DICTIONARY OF NATIONAL BIOGRAPHY.* THE most interesting article in this
volume is, we think, the .sditor's memoir of Laurence Sterne. Mr. Lee has had access to a considerable quantity of hitherto unpublished matter, contemporary notices and anecdotes, letters from and about Sterne, a journal kept by him for " Eliza," otherwise Mrs.
Draper, and other miscellanies. This abundance of material has tempted the writer, and very naturally too, to indulge himself with an amount of space which he would scarcely have allowed to a contributor writing on the same subject. Two-and-twenty pages are more than Sterne's position in literature seems to entitle him to. The new matter does not really affect our estimate of the man, though it adds some curious details to the picture, details which, on the whole, go to make it more strange, and, one cannot help saying, more repulsive than ever. Mr. Lee does his best for his temporary client. What was wrong in him was all, he thinks, an affair of nerves. Nerves gave him a "constitutional sensitiveness to pain and pleasure" so great that the "reasoning faculty was incapable of controlling it." Want of self-control caused both the indecency that characterises his writings, and the sentimentality that makes that indecency peculiarly nauseous.
All this came from "the normal state of his nerves." His sentimentality was so delightful to him that "it discouraged him from seeking to translate its suggestions into act." As Lord Byron tersely put it, " he whined over a dead ass while he let his mother starve." This is all very well, but we prefer a simpler phraseology, and to say with Thackeray that Sterne was a " scamp." The evil was aggravated by the fact that he was a clergyman, which compelled to profess a morality which be absolutely ignored in practice, and a faith to which be could have given scarcely the slightest intellectual adher- ence. The claim that he had generous impulses may be willingly admitted, but to admit it is only equivalent to say that he was human.
If Sterne was a specimen of the type to which Aristotle gives the name of cisosisavo;, the man who is absolutely with- out any principle of morals, we may find a representative of the cixpari;, the man who knows that what he does is wrong, but is mastered by passion, in Richard Steele. The memoir of Steele is written by Mr. Austin Dobson, who is content, we are glad to see, with the commonly accepted standards and terminology of morals, and does not attempt either to palliate or to exaggerate the faults of his subject. Of course a man of Steele's character lays himself open only too easily to charges of hypocrisy, a habit of which Sterne was even osten- tatiously free. To write such a book as The Christian Hero because he felt that his own practice was sadly in want of an ideal, and to publish it because he found that to have written it was not enough, and hoped that this " standing testimony against himself" might be more effective, was a proceeding which might easily be called a sham. But Steele was no sham. "He had," as Pope said, "a love and reverence for virtue,"
even where he was not always constant in its practice, and there were virtues, generosity and loyalty to friend and country among them, where his constancy was beyond reproach. Mr. Dobson well says :— As the first painter of domesticity the modern novel owes him much, but the women of his own day owe him more. Not only did he pay them collectively a magnificent compliment when he wrote of Lady Elizabeth Hastings that love her was a liberal education,' but in a time when they were treated by the wits with contemptuous flattery or cynical irreverence, he sought to offer them a reasonable service of genuine respect, which was im. measurably superior to those fulsome raptures, guilty impressions,
• Dictionary of National Biography. Edited by Sidney Lee. Vol. LW., Stanhope—Storin. London; Smith and Elder. 1153. Intl
senseless deifications, and pretended deaths with which it was the custom of his contemporaries to insult their understanding."
Robert Louis Stevenson is perhaps the greatest, or at least the best known, of the literary names included in the volume. He is fortunate in finding in Mr. Sidney Colvin an ideal biographer, thoroughly acquainted with the circum- stances of his life, and able to be sympathetic without abdicating the function of criticism. The appreciations of Stevenson's work seems to us singularly just. Few, we ven- ture to think, will dispute the high rank which he gives to Kidnapped, as a story in which "the romance of history and the sentiment of the soil are expressed as they had hard'y been expressed since Scott."
The memoir of Dean Stanley is from the pen of Mr. Prothero, who is probably right in refusing to accord a place to any of his work in the highest or most permanent class of literature. "The Life of Dr. Arnold," however, might well have been made more than " a possible exception." This must ever rank high among biographies, which seldom unite so com- pletely a great subject and a perfectly competent and sympathetic writer. There is an interesting notice of John Sterling by Dr. Garnett, who remarks with great force that he is "a remarkable instance of a man of lettere of no ordinary talent and desert who, nevertheless, owes his reputa- tion to a genius not for literature but for friendship." It might almost be said that we know of Sterling through Carlyle's Life, just as we know of Edward King through Lycidas.
The chief politicians commemorated in the volume are to be found among the Stanleys and the Stewarts. Mr. J. A. Hamilton writes about the Earls of Derby, father and son, who had so interesting a share in English politics for two generations. (The father entered Parliament in 1820, though he did not become prominent till 1827 ; the son practically retired from politics in 1891) The two memoirs are admirably compressed and lucid specimens of political
biography, though the sobriety of Mr. Hamilton's style is, perhaps, better suited to the prosaic son than to the
brilliant father. The latter was called to the House of Lords is his father's lifetime, and the step, says Mr. Hamilton, "was probably due to the fact that he did not get on well with Peel." He might have appropriately quoted from The New Timon the lines which describe how the "Rupert of Debate"— "Plants a sly bruiser on the nose of Bob. Decorous Bob, too friendly to reprove, Suggests fresh fighting in the next remove."
In the memoir of the younger Earl it might have been men- tioned that he spent a year between Rugby and Cambridge at King's College, London, where he somewhat astonished his class, to whom he had given no sign whatever of his scholarship, by taking the first prize at the annual examina- tion.
The Stewarts are a numerous class with a somewhat com- plicated genealogy. They claim about sixty names in the index, divided among a number of peerages, of which Lennox, Moray, Mar, and Albany are perhaps the most conspicuous. The most famous in the list are the Regent Lord James Stewart, created Earl of Moray (better known under the incorrect form of Murray). This memoir is written by Mr. T. F. Henderson. Another Stewart is familiar to students of English history under the title of Lord Castlereagh. Here again we have the able pen of Mr. J. A. Hamilton at work.
The estimate of Lord Castlereagh's policy will probably come as a surprise to many who have been accustomed to judge of him by the Whig satirists of the time. "Few men have taken part in so many important events as did Lord Castlereagh in the quarter of a century that covers his public career ; few men have been the victims of such constant and intense unpopularity. Yet the services which he rendered to his country and to Europe were signal." He did at home what Nelson and Wellington did abroad. If he could always have had such men to carry out his plane, his lot would have been different indeed. But after he had planned the Walcheren expedition, the King—it must have been almost his last act—insisted on putting the Earl of Chatham in command. When Wellington was available, Lord Castlereagh did all he could to help him. This memoir is certainly one of the most enlightening portions of the volume.
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