ment of foreign industry would be speedily removed. It would be impossible to name any country in which the sources of wealth are more evident, and their development more easy.

We have thus, we trust, placed before our readers, as concisely as the vastness and importance of the subject will admit, a general view of the condition and prospects of the Ottoman empire, and of its present critical relations with regard to the rest of Europe. We have shown the magnitude of the stake at issue, and the obligations which we are under, as much for our own sake as for that of European liberty and civilisation at large, to support Turkey in her resistance to the aggressive policy of Russia. This is no party question. No country can be more averse from a war than our own; the interests of humanity and our material interests are equally opposed to it. Peace, as we have already remarked, may even have been jeopardised by the very anxiety to preserve it. At any rate, we have the satisfaction of reflecting, and the means of proving to the world, that forbearance had been carried to the utmost before we engaged in the tremendous conflict, now, we fear, too imminent. But if the die be cast, and the Emperor of Russia be determined to hazard everything in maintaining and pushing those great schemes, which form the traditional policy of his house, and upon the successful accomplishment of which the very tenure of his throne may depend, England has but one course to pursue. She must arm herself for the contest with that energy and determination which will prove that she is resolved to carry it successfully through. Cordially united with France, and engaged in a righteous contest, we have little to dread from a Power which has added to the other elements of its weakness by the injustice of its cause. But there must be no half-measures. The whole resources of these two great countries must at once be brought to bear; Englishmen of all parties must for the time forget their differences in this one great national object; and let us bear in mind, that the better the beginning the speedier the end.

THE

QUARTERLY REVIEW.

ART. I.-Sterne Inédit; Le Koran. Traduit per Alfred Hédouin, édition accompagnée de Notes. Paris, 1853.

THE

HE Koran, which is the affected title of a pretended autobiography of Sterne, was first published in English in 1775. M. Hédouin says he has proved in the Revue de Paris that a complete translation of the work has never appeared in France till now; it would have been more to the purpose if he could have proved that the original was the production of Sterne. Though it has recently been treated as genuine in two continental periodicals of authority-the Revue des Deux Mondes and the Bibliothèque Universelle de Genève-no man of letters in England would hesitate to pronounce it a transparent forgery. The work is divided into three parts, of which the first is not only written in imitation of Tristram Shandy, but chiefly consists of the development of hints which are dropped in the parent fiction, or in the meagre account of his life, which Sterne drew up for the information of his daughter. The mannerism and licentiousness of the model are faithfully copied; the wit, the pathos, the eloquence, the delineations of character were beyond the mimicry of a bookseller's journeyman. The second and third parts are made up of the avowed sayings of eminent men and of miscellaneous opinions, professed to be original, but many of them plagiarised from familiar sources. Such, however, is the force of imagination, when under the influence of a name, that M. Hédouin discovers in this spurious production all the lineaments of the reputed parent. Some years since a learned Frenchman, M. Salverte, mistook Tristram Shandy itself for an authentic biography, and in his elaborate treatise Sur les noms d'hommes, de peuples, et de lieux,' quoted Shandy, of Shandy Hall, among the examples of persons who had derived their names from a place.

In one respect M. Hédouin adopts an original view of his author. He ranks him among the bold thinkers-Voltaire, Diderot, and Rousseau - who waged war in the eighteenth century against tyranny and intolerance; with this difference, that what, he says, especially characterised Sterne, was his religious sentiment!

VOL. XCIV. NO. CLXXXVIII.

X

sentiment! M. Hédouin has nothing to allege in support of a paradox which is equally refuted by the life, and writings of a man who, though a great, and, in many respects a benignant genius, was, we are reluctantly compelled to acknowledge, a disgrace to his cloth. Mr. Thackeray, in the hasty sketch which he has given of him in his lectures, has remembered on the other hand little else than his profligacy, and has passed too lightly over the mental gifts which alone entitled him to a place in the gallery of English Humorists.'

