1864.] If selves what manner of man he was. 109 we presume, of payment, he married the "In all our numerous family, for these four generations, we count no more than one archbishop, a Welsh judge, some three or four aldermen, and a single archbishop" was mountebank." The Richard Sterne, who filled the see of York from 1664 to 1683. He had been an ardent royalist during the civil war, and when master of Jesus College, Cambridge, sent the college plate as an offering to King Charles. "His loyalty cost him his liberty. Cromwell seized him and carried him captive to London, along with some other "pestilent, bad birds of the same viperous brood." He was, however, speedily released, and reäppeared, after a brief eclipse, on the restoration, to be recompensed first with the bishopric of Carlisle, and afterward with the primacy of York. Adversity, it seems, had not taught him toleration, for we presently hear that he was a High Churchman, who dealt strictly with the Nonconformists," and again, from Baxter, that he had "a promising face, but not half the charity which became so grave a bishop, nor so mortified an aspect." Burnet is not more comThere is no foundation for this epigramplimentary. "Sterne died," he tells us, "in the eighty-sixth year of his age: heatic calumny. Mrs. Sterne seems to have was a sour, ill-tempered divine, and mind- leaned on her son for support to the last. ed chiefly the enriching of his family: he As late as 1758 we hear of her journeying all the way from Ireland to York, to obwas suspected of Popery." tain his advice and assistance; and soon afterward we find him expressing a hope that his "poor mother's affair is by this time ended, to our comfort, and, I trust, hers." These are not the words of a hollow sentimentalist. The Welsh judge " is unknown; the "aldermen" are known but insignificant; the "mountebank" is the author of Tristram Shandy himself, and great grandson of the loyal primate. Roger Sterne, his father, was an ensign in Chudleigh's regiment, which formed part of that British army famous, according to "my Uncle Toby," for having "sworn terribly in Flanders." He joined in 1708, and served through several of Marlborough's campaigns. At Bauchain, in 1711, he fell in with a widow, named Agnes Hebert, the step-daughter of a "noted sutler." "I know,' writes Horace Walpole, 'from indubitable authority, that his mother, who kept a school, having run into debt on account of an extravagant daughter, would have rotted in a jail if the parents of her scholars had not raised a subscription for her. Her own son had too much sentiment to have any feeling. A dead ass was more important to him than a living mother.' Roger Sterne must have been one of the most lovable of men. "My father,' says Laurence, in a burst of affectionate admiration, 'was a little, smart most patient of fatigue and disappointments, man, active to the last degree in all exercises, of which it pleased God to give him full meas"N. ure. He was, in his temper, somewhat rapid and hasty, but of a kindly, sweet disposition; void of all designs, and so innocent in his own B.," writes the son concerning his father, intentions, that he suspected no one: so that you might have cheated him ten times in a day, if nine had not been sufficient for your purpose.'" Doubtless this kind and gentle creature furnished Sterne with the idea of that most delightfull of all characters in fiction, "my Uncle Toby." If we compare this genial picture of the father with the following sketch from Tristram Shandy, we shall find two Dromios who confound us: have often drank in, with breathless interest, the glorious story of the deeds of the brave "army in Flanders;" or, seated in the guard-room, have listened with eager ears to the yarns of Marlborough's battered veterans. Of course he lost in this strange rough school much knowledge which other school-boys naturally gain. Spelling, for instance, was an art which he was not taught, and which he never afterward acquired. His mistakes, even in common words, are ludicrous. Thus "My Uncle Toby was a man patient of in- we have "vinierd" for vineyard; "akes" juries-not from want of courage, but he was for aches; "magazeen" for magazine; of a peaceful, placid nature-no jarring element" mettles" for metals; and dozens of in it-all was mixed up so kindly within him; blunders quite as execrable. my Uncle Toby had scarce a heart to retaliate on a fly. "Go," says he, one day at dinner, to ignorance of what an overgrown one which had buzzed about his nose, and tormented him cruelly all dinnertime, and which, after infinite attempts, he had caught at last, as it flew by him. "I'll not hurt thee," says my Uncle Toby, rising from his chair, and going across the room with the fly in his hand. "I'll not hurt a hair of thy head. Go," says he, lifting up the sash, and opening his hand as he spoke, to let it escape; "go, poor devil, get thee gone; why should I hurt thee? This world is surely wide enough to hold both thee and me."'""" A man who hesitates to crush a fly, is likely to get crushed himself in the "ugly rush" of his comrades for promotion and rewards. We can not wonder that the simple Roger Sterne lived and died a subaltern. His career was one long campaign unsweetened by success. In Flanders, in Portugal, at Gibraltar-where he was run through the body by a brother officer in a duel about a goose!