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Sterne. Sterne's two fictions, Tristram Shandy and 4 Sentimental Journey, are marred by an excess of sentimentality. He was notoriously and purposely careless of form. What he contributed to the English novel was some admirable character-drawing, including one figure-Tristram's Uncle Toby universally admitted to be unsurpassed in eighteenth-century fiction. "As the author of Tristram Shandy, he remains," says Sidney Lee, "a delineator of the comedy of human life before whom only three or four humorous writers can justly claim precedence." Admitting the truth of even this encomium, we cannot place a writer so regardless of form as was Sterne on a plane with his great contemporaries, Richardson and Fielding.

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Other Novelists before 1800. The popularity of the new literary type produced a host of novelists between 1750 and 1800. New sub-types arose. In the so-called Gothic romance," of which Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto and Mrs. Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho are the best representatives, emphasis is laid on the supernatural and the terrible. There was the novel of purpose," of which Johnson's Rasselas and Thomas Day's Sandford and Merton are excellent examples. Then there was Goldsmith's Vicar, a charming volume, in which, probably for the first time in English literature, an author used experiences of his own as material for fiction. None of these added anything of value in the defining of the type, which, as has been said, was due to Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne.

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Aspects of Romanticism. If individualism and revolt are the keynotes of the movement, we can doubtless best

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see its real significance by studying the individual writers. It will, however, be of some value to cite some aspects of Romanticism which appear with more or less frequency and with varying emphasis in several writers.

(1) Perhaps the most striking mark of the Romanticist is what we call subjective treatment of material; that is, the handling of it so as to show the author's own observation, feelings, sensations, interpretation. (2) Another mark is a love of natural scenery - ranging from mountains and

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