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,

1

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 utmost 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. of busi

1

On leaving Cambridge in 1736, Sterne entered into orders, and his uncle Jaques Sterne, a pluralists with two prebendaries and two rectories, got him presented to the living of Sutton in York shire. 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 be 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, to 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 contentment.

211

1

From the love epistles of his youth up to the eve of the publication of Tristram Shandy a 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,

were

wete books, painting, fiddling, and shooting. His duties we may assume, without much want of charity; were confined to reading prayers and preaching on Sundays.nl dl vunda 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 1750 and he is supposed to have written polities in the Whig 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; 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 his 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 am 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.ad

*་་་་་་ aམ

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, bat 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 vapid, 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 Walpole's swans. Love is not more blind to defects than envy is to merit, and all the geniuses of the age, who did not belong to his

set,