-the single-minded soldier toiled at the tedious round of duty in barracks and in the field, unnoticed and uncared for. At last death overtook him in Jamaica, far away from friends and kindred. "The country fever," his son writes, in a sentence where emotion appears to have overpowered grammar, "took away his senses first, and made a child of him; and then, in a month or two, walking about continually without complaining, till the moment he sat down in an arm-chair and breathed his last." Sterne passed his childhood with his parents. Up to his eleventh year he was their companion in all their wanderings. It was in these early days that he gained that insight into the small details of a soldier's life, which he turned to such good account in Tristram Shandy. The little fellow, mounted on his father's knee, must But this "every school-boy knows" was a price he could well afford to pay for the education of the barrackyard and parade-ground-for the acquaintance of captains like "my Uncle Toby," and corporals like Trim. In 1724 the boy's gipsy life came to an end, and he was fixed at Halifax free school by his father, whom he never saw again. He was not, however, left quite alone; for near at hand lived his Yorkshire relatives, the Sternes of Elvington, with whom he often spent his holidays. He seems to have been an idle, careless, irregular scholar; but an incident related by himself proves that his natural brilliancy had already become discernible : whitewashed, and the ladder left behind by the "The ceiling of the school-room having been workmen, I, one unlucky day, mounted it, and wrote with a brush, in large capital letters, Lau. Sterne, for which the usher severely whipped me. My master was very much hurt at this, and said before me that never should that name be effaced, for I was a boy of genius, and he was sure I should come to preferment. This made me forget the stripes I had re ceived.'" Perhaps the worthy pedagogue's appre hension was made preternaturally acute from his knowledge that Richard Sterne, Esq., kinsman of Laurence, was one of the governors of the school. Certainly it was injudicious to pronounce a panegyric on a lad whose habit was, we are told, to "learn when he pleased, but not oftener than once a fortnight." The misplaced praise would be likely to make him ten times more idle, conceited, and troublesome than he had been before. Sterne remained at Halifax until he was nineteen years old, when his cousin, the Elvington squire, sent him to Jesus Col lege, Cambridge. Within its quiet pre- | very smooth. "She owned she liked me, cincts the memory of his sturdy royalist but thought herself not rich enough, or ancestor, who sent the plate to Charles I., me too poor, to be joined together. She must still have been cherished. His own went to her sisters in Staffordshire. I college career was undistinguished. "At wrote to her often." Some of these letthe university," we read in a short sketch ters were published after Sterne's death; of him, published in a London paper after they are in the ardent, exaggerated style he had become famous, and suspected to in which he always addressed the other be from his own pen, "he spent the usual sex. He professes himself in despair benumber of years; read a great deal, cause his "L" is absent. He weeps laughed more, and sometimes took the freely : diversion of troubling his tutors. He left Cambridge with the character of an odd man, who had no harm in him, and who had parts if he would use them"-just such a person as we should imagine the lad would grow into, who would learn when he pleased, but not oftener than once a fortnight. His great friend was John Hall Stevenson, the writer of the shameful Crazy Tales, and whom we may justly call the corrupter of the mind of Sterne. He is the "Eugenius" of Tristram Shandy, and throughout life he was the constant associate of "Yorick." At college they seem to have belonged to a rollicking "fast" set. Troubling the tutors was among the more innocent of their pleasures. The riotous companionship of a noisy profligate was a sorry preparation for the sacred duties which were awaiting Sterne. all attention to me; but I sat over it with The lover's tears are for ever flowing. "Tears are trickling down upon the paper at I trace the word L." Sometimes he addresses her in a gayer strain : "Methinks I see my contemplative girl now in the garden, watching the gradual approaches of spring. Dost thou not mark with delight the first vernal buds? the snowdrop and primbeneath thy feet. rose, those early and welcome visitors, spring The feathered race are all thy own; and with their untaught harmony will soon begin to cheer thy morning and evening walk. Sweet as this may be, return, return; the birds of Yorkshire will tune their pipes, and sing as