its context; and if we were
to consider it as only intended to serve the purpose of a sudden
and dramatic discomfiture of the Traveller's somewhat inconsiderate
moralizings on captivity, it would be well enough. But, regarded as
a substantive appeal to one's emotions, it is open to the criticisms
which apply to most other of Sterne's too deliberate attempts at the
pathetic. The details of the picture are too much insisted on, and
there is too much of self-consciousness in the artist. Even at the
very close of the story of Le Fevre's death--finely told though, as
a whole, it is--there is a jarring note. Even while the dying man is
breathing his last our sleeve is twitched as we stand at his bedside,
and our attention forcibly diverted from the departing soldier to the
literary ingenuities of the man who is describing his end:

"There was a frankness in my Uncle Toby, not the effect of familiarity,
but the cause of it, which let you at once into his soul, and
showed you the goodness of his nature. To this there was something
in his looks, and voice, and manner, superadded, which eternally beckoned
to the unfortunate to come and take shelter under him; so that
before my Uncle Toby had half finished the kind offers he was making
to the father had the son insensibly pressed up close to his knees,
and had taken hold of the breast of his coat, and was pulling it towards
him. The blood and spirits of Le Fevre, which were waxing
cold and slow within him, and were retreating to their last citadel,
the heart, rallied back; the film forsook his eyes for a moment; he
looked up wishfully in my Uncle Toby's face, then cast a look upon
his boy--and that ligament, fine as it was, was never broken."

How excellent all that is! and how perfectly would the scene have
ended had it closed with the tender and poetic image which thus
describes the dying soldier's commendation of his orphan boy to the
care of his brother-in-arms! But what of this, which closes the scene,
in fact?

"Nature instantly ebbed again; the film returned to its place; the
pulse fluttered--stopped--went on--throbbed--stopped again--moved,
stopped. Shall I go on? No."

Let those admire this who can. To me I confess it seems to spoil a
touching and simple death-bed scene by a piece of theatrical trickery.

The sum, in fact, of the whole matter appears to be, that the
sentiment on which Sterne so prided himself--the acute sensibilities