malade,' and makes the dying Yorick place her hand upon his heart.

"But little is known of his last moments. Towards four o'clock in the afternoon he complained of cold in his feet, and asked the attendant to chafe them. This seemed to relieve him, but presently he said the cold was mounting yet higher; and while she was striving to impart a warmth to his feet and ankles, which a more awful power was driving away, at this moment some one knocked at the hall-door, and the landlady opening it, found it was a footman sent to inquire after Mr. Sterne's health."

"Fish" Crawford, the well-known Macaroni, was giving a dinner party close by, in Clifford-street.

"The guests were all friends of the dying humorist; of the company were the Dukes of Grafton and Roxburgh, the Earls of March and Ossory; Mr. Garrick, Mr. Hume, and Mr. James. Some one had mentioned his illness, and it was proposed to send to know how he was, and the footman, whose name has been preserved, was despatched to New Bond-street, to inquire. The landlady was not able, or did not care, to give him the latest news, but bade him go up and inquire of the attendant. He did so, and entered the room just as the deserted Shandean was expiring. He stood by and waited to see the end; he noted how the wasted arm was suddenly raised, as if to ward off something, caught a murmur of 'Now it is come!' and then saw his frame relax in death.*

"This was Yorick's end-a footman and a nursetender watching his agonies. The footman went his way back to the merry party of gentlemen in Clifford-street, and told what he had seen. The gentlemen, he says, were all very sorry, and lamented him very much.

We can almost hear this afterdinner panegyric: Hume and Garrick could have told of his freaks in Paris, and bewailed with convivial grief how Yorick had been no one's enemy but his own. Mr. James could have said something about his good heart. Then, as of course, the claret went round again, and Lord March went back again to the praises of the Rena,' or the Zamperini.'

Even the dead body of Yorick was not exempt from the law of adventure and odd situation which ruled his eccentric, brilliant, and melancholy life. There is a horrible whimsicality in this posthumous anecdote, so picturesquely told by Mr. Fitzgerald:

"In the Bayswater road, not very far from Tyburn Gate, a new burying-ground had

been opened, attached to that church in Hanover-square where the more fashionable marriage rites were celebrated. We can readily find our way to it now, for it is notorious among the neglected graveyards of London, and found very useful as a sort of huge pit for all the rubbish of the ruinous houses that hem it in closely all round. Weeds rioting in their impurity, yawning graves, headstones staggering over, dirt, neglect; and a squalid-looking dead-house, all soiled and grimed, with a belfry and a bell. This is now the condition of the grave-yard where Laurence Sterne is supposed to lie. It was then the new buryinging-ground, near Tyburn; and to this spot, on the day of his interment, at twelve o'clock noon, came a single mourning coach, with 'two gentlemen inside.' One of them is known to have been Becket, his publisher; the other, we fairly assume to have been his friend Mr. James. The bell over the soiled and grimed dead-house was not allowed to ring. And in this 'private' manner (a privacy almost amounting to shame), was the body of the great humorist consigned to earth. The two gentlemen' represented the splendid roll of nobility and gentry that 'pranced' before his sermon-lists! One more instance of the fatal blight of desertion that seems to attend the jesters of society at their grave.

"Now follows that strange and ghastly scene in which that meagre figure of poor Yorick, upon which he and others were so often merry, was to make a last appearance.

"When the two gentlemen' were seeing the earth laid upon their friend's remains, there were other and more profane eyes watching from the road, and marking the spot. At that time the tribe of resurrectionmen pursued their calling as lawlessly as the highwaymen did theirs upon the road. And this

new Tyburn burying-ground had already acquired a notoriety as being the scene of constant outrages of this kind. Only a few months before it had become ne-cessary to place regular watchers, and a large mastiff dog, in spite of which precautions, the infamous spoliation continued.'†

"Two nights after, on the 24th, these men came, took up the body, placed it in a case, and sent it away down to Cambridge.

"Mr. Collignon, B.M.,' of Trinity, was then Professor of Anatomy, and to him it had been disposed of. These aids to medical science being costly, and procured with difficulty, Mr. Collignon invited some friends to see him illustrate his anatomy on the body that had been sent to him from London; and an old friend of Mr. Sterne, who was of the party, was inexpressibly shocked at recognising the familiar features, and fainted away on the spot. It was too

VOL. LXIII.-NO. CCCLXXV.

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late, unfortunately, to save the body from the knife, for the dissection had nearly been completed.

"What a close to Yorick's strange career, which began in wanderings, and brought him thus finally to his old University."

Everyone has heard of "Eliza and Yorick"-of the Bramin and Le Bramine. Eliza was known to have been Mrs. Draper, wife of that "Daniel Draper, Esquire, of Bombay," with whom Mr. Thackeray made so merry; but very little more was known. Here, however, we find her full history. The whole book, indeed, is sprinkled with curious little bits of information-scraps about persons

and things, all strictly apropos, and not drawn in with violence. Puzzling initials are filled in-obscurities, as puzzling, cleared up.

These two volumes open a brightlycoloured, moving panorama of as crowded and diversified a life, and one as pleasantly contrasted, in nearly all points capable of variation, with the routine of modern existence as can well be imagined. We have London life, and rural life, and life in the provincial towns-life in Ireland, in England, and in France-life among great people, literary people, queer people; and all so exact in outline, so brightly costumed, and so racy of the hour, that one reads with the sensation of following an eyewitness.

This life of Sterne is a book for all readers, and for every mood. It has the vicissitude, the colour, and the

lightness of fiction, and the force and moral of a true social picture-philosophic, comic, tragic. With Mr. Fitzgerald's pictured pages open, one wonders that such a theme should, in this age of biography, have escaped so long. The secret is, however, discoverable in the paucity of apparent and easily accessible material, in the wide field of inevitable reading, and in the imperial quest after scattered MSS., letters, records, and traditions imposed upon the Shandean explorer and collector. A conscientious labourer might have done something. But to amass all that Mr. Fitzgerald has brought together has required the unflagging stimulus of enthusiasm. It is by the amount of vigorous industry expended upon it, and of which the author speaks so modestly, that the authority of this work is we think permanently fixed. And we must add, that into no more accomplished hands could the task of working his various and fragmentary materials into a charming and harmonious narrative have fallen. There are few living writers who can analyze character with a pen at once so light and so masculine, and finish their pictures with so quaint, peculiar, and powerful a touch. Mr. Fitzgerald's "Life of Laurence Sterne" is one of the most delightful and valuable of the many modern contributions to literary biography which have so happily revolutionized the art of writing the lives of our British worthies.