melodiously as those of Staffordshire." On leaving the university, he was or dained deacon by the Bishop of Lincoln, and, two years later, priest by the Bishop of Chester. Well would it have been for his reputation had he never taken on himself that solemn office! Construe his This sort of rhodomontade sounds rathconduct as charitably as we may, it is im- er absurd to a calm bystander, but it must possible to help seeing how radically unfit have been acceptable enough to L. he was for the serious responsibilities of a We are not surprised that she treasured minister of religion. His sole motive in such glowing love-letters long after the assuming them was the certainty of pre-heart of the writer had grown cold toward ferment. His uncle, Jaques Sterne, an her. ardent politician, and, we may add, an The objection of poverty soon melted unblushing pluralist, was archdeacon of away in the sunshine of Sterne's clerical the East Riding, and ready to push a rel-promotion; but a new obstacle to the marative without scruple. Sterne, who had riage arose. Miss Lumley fell into bad been guilty of the meanness and hypoc- health, and narrowly escaped sinking into risy of "taking orders" to secure a livelia fatal decline. She herself anticipated hood, was not disappointed in his expect that her illness would end in death. ations, for five days after his ordination. he was presented to the vicarage of Suttonon-the-Forest. Meanwhile, during one of his visits to York, he had met his future wife. Her name was Elizabeth Lumley, and she came of a good family in Staffordshire. The course of true love did not at first run "One evening," writes her husband to their daughter Lydia, "when I was sitting by her with an almost broken heart to see her so ill, she said, 'My dear Laurey, I can never be live; but I have left you every shilling of my yours, for I verily belive I have not long to fortune.' Upon that she showed me her will. This generosity overpowered me. It pleased God that she recovered, and I married her in day wedded him more and more closely the year 1741." to his college friend, Stevenson, who had come to dwell hard by at Skelton Castle. There, in a magnificent library well stored with the quaint old authors, to whom we owe many of Sterne's happiest thoughts, or in the great hall carousing with inaptly self-named "Demoniacs," he passed many intoxicating hours. Strange employment for an English clergyman, yet hardly more demoralizing than the dull dissipation in which many of his order indulged. "Eugenius" has left us a comical sketch of one of the ordinary country parsons of the day: The marriage was not a happy one. Indeed we may gather from Sterne's own account of the manner in which her "generosity" overpowered him that even be fore the wedding-day love had departed." Eugenius" and other choice spirits, not It is difficult to apportion blame when husband and wife disagree. As time passed on, Sterne certainly did become indifferent to his L-, but he was not alogether without excuse. She seems to have been singularly uninteresting. Mr. Hawthorne notices, in his last book, the disagreeable expression of her portrait; and she was as destitute of mental as of physical gifts. Wholly incapable of appreciating her husband's genius, real union with him and affection for him must have been impossible. In spite of her "fine voice and good taste in music," and of his "books, painting, shooting, and fiddling," the hours must often have hung heavily in the parsonage at Sutton. "Not more renowed for song and pipe, Who can wonder that the feeble and nervous Vicar of Sutton despised and avoided these muscular pagans? Neither they nor their patrons, the Squire WestIn that rural and rather dull retirement, erns of the county, were at all to his taste. however, Sterne was destined to live for He felt a contempt for them and their nearly twenty years, unnoticed and almost rude jokes and boisterous mirth, which he unknown. Now and again we catch was at no pains to conceal. They repaid glimpses of him mingling in party politics, his contempt with hatred. In the welland, until he quarreled with his uncle the known dialogue between Yorick and archdeacon, writing occasionally in the Eugenius, in Tristram Shandy, we learn whig interest in party newspapers. After the penalty he paid for jesting at the exthe quarrel, he refused to continue writ- pense of others. "For every ten jokes ing, and suddenly discovered that he de- thou hast got a hundred enemies. Whentested such dirty work. There was little ever they associate for mutual defense, or no society in which he could have cared depend upon it they will carry on the war to mix. The clergy of the province in such a manner, my dear friend, as to were notoriously underpaid and illiterate. make thee heartily sick of it, and of thy Twelve shillings a week was the ordinary life, too." This gloomy prediction was wages of curates, who in those days were signally verified. "Revenge, from some the companions of footmen and maid-serv-baneful corner," was never weary of levelants. Corporal Trim, when he went