d so pimply--Tourville, so fair and so
foppish!" etc. In casuistry this author is quite at home; and, with a
boldness greater even than his puritanical severity, has exhausted every
topic on virtue and vice. There is another peculiarity in Richardson, not
perhaps so uncommon, which is, his systematically preferring his most
insipid characters to his finest, though both were equally his own
invention, and he must be supposed to have understood something of their
qualities. Thus he preferred the little, selfish, affected, insignificant
Miss Byron, to the divine Clementina; and again, Sir Charles Grandison, to
the nobler Lovelace. I have nothing to say in favour of Lovelace's
morality; but Sir Charles is the prince of coxcombs,--whose eye was never
once taken from his own person, and his own virtues; and there is nothing
which excites so little sympathy as this excessive egotism.

It remains to speak of Sterne; and I shall do it in few words. There is
more of _mannerism_ and affectation in him, and a more immediate reference
to preceding authors; but his excellences, where he is excellent, are of
the first order. His characters are intellectual and inventive, like
Richardson's; but totally opposite in the execution. The one are made out
by continuity, and patient repetition of touches: the others, by glancing
transitions and graceful apposition. His style is equally different from
Richardson's: it is at times the most rapid, the most happy, the most
idiomatic of any that is to be found. It is the pure essence of English
conversational style. His works consist only of _morceaux_--of brilliant
passages. I wonder that Goldsmith, who ought to have known better, should
call him "a dull fellow." His wit is poignant, though artificial; and his
characters (though the groundwork of some of them had been laid before)
have yet invaluable original differences; and the spirit of the execution,
the master-strokes constantly thrown into them, are not to be surpassed.
It is sufficient to name them;--Yorick, Dr. Slop, Mr. Shandy; My Uncle
Toby, Trim, Susanna, and the Widow Wadman. In these he has contrived to
oppose, with equal felicity and originality, two characters, one of pure
intellect, and the other of pure good nature, in My Father and My Uncle
Toby. There appears to have been in Sterne a vein of dry, sarcastic
humour, and of extreme tenderness of feeling; the latter sometimes carried
to affectation, as in the tale of Maria, and the a