My sympathies are with Walpole, although, when he pronounces Bolingbroke’s metaphysical divinity to be the best of his writings, I cannot agree.
Mr. Collins’ book is a most excellent one, and if anyone reads it because of my recommendation he will owe me thanks. Mr. Collins values Pope not merely for his poetry, but for his philosophy also, which he cadged from Bolingbroke. The ‘Essay on Man’ is certainly better reading than anything Bolingbroke ever wrote—though what may be the value of its philosophy is a question which may well stand over till after the next General Election, or even longer.
STERNE.
No less pious a railway director than Sir Edward Watkin once prefaced an oration to the shareholders of one of his numerous undertakings by expressing, in broken accents, the wish that ‘He who tempers the wind to the shorn lamb might deal gently with illustrious personages in their present grievous affliction.’ The wish was a kind one, and is only referred to here as an illustration of the amazing skill of the author of the phrase quoted in so catching the tone, temper, and style of King James’s version, that the words occur to the feeling mind as naturally as any in Holy Writ as the best expression of a sorrowful emotion.
The phrase itself is, indeed, an excellent example of Sterne’s genius for pathos. No one knew better than he how to drive words home. George Herbert, in his selection of ‘Outlandish Proverbs,’ to which he subsequently gave the alternate title ‘Jacula Prudentum,’ has the following: ‘To a close-shorn sheep God gives Wind by measure’; but this proverb in that wording would never have succeeded in making the chairman of a railway company believe he had read it somewhere in the Bible. It is the same thought, but the words which convey it stop far short of the heart. A close-shorn sheep will not brook comparison with Sterne’s ‘shorn lamb’; whilst the tender, compassionate, beneficent ‘God tempers the wind’ makes the original ‘God gives wind by measure’ wear the harsh aspect of a wholly unnecessary infliction.
Sterne is our best example of the plagiarist whom none dare make ashamed. He robbed other men’s orchards with both hands; and yet no more original writer than he ever went to press in these isles.
He has been dogged, of course; but, as was befitting in his case, it has been done pleasantly. Sterne’s detective was the excellent Dr. Ferriar, of Manchester, whose ‘Illustrations of Sterne,’ first published in 1798, were written at an earlier date for the edification of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society. Those were pleasant days, when men of reading were content to give their best thoughts first to their friends and then—ten years afterwards—to the public.