There he formed a friendship, which lasted his life, with Hall Stevenson, the infamous author of Crazy Tales, and other doggrel ribaldry. The alliance seems to have been cemented by degrading sympathies, and chiefly by a propensity to laugh at-topics which would have raised a blush with saner minds. A worthy companion would have done his atmost to persuade the author of Tristram Shandy to strain out the impurities from his rich flavoured humour, but Stevenson incited him to stir up the lees.

On leaving Cambridge in 1736, Sterne entered into orders, and his uncle Jaques Sterne, a pluralist with two prebendaries and two rectories, got him presented to the living of Sutton in Yorkshire. At York he fell in love with his future wife, who thought their joint-stocks insufficient for their comfort, and declined-a present engagement. In the meanwhile she went to reside with a sister in Staffordshire. Four of the letters he addressed to her in her absence have been preserved, and, though they are artificial, rhapsodical compositions, they are strongly marked with the peculiarities of his maturer style. The lady returned to York, and nearly died of a consumption. My dear Lawrey,' she said to him one evening when he was sitting by her side, with an almost broken heart, I can never be yours, for I verily believe I have not long to live; but I have left you every shilling of my fortune. On her recovery she consented to make two lovers unhappy, and they were married in 1741. Whatever else may have tried their patience, they were not exposed to the misery which Mrs. Sterne apprehended of straitened circumstances. A friend of her own performed a promise he had made her of presenting her husband, if she married a Yorkshire clergyman, to the living of Stillington, which was luckily in the neighbourhood of Sterne's previous preferment, and his pluralist uncle about the same time had interest to get him appointed a prebendary of York. "I thank God,' he wrote in 1760, though I don't abound, that' I have enough for a clean shirt every day and a mutton chop; and my contentment with this has thus far, and I hope ever will, put me above stooping an inch for it.'- Sterne was prodigal of money, and it was no contemptible income which purchased him shirts, chops, and contentmentisdonT .emon 07 1 ! 1787 9HQ From the love epistles of his youth up to the eve of the publi cation of Tristram Shandya period of twenty years not a single fragment of Sterne's correspondence appears to have been kept by any one of his connexions, which is much the same as to say that none of them suspected his genius, or anticipated that he would ever make a noise in the world. Throughout this long period he resided at Sutton, where his amusements, he tells us, Mo 45 29/PI89 941ʼlik bus

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eldig stil eid boter doidw qidzbnoist & bontot od 91T were books, painting, fiddling, and shootingut Hist duties/we may assume, without much want of charity, were confined to reading prayers and preaching on Sundays.id bas 291disqarza At the ripe age of forty-five he commenced Tristram Shandy! He had previously printed a couple of sermonsone preached for a charity-school in 1747, the other at York assizes in 17501 and he is supposed to have written politics in the Whigh interest at the instigation of his uncle. They quarrelled, however, at last, because, as Sterne asserts in his Memoirs, he refused to pen party paragraphs in the newspapers, an employment he thought beneath him. An earlier account, which he gives in a letter while Tristram was in progress, presents his conduct in a different light. He there states that he was tired of employing his brains for other people's advantage; of a foolish sacrifice, he added, which I have made for some years to an ungrateful person." Hence it would, appear that he exerted his pen for years in hist uncle's service, and only desisted because he had failed to reap the advantages he expected. Whatever was the nature of these! occasional productions, they were not such as Sterne was amu bitious to own after his reputation was established Like many other authors he was long in discovering the real bent of his genius, and detected it suddenly at last. Even then he was! ignorant of the full compass of his powers. He had produced at the outset a single tender scene, but, in spite of the pathos of the death of Yorick, it was upon his humour alone that he laid any stress, and it was not until he had got into the third instalment of his work that he learnt that he was possessed of a second string to his bow, arulzdro { & hairy m sde fi bur 2nd In January, 1760, the first two volumes of Tristram Shandy were published, and had a signal success. At present," wrote! Horace Walpole in April, nothing is talked of, nothing admired, but what I cannot help calling a very insipid and tedious performance; it is a kind of novel, called The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy," the great humour of which consists in the whole narration always going backward. It makes one smile two or three times at the beginning, but in recompense makes one yawn for two hours. The characters are tolerably kept up, but the humour is for ever attempted and missed.' The fastidious critic who thought Tristram Shandy rapid, could discover a vast deal of original wit in the flat and feeble verses of Stevenson, and protested that he should not have been so sick of authors if they had all possessed the parts and good sense of this licentious rhymester. It was generally the geese that were Wald pole's swans, Love is not more blind to defects than envy is to'l merit, and all the geniuses of the age, who did not belong to his

