sentimentalists, or were merely deliberate devisers of characters and situations designed to draw tears from the reader; but it appears likely that Richardson shared to some degree his public's sensibility, and had some part in the painful pleasure roused by the pathos of his heroine's prolonged demise. The same problem faces one in the case of even more abandoned caterers to the sentimental taste, like the author of The Man of Feeling, who complicates the matter still further by pointing out the evils of excessive sensibility while creating scenes and persons which seem deliberately calculated to excite it. Still more perplexing is the literary character of Laurence Sterne. It is often said that all that sentiment needs to keep it from degenerating into sentimentalism is the saving grace of humor. Yet Sterne is, both in his character and in his work, a pronounced sentimentalist, while at the same time he is a great humorist. In some writers, Dickens for example, this combination is accounted for by an alternation of moods: one scene is written in one mood, another in the other. But in Sterne they come to closer quarters, in the same scene, the same paragraph, the same sentence even. This man had the power of coaxing the tears out of a situation, and next moment of laughing at its absurdity, without being in the least ashamed of himself, or at all reluctant to resume the sentimental attitude forthwith. No sentimentalist was ever so open and unashamed in his frank profession of the quest for the sentimental occasion and the sentimental experience; none so sophisticated in contriving refinements of his favorite dissipation. The humor which, in a simpler temperament, would check by exposure the rise of factitious feeling, served in Sterne only to excite it by tantalizing; and left him free to use even prurience in its service. Nowhere in the poetry of this or any other period are we likely to find the deliberate abuse of sentiment carried to the extreme in which it is found in the writings of Laurence Sterne.

V

In the eighteenth century the sentimental movement affected non-dramatic poetry later and at first much less obviously than it did the drama and the novel. The frigid attempts at lyric that appeared during the neo-classical supremacy in England contain evidence enough of attempts to work up feeling that certainly did not spring forth spontaneously; but these attempts are as a rule so unsuccessful that one cannot believe that either writer or reader was really touched, as the sentimentalist yearns to be touched. Honest sentiment without pretence at profundity, but sincere as far as it went, one finds, indeed, in the society verses of Prior, in popular songs like Gay's Black-eyed Susan, Carey's Sally in our Alley, or Dibdin's Tom Bowling; and a tenderer strain in the Scottish poets, who were much less affected by neo-classicism than their southern brethren,

Allan Ramsay, Grizel Baillie, and the authors of such familiar songs as The Flowers of the Forest, The Braes of Yarrow, and Auld Robin Gray; but most of the poetry of this class rings sincere, and needs to be mentioned in this discussion only to be distinguished from the product of the rising tide of sensibility.

One document, notorious enough in its day, and usually claimed as a prominent evidence of the revival of romanticism, gives rise to a nice question in criticism. Macpherson's Ossian has, indeed, externally many of the marks of a romantic production. Realistic it is not; classic it is not; for one cannot find in it either sense of fact or form. Vague and tumultuous, this production appealed to many readers, on the Continent as well as in Britain, as a highly imaginative work, presenting ideal passion against a background of mist and mountain, the very embodiment of romance. The soberer criticism of our time has its doubts about Ossian, doubts that go deeper than the historical questions of its age and authorship. Some find that its characters are but names, not people; that its landscape defies visualization; that its supposed imagination is a humbug and a fraud. This is, perhaps, a trifle severe; but it is at least fairly to be argued that Macpherson's conceptions did not really rouse in theirauthor powerful emotion, but rather came into existence as the result of a violent effort to produce something impressive and thrilling; and that they found a responsive audience because so much of the public at that time stood eager to be thrilled. Thus interpreted, the vogue of Ossian would appear as the result of a conspiracy, unconscious on the side of the public, and perhaps on both sides, to regard as a masterpiece a pretentious impostor, whose very pretentiousness was the chief factor in making possible a kind of self-hypnotism. If this is right, Ossian was the first notable non-dramatic triumph of the sentimentalist movement in English poetry in that age.

Among the beneficent results of the vogue of sensibility in the period under discussion was the rise of the humanitarian movement. Its effects upon society were very great: prison-reform and the abolition of slavery were only two of the most important results; but the current of sentiment which has produced down to our own time Societies for the Prevention of various cruelties, and for the protection and preservation of people and animals not able to protect themselves, has its source in the eighteenth-century revival of feeling, and has never to any notable extent ebbed since. The humanitarian poetry of the last quarter of the eighteenth century seems to be clearly a phase of the same movement. Cowper's poems about his tame hares, and Burns's poems To a Daisy and To a Mouse, to the old ewe, and to the mare, Maggie, are often brought into relation with the political side of the Romantic Movement, as if the doctrine of the rights of man and the brotherhood of man had been extended to hares and mice