nurse his emotion and enjoy his imagined misery, is a clear example; and it is brought into clear relief by contrast with the Romeo who loves Juliet with a genuine passion, and with open eyes risks and meets death itself for her sake. Constance, in King John, sacrificing the political prospects of her son in her eagerness to indulge in voluble eloquence her grief over that son's wrongs, till King Philip impatiently exclaims, "You are more fond of grief than of your child," - this Constance is another instance. Richard II is a still more elaborately drawn specimen of the type. Landing in Wales, he finds his throne threatened by the invading Bolingbroke, and first he falls back on his favorite view of himself:

Not all the water in the rough rude sea
Can wash the balm off from an anointed king;
The breath of worldly men cannot depose

The deputy elected by the Lord.

(Richard II, III, ii, 54 ff.)

But Bolingbroke presses on till the danger cannot be ignored, and then Richard finds his satisfaction, not in leading a forlorn hope, but in indulging in a depression as unreasonable, but just as enjoyable, as his former assur

Of comfort no man speak.
Let's talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs;
Make dust our paper and with rainy eyes
Write sorrow on the bosom of the earth.
For God's sake, let us sit upon the ground
And tell sad stories of the death of kings.

...

(III, ii, 144 ff.)

Even in the humiliation of the abdication scene, he wallows luxuriously in the sense of his own debasement, and prolongs the agony for no purpose but the enjoyment of the picturesque misery of his fall. Once more, Duke Orsino, in Twelfth Night, exhibits with fatal clearness the two main aspects of sentimentalism. The first is in the opening speech :

If music be the food of love, play on !
Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken, and so die.
That strain again! It had a dying fall.
O, it came o'er my ear like the sweet sound
That breathes upon a bank of violets,
Stealing and giving odour. Enough! no more!
'Tis not so sweet now as it was before.

Here, surely, is an explicit picture of the sentimental as opposed to the real lover, lying among flowers, listening to music with a dying fall, nursing his sickly passion into an anæmic existence, and sending a proxy to do his wooing. Orsino is in love with love, not with Olivia. Then at the end, when Olivia definitely rejects him, the other side of sentimentalism

appears:

Why should I not, had I the heart to do it,
Like to the Egyptian thief at point of death,
Kill what I love? - a savage jealousy
That sometimes savours nobly.

(v, i, 120 ff.)

Here imagination is brought to his aid, and he contemplates with interest the image of himself as the jealous murderer of the woman he thought he loved.

These examples from Shakespeare are brought together, not as part of a historical treatment of the sentimental tendency in literature - for such exposures as these indicate the reverse of sentimentalism in the author but as concrete instances which may help to make more definite the notion of sentimentalism contained in the abstract description. We return now to the historical consideration of the tendency in the sentimental literature of the eighteenth century.

IV

Among the speculations on man and society that abounded in that era, sentimentalism seized on the congenial theory of the essential goodness of the human heart. The view that the criminal was at bottom a good fellow, who had been led astray by the force of circumstances and who consequently was to be pitied rather than blamed, appealed then as now to temperaments eager to enjoy the sentiments of compassion and universal benevolence. The sentimental drama sprang up, a type of play which presented middle-class or humble life by a method externally realistic, and in which the action centred in an erring son or daughter, husband or wife, whose sins and whose sufferings, repentance and forgiveness, served equally to provide the luxury of gushing tears. The intensity of passion of any sort seldom appears here; the "melting mood" is the appropriate outcome for this kind of feeling. From England, as Bernbaum has shown, the sentimental drama passed to France; and the comédie larmoyante, and the sentimental journey and autobiography which imitated Sterne, were among the most notable contributions of English to Continental literature in the eighteenth century.

The theory of the essential goodness of human nature did more than provide an easy channel for the runnings of sentimental sympathy. It softened the sentimentalist's heart towards himself as well as towards other victims of environment, and, along with an excessive development of the doctrine of the rights of feeling, it tended to the weakening of moral judgments, and to the substitution of a tender sensibility for common sense and a clear conscience as the guide of life and the criterion of character. Later the fervid eloquence of Rousseau proclaimed these doctrines as a new gospel, and for half a century one hears their echoes in theories of education and government, in novel and lyric and romance.

The manifestation of this tendency in the novel lies outside of our field; but a glance at one or two writers will help the completeness of our view. Samuel Richardson was too great an artist to compose his novels on a recipe so simple as served for the sentimental drama. Life as he understood it was a complex thing, and exhibited a great variety of character and emotion. Yet it was undoubtedly the same craving as found satisfaction in the lachrymose drama that gave Richardson his eager audience, and held London palpitating and sobbing for weeks over the fate of Clarissa. It is a difficult question to what extent the writers of sentimental books in this period were themselves