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set, were regularly enrolled in the Dunciad of Strawberry Hill.* Great, indeed, must have been the triumph which was acknow ledged by this drawing-room Diogenes to be complete. The town,' says Gray in a letter of the same month, are reading the King of Prussia's poetry. Tristram Shandy is still a greater object of admiration; the man as well as the book. One is invited to dinner, where he dines, a fortnight beforehand.' According to the testimony of Walpole the effect of so much popularity and attention was to turn quite topsy-turvy a head which was a little turned before.

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Sterne said that he wrote not to be fed but to be famous.' His gains nevertheless were unusually large. He received 7007. for a second edition of his first two diminutive volumes, and for the copyright of two more which were not yet begun. Just then Lord Falconberg presented him with the living of Coxwold, and it was inferred that it was a testimony of the patron's estimation of Tristram Shandy. The imputation of bestowing so incongruous a reward was undeserved, for Sterne states in a letter that the preferment was a return for some service he had rendered. Another report which gained general belief was that Warburton, in the fervour of his admiration, had sent him a purse full of gold. Shortly afterwards it was asserted that Sterne had formed a design of satirising the author of the Divine Legation' under the guise of tutor to Tristram, and that the Bishop in alarm had paid the money to be spared the ridicule. The story in all its parts was a fiction, and Sterne wrote a letter to Garrick, which was evidently intended to be shown to Warburton, in which he expressed with affected extravagance great concern at the calumny, and great admiration of the Bishop. The Bishop replied that he was pleased to find that he had no reason to change his opinion of so original a writer, that he prided himself on having warmly recommended Tristram Shandy to all the best company in town, that he had been accused in a grave assembly as a par ticular patroniser of the work, and had pleaded guilty to the charge, and that if his enemies had been joined by the author he believed the latter would have been grieved to find himself associated with a crew of the most egregious blockheads that ever abused the blessing of pen and ink. Walpole relates that Warburton especially eulogised the book to his episcopal brethren, and told them that Sterne was the English Rabelais. The Bishops, adds Horace, had never heard of such a writer. It is an obvious retort to this contemptuous pleasantry that it is just as well to be

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*This portion of Walpole's character is well described in a chapter entitled Walpole's World of Letters in Mr. Charles Knight's entertaining little work, Once upon a Time,' which is full of various knowledge, agreeably told.

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ignorant of works of genius as to read them, as Walpole did Tristram Shandy, and be insensible to their merits.

