he and his tears are as much out of place as if he were the compositor
who set up the type. It is not merely that we don't want to know how
the scene affected him, and that we resent as an impertinence the
elaborate account of his tender emotions; we don't wish to be reminded
of his presence at all. For, as we can know nothing (effectively)
of Maria's sorrows except as given in her appearance--the historical
recital of them and their cause being too curt and bald to be able to
move us--the best chance for moving our compassion for her is to
make the illusion of her presence as dramatically real 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