The reader is _with_ the writer throughout;
and their common mood of half-humorous pity is sustained, unforced,
but unbroken, from first to last.
One can hardly say as much for another of the much-quoted pieces from
the _Sentimental Journey_--the description of the caged starling.
The passage is ingeniously worked into its context; and if we were
to consider it as only intended to serve the purpose of a sudden
and dramatic discomfiture of the Traveller's somewhat inconsiderate
moralizings on captivity, it would be well enough. But, regarded as
a substantive appeal to one's emotions, it is open to the criticisms
which apply to most other of Sterne's too deliberate attempts at the
pathetic. The details of the picture are too much insisted on, and
there is too much of self-consciousness in the artist. Even at the
very close of the story of Le Fevre's death--finely told though, as
a whole, it is--there is a jarring note. Even while the dying man is
breathing his last our sleeve is twitched as we stand at his bedside,
and our attention forcibly diverted from the departing soldier to the
literary ingenuities of the man who is describing his end:
"There was a frankness in my Uncle Toby, not the effect of familiarity,
but the cause of it, which let you at once into his soul, and
showed you the goodness of his nature.
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