Nothing is related of the family of Sterne's mother, except that her step-father, Mr. Nuttle, was of Irish extraction. That one or both of her own parents were of the same nation is in the highest degree probable from the Hibernian disposition that predominated in the character of her celebrated son. Roger, his father, who was the grandson of Roger Sterne, Archbishop of York, entered the army during Marlborough's campaigns. Of this army Mr. Nuttle was a sutler, and Lieutenant Sterne, having got into debt to him, propitiated his creditor by marrying the step-daughter, who was a widow. Laurence was their second child. He was born at Clonmel, the residence of the Nuttles, November 24th, 1713, a few days after his parents had arrived there from Dunkirk in consequence of the peace of Utrecht. The regiment of the lieutenant, whose commission was his fortune, was now disbanded, and until it was again re-established ten months later, he was compelled to quarter himself and his family upon his mother, who, as the daughter and heiress of Sir Roger Jaques, possessed the seat of Elvington, near York. Unfortunately those who wore the King's colours had incessantly to traverse the King's highway. From Elvington the Lieutenant was ordered to Dublin. From thence in a month he was sent to Exeter, and in another twelvemonth back again to Dublin. Here the hopeful soldier, who was transplanted every season, expected to take root. He furnished a large house, spent a vast deal of money in a short space of time, and had then to break up his establishment, which would doubtless otherwise have broken him, to join the Vigo expedition in the Isle of Wight. On his return his life was the same perpetual march as before, and in this removal from place to place his family were exposed to many dangers and hardships. These they shared with hundreds of the inglorious dead. The material circumstance is, that till he was ten years old, the author of Tristram Shandy lived a soldier's life-that his earliest world was the barrack yard, his earliest knowledge feats of arms, and that his earliest steps were made to the sound of fife and drum. The self-sown seed dropped by chance, and abandoned to nature, long overlooked, or only seen to be despised,

often

often produces the noblest growth. The heroes of Blenheim, Ramilies, and Malplaquet, who entranced the little boy with their enthusiastic tales, could never have suspected that they were training a genius who would rival in letters the renown of Marlborough in arms.

When little Laurence was in his eighth year he fell under the water-wheel of a mill while it was going, and was taken out unhurt. The event occurred at Wicklow, and the country people flocked by hundreds to look at him-a truly Irish act as if there could be anything to see in a child, whose sole peculiarity was to have had a narrow escape. In the autumn of 1723, or the spring of 1724, when the Lieutenant and his regiment were quartered at Carrickfergus, Laurence was removed from the tutorship of Marlborough's veterans, and sent to school at Halifax. In the brief memoir of himself, which is the principal authority for his life, he omits to state where he spent his vacations; but the opportunity to revisit his old companions and haunts at all events ceased in 1727, for his father was aiding that year in the defence of Gibraltar, and never returned to England. He quarrelled about a goose with a Captain Phillips, was run through the body, had a struggle for life, was sent to Jamaica with an impaired constitution, took the yellow fever, lost his senses, lingered on a harmless and complacent idiot for a couple of months, and then sat down quietly in an arm-chair and breathed his last in 1731. He was,' says Sterne, a little smart man, active to the last degree in all exercises, most patient of fatigue and disappointments, of which it pleased God to give him full measure. He was in his temper somewhat rapid and hasty, but of a kindly, sweet disposition, void of all design, and so innocent in his own intentions that he suspected no one, so that you might have cheated him ten times a day, if nine had not been sufficient for your purpose.' Nobody can doubt after this from what original Uncle Toby was drawn,

Sterne remained eight years at the Halifax school. He says that the master was able, and has furnished a proof that he was sagacious. The ceiling of the school-room had been newly whitewashed, and Sterne emblazoned his name in capital letters on the tempting tablet. He was severely flogged by the usher for defacing the work; the superior however resented the punishment, declaring that the name was that of a genius, and should never be erased. It might have been expected that Sterne, in requital, would have recorded with the anecdote the name of the master who had done him such homage.

Sterne states that his cousin, the heir of Elvington, became a father to him, and sent him in 1733 to Jesus College, Cambridge.

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