kind, and the easiest of invention; for is it not for the most part allusive obscenity? a species of wit to be found in its fullest perfection in the vulgarest and vilest haunts of vice? It is, indeed, easy to attract the notice and the admiration of the youthful and the wanton, by exhibiting loose images under a transparent veil. It is true, indeed, there is usually a veil, and the decent are therefore tempted to read; but the veil, like the affected modesty of a courtezan, serves only as an artifice to facilitate corrup

tion.

The praise of humour has been lavished on him with peculiar bounty. If quaintness is humour, the praise is all his own, and let Cervantes and Fielding bow their heads to Sterne. They who admire Uncle Toby, Doctor Slop, and Corporal Trim, as natural characters, or as exhibiting true humour in their manners and conversations, are little acquainted with nature, and have no just taste for genuine huIt is evident enough that the author meant to be humorous and witty, and many of his readers, in the abundance of their good-nature, have taken the will for the deed.

mour.

But till obscurity, till obscenity, till quaintness, till impudence, till oddity, and mere wantonness, wildness and extravagance, are perfections in writing, Tristram Shandy cannot justly claim the rank to which it has been raised by folly and fashion, by caprice, libertinism, and ignorance. I know that this censure will be considered as blasphemy by the idolaters of Sterne; but I hope it will not sour that milk of human kindness which they may have imbibed from his writings; and to an excessive degree

of which many soft and effeminate persons affectedly pretend. Let their philanthrophy repress awhile their resentment, and I will venture to predict, that time will insensibly strip the writer of those honours which never belonged to him.

But will you allow his sermons no merit? I allow some of them the merit of the pathetic; but the laborious attempts to be witty and humorous have spoiled the greater part of them. The appearance of sincerity is one of the best beauties of a sermon. But Sterne seems as if he were laughing at his audience, as if he had ascended the pulpit in a frolic, and preached in mockery. Had he however written nothing but his sermons, he certainly would not have been censured as the destroyer of the morals and the happiness of private life.

There are, indeed, exquisite touches of the pathetic interspersed throughout all his works. His pathetic stories are greatly admired. The pathetic was the chief excellence of his writings; his admirers will be displeased if one were to add that it is the only one which admits of unalloyed applause. It is certainly this which chiefly adorns the Senti- mental Journey; a work which, whatever are its merits, has had a pernicious influence on the virtue, and consequently on the happiness, of public and private society.

That softness, that affected and excessive sympathy at first sight, that sentimental affection, which is but lust in disguise, and which is so strongly inspired by the Sentimental Journey and by Tristram Shandy, have been the ruin of thousands of our countrymen and countrywomen, who fancied, that while they were

breaking the laws of God and man, they were actuated by the fine feelings of sentimental affection. How much are divorces multiplied since Sterne appeared!

Sterne himself, with all his pretensions, is said to have displayed in private life, a bad and a hard heart; and I shall not hesitate to pronounce him, though many admire him as the first of philosophers, the grand promoter of adultery and every species of illicit commerce.

NO. CXLVI. ON THE WEIGHT AND EFFICACY WHICH MORALITY MAY DERIVE FROM THE INFLUENCE AND EXAMPLE OF THOSE WHO ARE CALLED THE GREAT.

IT is true, indeed, that the world abounds with moral instruction, and that there is scarcely any good thing so easily obtained as good advice; but it is no less true, that moral instruction and good advice are found to possess a very small degree of influence in the busy walks of active life. In the church, we hear the scriptures read and sermons preached; in the library, we study and admire the morality of the philosophers; but how few, in the actual pursuits of ambition, of interest, of pleasure, and even in the common occupations and intercourse of ordinary life, suffer their conduct to be regulated by the precept of a Solomon, of a Socrates, or of Him who was greater than either!

No sentence is triter, than that example is more powerful than precept; but when the example is set by the rich and the great, its influence on the herd of mankind becomes irresistible. What can books

effect? what avail the gentle admonitions of the retired moralist, against the examples of lords, dukes, and East India nabobs? Can the still small voice of conscience be heard by those who live in the noise and tumult of pleasurable pursuits? or can the mild doctrines of the humble Jesus be attended to, amid the agitations of the gaming-table, and the debaucheries of a brothel? A vicious nobleman, or profligate man of fashion, contributes more to extirpate morality, and diminish the little portion of happiness which is allowed to mankind, than all the malignant writings of the sceptics, from Mandeville and Bolingbroke, down to the feeble, yet conceited writer, who insinuates his corrupt and infidel opinions under the fair semblance of an elegant history. I cannot help observing, when I think of this last and recent attempt, that it resembles that of the evil spirit, who, when he beguiled the mother of mankind, and ruined all her progeny, used the soft words of an affected eloquence. The serpent was however cursed; but the wily historian is invited to a court, rewarded with places of honour and advantage, and eagerly enrolled in the legislative body of a mighty and a christian nation.

It is certainly true, that when a government bestows peculiar honour on men who have written against the religion of the country, and who have impiously fought against the King of kings, it must lose the respect and attachment of all good men. The religion of a country is unquestionably worthy of more solicitude in its preservation than the political constitution, however excellent and admirable. Kings, with all their minions and prerogatives, lawgivers VOL. III.

H

and laws, are trifles compared to that system of religion, on which depends the temporal and eternal welfare of every individual throughout the empire. What avails it, that under a successful administration the French are beaten, and the Americans scourged for the sin of rebellion, if the same administration ruins our best, our sweetest hopes; those which rely on the protection of a kind Providence, and those which cheer us in this vale of misery, by the bright gleams of a sun which shall rise to set no more?

But supposing the narrow-minded ministers of a government so involved in gaming, sensuality, and temporal concerns, as to view all religion as imposture, and all modes of faith as political contrivances; yet surely they act inconsistently with the dictates of their own mean and low species of wisdom, when they extirpate, by their example, that religion which they allow to be politically useful. What must the common people think when profligate men are advanced to the head of a profession? They cannot but believe, that those who are reputed to be so much wiser than themselves, and who are evidently greater, in a wordly sense of the epithet, must have chosen that system of opinions, and that plan of conduct, which are most likely to be just and rational, safe and pleasant. "If my lord, or "his grace," says the mechanic," of whose wisdom

listening senates stand in awe, is a debauchee and "an infidel, I must conclude that my parish preacher, an obscure and homely man, is a hypocrite, religion a farce, morality a useless restraint on the "liberty of nature. Welcome, then, universal liber