But it
is quite possible that the daily companion of one of the most
indefatigable jesters that ever lived may have been unable to see
a joke; that she regarded her husband's wilder drolleries as mere
horse-collar grimacing, and that the point of his subtler humour
escaped her altogether. But even if it were so, it is, to say the
least of it, doubtful whether Sterne suffered at all on this ground
from the wounded feelings of the _mari incompris_, while it is next to
certain that it does not need the sting of any such disappointment
to account for his alienation. He must have had plenty of time and
opportunity to discover Miss Lumley's intellectual limitations during
the two years of his courtship; and it is not likely that, even if
they were as well marked as Mrs. Shandy's own, they would have
done much of themselves to estrange the couple. Sympathy is not the
necessity to the humourist which the poet finds, or imagines, it to be
to himself: the humourist, indeed, will sometimes contrive to extract
from the very absence of sympathy in those about him a keener relish
for his reflections. With sentiment, indeed, and still more with
sentimentalism, the case would of course be different; but as for Mr.
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