The indecency, which _was_ found out at once, and which drew a creditable and not in the least Tartuffian protest from Warburton, is a far more serious matter--not so much because of the licence in subject as because of the unwholesome and sniggering tone.

The sentimentality is very often simply maudlin, almost always tiresome _to us_, and in very, very few cases justified by brilliant success even in its own very doubtful kind.

Most questionable of all, perhaps, is the merely mechanical mountebankery--the blanks, and the dashes, and the rows of stops, the black pages and the marbled pages which he employs to force a guffaw from his readers.

The abstinence from any central story in _Tristram_ is one of those dubious pieces of artifice which may possibly show the artist's independence of the usual attractions of story-telling, but may also suggest to the churlish the question whether his invention would have supplied him with any story to tell; and the continual asides and halts and parenthetic divagations in the _Journey_ are not quite free from the same suggestion.

In fact if you "can see a church by daylight" you certainly want no piercing vision, and no artificial assistance of light or lens, to discover the faults of this very unedifying churchman.
But he remains, for all that, a genius; and one of the great figures in our history.