to see the poor lieutenant, found Mr. Yorick's curate" smoking a pipe by the kitchen fire." In Macklin's Man of the World, . which represents the manners of a somewhat later period, the lady's maid sets her cap at the chaplain. Nor were the rectors and vicars, in Yorkshire at any rate, more refined than their humbler brethren, although they were perhaps less needy. Hunting, swearing, and drinking were by no means uncommon in the reign of the primate whom Walpole calls, "The jolly old Archbishop" Blackburne. The fastidious "Yorick can not have found many friends among these rough neighbors, and it is not surprising that every ing tales of dishonor at him; "the fortunes of his house tottered; his character bled on every side." Sutton was within an easy distance of York, and a visit to the cathedral city was one of Sterne's favorite relaxations. There he first made his reputation as a wit and as a preacher; and there, in 1759 or thereabouts, he found in Miss Catherine de Fourmantelle, the object of a sentimental attachment. We may observe that both in this instance and in the many others which were to follow, we believe the attachments to have been in truth sentimental, and nothing more. Even when regarded in this light they are discreditable enough. An elderly ecclesias 1864.] 113 "The tic, who had a wife and daughter waiting have the greatest honors paid me, Mr. for him at home, sitting and sighing at and am engaged with ten noblemen and the feet now of this "flame," now of that, men of fashion to dine. Even all the presents a spectacle both ludicrous and Garrick pays me all and more honor than painful. Still we should remember that I could look for. Sterne was a sentimentalist by constitu- bishops have sent their compliments to tion, a man of exquisite sensibility, and me!" This rose-colored picture was not keenly alive to sympathy. "I myself," overdrawn. Impartial and hostile byhe says, "must ever have some Dulcinea standers confirm all its details. in my head: it harmonizes the soul." man Sterne," said Johnson, whom the Poor Mrs. Sterne, in nineteen years of un- affectation of the new-comer was certain Gray congenial companionship, had ceased to be to displease, "I have been told, has had his Dulcinea, and now Miss Fourmantelle engagements for three months." was to reign for a brief space in her stead. records that "one is invited to dinner Lord He was a frequent visitor at the house in where he dines a fortnight beforehand." York where his "dear, dear Kitty" lived, Reynolds painted his portrait. and when absent, used to write her rap- Fauconberg presented him to a living. No excuse can be made More substantial advancement-a deanturous letters. for the unbecoming language he employs. ery, or perhaps a bishopric-seemed to be "I love you to distraction, Kitty," "I"looming in the future." His expectawould give a guinea for a squeeze of your tions might have been realized had he hand;" with much more to the same been more careful in his conduct. As it He cared effect. Yet through all his letters to her was, his recklessness became an effectual there runs a vein of affection more paternal bar to further preferment. than lover-like, for which the wide differ- neither where he went nor what he did. ence in age may perhaps account. He He was often to be seen at Ranelagh, and calls her by the same nickname as he be- sometimes behind the scenes at Drury stowed on his daughter Lydia; he sends Lane. In truth his brilliant triumph comhis service to her mamma; he presents pletely turned his head. "Poor Yorick," her with a copy of one of his printed ser- he writes of himself in Tristram Shandy, An absurd falsehood was invented" carried not an ounce of ballast; after Sterne's death about his relations to Kitty." It was said that he courted her for five years, and then deserted her to marry Miss Lumley; that the forlorn girl went mad; that her truant sweetheart visited her in the mad-house to which she had been sent, and actually founded on the story of his own baseness and her misery the pathetic episode of This tale rests on "Maria of Moulines." the same "indubitable authority" as Walpole's slander. Kitty was in long clothes when Sterne married, and it is nearly twenty years later that we find him seeking in her society a selfish, but not guilty, consolation for the tedium of his home. mons. Meanwhile he was hard at work on the VOI LXIII.-NO. 1 the brisk gale of his spirits, as you will Tristram Shandy, although now read only by the curious, thoroughly deserved the astonishing success which it attained. It was, and indeed it still remains, a complete novelty in English literature. Continuous story there is none; the whole interest depends on the sayings and doings of the group of originals whom Sterne has created with such consummate art. They are all odd, yet all natural. Mr. Shandy, Uncle Toby, that sweetest, simplest, and most lovable of soldiers, Yorick, and Dr. Slop-we can see them all in the back parlor at Shandy Hall, solemnly smoking their pipes, talking delightful nonsense, and riding their hobby-horses at each 8 |