depends upon his kindness. A third, in his general behaviour,
is found to be generous, disinterested, humane, and friendly. Hear
but the sad story of the friendless orphans too credulously trusting
all their whole substance into his hands, and he shall appear more
sordid, more pitiless and unjust than the injured themselves have
bitterness to paint him. Another shall be charitable to the poor,
uncharitable in his censures and opinions of all the rest of the
world besides: temperate in his appetites, intemperate in his tongue;
shall have too much conscience and religion to cheat the man who
trusts him, and perhaps as far as the business of debtor and creditor
extends shall be just and scrupulous to the uttermost mite; yet in
matters of full or great concern, where he is to have the handling
of the party's reputation and good name, the dearest, the tenderest
property the man has, he will do him irreparable damage, and rob him
there without measure or pity."--Sermon XI.--_On Evil Speaking_.

There is clearly nothing particularly striking in all that, even
conveyed as it is in Sterne's effective, if loose and careless, style;
and it is no unfair sample of the whole. The calculation, however, of
the author and his shrewd publisher was that, whatever the intrinsic
merits or demerits of these sermons, they would "take" on the strength
of the author's name; nor, it would seem, was their calculation
disappointed. The edition of this series of sermons now lying before
me is numbered the sixth, and its date is 1764; which represents a
demand for a new edition every nine months or so, over a space of
four years. They may, perhaps, have succeeded, too, in partially
reconciling a certain serious-minded portion of the public to the
author. Sterne evidently hoped that they might; for we find him
sending a copy to Warburton, in the month of June, immediately after
the publication of the book, and receiving in return a letter of