

For his conduct to his wife his memory has been scourged by Thackeray
and by his latest biographer, Mr. H. D. Traill. It cannot be too
severely scourged. He took her youth, he took her money, and he tired
of her, and was untrue to her, and spoke against her in the dastardly
letters he wrote to his friends and in which he has gibbeted himself to
all time as a hideous warning, a sort of sentimental scarecrow. "As to
the nature of Sterne's love affairs," says Mr. Traill, "I have come,
though not without hesitation, to the conclusion that they were most,
if not all of them, what is called, somewhat absurdly, platonic. . . .
But as I am not one of those who hold that the conventionally
'innocent' is the equivalent of the morally harmless in this matter, I
cannot regard the question as worth any very minute investigation. I
am not sure that the habitual male flirt, who neglects his wife to sit
continually languishing at the feet of some other woman, gives much
less pain and scandal to others or does much less mischief to himself
and the objects of his adoration than the thorough-going profligate."

One of the greatest of German writers, Jean Paul Richter, {303}
declares more than once that he regards Sterne as his master. The
statement is amazing. Jean Paul Richter, Jean Paul the Only One, as he
was fondly called, was immeasurably sincerer than his master. All that
was sham, tinsel, and tawdry in the writings of Yorick was genuine,
heart-felt, and soul-inspiring in Jean Paul. Yorick's sentiment was
pinchbeck; Jean Paul's was pure gold. All that Richter ever wrote is
animated with the deepest re