It should follow, according to the doctrine just set forth, that we ought to love Uncle Toby's creator. But here I fancy that everybody will be sensible of a considerable difficulty. The judgment pronounced upon Sterne by Thackeray seems to me to be substantially unimpeachable. The more I know of the man, for my part, the less I like him. It is impossible to write his biography (from the admiring point of view) without making it a continuous apology. His faults may be extenuated by the customary devices; but there is a terrible lack of any positive merits to set against them. He seems to have been fond of his daughter and tolerant of his wife. The nearest approach to a good action recorded of him is that when they preferred remaining in France to following him to England, he took care that they should have the income which he had promised. The liberality was nothing very wonderful. He knew that his wife was severely economical, as she had good reason to be; inasmuch as his own health was most precarious, and he was spending his income with a generous freedom which left her in destitution at his death. Still we are glad to give him all credit for not being a grudging paymaster. Some better men have been less good-natured. The rest of his panegyric consists of excuses for his shortcomings. We know the regular formulæ. He had bad companions, it is said, in his youth. Men who show a want of principle in later life have a knack of picking up bad companions at their outset. We are reminded as usual that the morals of the time were corrupt. It is a very difficult question how far this is true. We can only make a rough guess as to the morals of our own time; some people can see steady improvement, where others see nothing but signs of growing corruption; but when we come to speak of the morals of an age more or less removed, there are so many causes of illusion that our estimates have very small title to respect. It is no doubt true that the clergy of the Church of England in Sterne's day took a less exalted view than they now do of their own position and duties; that they were frequently pluralists and absentees; that patrons had small sense of responsibility; and that, as a general rule, the spiritual teachers of the country took life easily, and left an ample field for the activity of Wesley and his followers. But, making every allowance for this, it would be grossly unfair to deny, what is plainly visible in all the memoirs of the time, that there were plenty of honest squires and persons in every part of the country leading wholesome domestic lives.