as possible;
a chance which is, therefore, completely destroyed when the author of
the illusion insists on thrusting himself between ourselves and the
scene.

But, in truth, this whole episode of Maria of Moulines was, like more
than one of Sterne's efforts after the pathetic, condemned to failure
from the very conditions of its birth. These abortive efforts are
no natural growth of his artistic genius; they proceed rather from
certain morbidly stimulated impulses of his moral nature which he
forced his artistic genius to subserve. He had true pathetic power,
simple yet subtle, at his command; but it visited him unsought, and by
inspiration from without. It came when he was in the dramatic and
not in the introspective mood; when he was thinking honestly of
his characters, and not of himself. But he was, unfortunately, too
prone--and a long course of moral self-indulgence had confirmed him in
it--to the habit of caressing his own sensibilities; and the result of
this was always to set him upon one of those attempts to be pathetic
of _malice prepense_ of which Maria of Moulines is one example, and
the too celebrated dead donkey of Nampont another. "It is agreeably
and skilfully done, that dead jackass," writes Thackeray; "like M. de
Soubise's cook on the campaign, Sterne dresses it, and serves it up
quite tender, and with a very piquante sauce. But tears, and fine
feelings, and a white pocket-handkerchief, and a funeral sermon, and
horses and feathers, and a procession of mutes, and a hearse with
a dead donkey inside! Psha! Mountebank! I'll not give thee one
penny-piece for that trick, donkey and all." That is vigorous
ridicule, and not wholly undeserved; but, on the other hand, not
entirely deserved. There is less of artistic trick, it seems to me,
and more of natural foible, about Sterne's literary sentiment than
Thackeray was ever willing to believe; and I can find nothing worse,
though nothing better, in the dead ass of Nampont than in Maria of
Moulines. I do not think there is any conscious simulation of
feeling in this Nampont scene; it is that the feeling itself is
overstrained--that Sterne, hugging, as usual, his own sensibilities,
mistook their value in expression for the purposes of art. The
Sentimental Traveller does not obtrude himself to the same extent as
in the scene at Moulines; but a little consideration of the scene will
show how much Sterne relied on the mere presentment of the fact that
here was an