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Warburton soon saw cause to withdraw his countenance. In a reputed letter of Sterne, but which is of doubtful authenticity, it is related that he remarked to a brother clergyman, who had read Tristram Shandy in manuscript, that he meant in correcting it to consider the colour of his cloth, and that the clergyman rejoined that with such an idea in his head he would render the book not worth a groat. Whether the conversation passed or not, Sterne acted on the opinion ascribed to his friend. Too much of his wit is the phosphoric light emitted by corruption. Amidst the applause which greeted his volumes an outery was raised in consequence against the indecorum of parts, while the author affirmed in his defence that the very passages excepted against were those best relished by sound critics, which showed him, he said, the folly of mutilating his book to please prudish individuals. No sooner had he made, through Garrick, the acquaintance of Warburton, than the bishop backed up the representations of the objectors, and repeatedly warned him against any renewed violations of decency and good manners.' Sterne professed to thank him for the advice, though he had probably no intention of profiting by it. His life in London was an unceasing round of levity and dissipation, and Warburton wrote to Garrick in June, I heard enough of his con duct there since I left to make me think he would soon lose the fruits of all the advantage he had gained by a successful effort, and would disable me from appearing as his friend and wellwisher. A few weeks before, two, wicked and nonsensical poems, which Gray called absolute madness, and of which the first is entitled To My Cousin Shandy on his coming to Town,' issued from the shop of the publisher of Tristram, They were notoriously written by Hall Stevenson, the bosom friend of Sterne, who had as notoriously approved them. With an effrontery, it is to be hoped unparalleled in the history of English, divinity, he now followed up his volumes of Tris, tram with two volumes of Sermons, and presented a copy to Warburton... The bishop seized the opportunity to send him a final letter of remonstrance, full of the most cutting and artful sarcasm. Sterne had complained in the note which accompanied the Sermons that the scribblers used him ill. The bishop agrees that they are the pest of the public, and as an instance of their profligacy quotes their conduct with respect to the poems of Stevenson.

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Whoever was the author, he appears to be a monster of impiety and lewdness. Yet such is the malignity of the scribblers, some have prioner

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given them to your friend Hall, and others, which is still more imposs sible, to yourself, though the first Ode has the insolence to place you both in a mean and ridiculous light. But this might arise from a tale equally groundless and malignant, that you had shown them to your acquaintances in MS. before they were given to the their being printed by Dodsley the fiven to the public. Nor was means of discrediting the calumny! to yusluqoq borsquins sild 7 22 21

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Not less admirable is his reproof of Sterne, under the veil of a panegyric upon Garrick, for his spendthrift habits, his presuming on his present popularity, and his companionship with dissolute men of rank. 297192 godine odt to quam fro7 git jiti bapse i But of all these things I dare say Mr. Garrick, whose prudence is equal to his honesty or his talents, has remonstrated to you with the freedom of a friend. He knows the inconstancy of what is called publie towards all, even the best-intentioned, of those who contribute to its pleasure or amusement. He, as every man of honour and discretion would, availed himself of the public favour to regulate the taste, and in his proper station to reform the manners of the fashionable world, while by a well-judged economy, he has provided against the tempta tions of a mean and servile dependency on the follies and vices of the greatog deort & out of mos gilt otai trou si 29261 917 ee# I have done my best,' said the bishopton forwarding a copy of the letter to Garrick, to prevent his playing the fool in a worse sense than I have the charity to think he intends.oł esteemed him as a man of genius, and am desirous he would enable me to esteem him as a clergyman. He proceeded on the contrary from bad to worse, and eighteen months afterwards the arrogant bishop, whose invectives had often no better warrant than his passions, pronounced him with reason an irrecoverable scoundrel.' While still paying court to him Sterne announced his intention of showing the world in the progresstof his story 5 the honour and respect in which the held so great a man.” Henceforth he abandoned the effort to conciliate him, and though he commemorated him in the final volume of Tristram Shandy, it was in a manner that, considering the protest of the bishop against the licentiousness of the work, seems rather intended to be offensive than flattering. offiWhat,' he says, has this book done more than the Legation of Moses, or the Tale of a Tub, that it may not swim down the gutter of/Time along with them?" The gutter of Time is a suitable expression for the viler parts of Swift and Sterne, but Warburton hoped to sail upon the stream. The Assize Sermon of 1750, which was printed separately at the time, and found, as the author tells us, neither purchasers nor readers,' was much admired when he inserted it in the second volume of Tristram, where, besides its intrinsic merits, it was largely set off by the interlocutory comments of the Shandys,

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