1773, "had engage

the bench of bishops,* and told them Mr. Sterne, the author, was the English Rabelais. They had never heard of such a writer."+ "Tristram Shandy," writes Gray, "is an object of still greater admiration [than Frederick the Great's poetry], the man as well as the book. One is invited to dinner where he dines, a fortnight beforehand." "The man Sterne, I have been told," said Dr. Johnson in ments [in London] for three months." "East and West were moved alike," it was said. "All novel-readers," says the Crit-. ical Review, "from the stale maiden of quality to the snuff-taking chambermaid, devoured the first part of Tristram Shandy with a most voracious swallow." Two hundred copies were sold in two days at York, where it had for some time been rumored that Parson Yorick-by which name Sterne appears to have been already known-was about to publish an extraordinary book. Salads, race-horses, a game of cards, in which the knave of hearts when trumps carried all before him, were named from Tristram Shandy,- signs of popularity more decisive in the last century than in this. Numerous attacks upon the book appeared in verse and in prose, and imitations, some of them so cleverly done as to deceive professional reviewers, and to render it necessary for Dodsley to assure the public, in his advertisement of the third and fourth volumes, that they were by the author of the first and second.

During the eight remaining years of Sterne's life there were occasional lulls in the gale of popular favor, but it soon freshened again or blew from a new quarter. Yorick's sermons were advertised in Tristram Shandy, and bishops, as well as ladies and dukes, subscribed for both. "Almost all the nobility in England," writes Sterne in 1765, "honor me with their names; and 'tis thought it will be the largest and most splendid list which ever pranced before a book, since subscriptions came into fashion." Even Walpole could

* Sterne writes to Kitty: "Even all the bishops have sent their compliments to me."

† Warburton afterwards quarrelled with Sterne, and called him an "irrevocable scoundrel," as he called Smollett "a vagabond Scot who wrote nonsense"; Voltaire, "a scoundrel and a liar"; Akenside, a "wretch," and Priestley, "a wretched fellow"; as he said that he "never knew a wickeder heart than Hume's, or one more disposed to do mischief"; as he told the House of Lords that "all the devils in hell were ready to welcome Wilkes."

It

not resist the fascination of the Sentimental Journey. is "very pleasing," says he, "though too much dilated, and infinitely preferable to his tiresome Tristram Shandy, of which I could never get through three volumes. In these there is great good-nature and strokes of delicacy." The reviews, taking opposite sides, kept the shuttlecock of fame high in air, to borrow the figure with which Dr. Johnson used to console Goldsmith. "One half of the town," writes Sterne in 1761, "abuse my book as bitterly as the other half cry it up to the skies; the best is, they abuse it and buy it, and at such a rate that we are going on with a second edition as fast as possible." Amongst those who could see no merit in Sterne was Goldsmith, who had broken loose, two years previously, from the traces of bookseller Griffiths and wife, but was still sore from the harness, still "in a garret writing for bread, and expecting to be dunned for a milk-score," and not yet supported by Johnson's stalwart arm. It seems incredible that he, who was soon to create the Vicarage of Wakefield, should have found nothing in Shandy Hall to love or to laugh at; but it is to be feared that Goldsmith's point of view of the fashionable author was "obscured by his own unlucky fortunes." Thus Mr. Forster accounts for his "unjust strictures" upon Garrick, in the " Enquiry into the Present State of Polite Literature in Europe," published in the same year with his attack upon Sterne. Goldsmith changed his opinion of Garrick after his own fortunes brightened, and he became friends with the great actor; but he never changed his opinion of Tristram Shandy, concerning whose merits he had, according to Mr. Forster, a dispute over a dinner-table at Blackwall, which ended in a fight. He never made the personal acquaintance of Sterne, and called him a "very dull fellow" several years after his death, to which Johnson* responded with his emphatic "Why, no, sir."

The author was criticised as well as his book; but the most serious charges that found their way into print or into an

* Johnson, according to "The European Magazine," told a friend of Sterne that it required all his powers to neutralize the effect of Sterne's fascinating conversation upon Garrick and Reynolds.

6

anonymous letter, which was sent (in 1767) to the Archbishop of York, accused him of frequenting unclerical haunts,- Arthur's Ranelagh Gardens, and the theatre, charges such as are often made against country clergymen when off duty. Sterne was certainly fond of the flesh-pots of the city. "He degenerated in London," said Garrick, a friendly witness, "like an ill-transplanted shrub. The incense of the great spoiled his head, as their ragouts had done his stomach." "I rejoice," writes Sterne to Stevenson (August, 1761), “you are in London. Rest you there in peace. Here, 't is the Devil. You was a good prophet. I wish myself back again, as you told me I should. . . . . O Lord! now you are going to Ranelagh tonight, and I am sitting sorrowful as the prophet was when the voice cried out to him, and said, What doest thou here, Elijah?' 'T is well the spirit does not make the same at Coxwould; for, unless for the few sheep left me to take care of in this wilderness, I might as well, nay, better, be at Mecca." Excellent shepherd as the pastor of Sutton might have been before his crook had been straightened into a sceptre, and his government extended over the English-reading world, he could no longer content himself with the care of a few sheep in the wilderness. He had ceased to relish the simple fare which, flavored by the society of York and Crazy Castle, had sufficed for twenty years. His heart was no longer in parochial work, but was given to the new volumes which were announced for Christmas, when the author would again go up to London to superintend their publication, to reap another harvest of fame, and be again" engaged fourteen dinners deep." "Hard writing in the summer," writes he (February, 1762), “together with preaching, which I have not strength for, is fatal to me; but I cannot avoid the latter yet, and the former is too pleasurable to be given up." The struggle to serve two masters proved too much for his delicate constitution. A vessel broke in his lungs, and he went abroad for his health, spending a winter in Paris, and nearly two years in the South of France.

The doors of French society flew open for him, as for Garrick, Hume, Wilkes, and Walpole. Those were days of Anglomania. "They have adopted," writes Walpole, " our two dullest things, whisk and Richardson." Those were the days, NO. 220.

VOL. CVII.

2

too, of the salons, of real social intercourse amongst men and women, who agreed to differ, where they differed, with courtesy and mutual respect, and who looked in one another, not for an echo, but for a living spirit, serious or gay, as faculty and mood should determine. "Heureux temps!" exclaims Sainte-Beuve; "toute la vie alors était tournée à la sociabilité; tout était disposé pour le plus doux commerce de l'esprit et pour la meilleure conversation. Pas un jour de vacant, pas une heure. Si vous étiez homme de lettres et tant soit peu philosophe, voici l'emploi regulier que vous aviez à faire de votre semaine dimanche et jeudi dîner chez le baron d'Holbach; lundi et mercredi dîner chez Madame Geoffrin; mardi chez M. Helvétius; vendredi dîner chez Mme. Neckar." Some English critics have taken the Rev. Mr. Sterne to task for consenting to associate with "French infidels." But argument is not needed to convince anybody but John Bull, with a pen in his hand, and with Mrs. Grundy looking over his shoulder, of the absurdity of refusing an invitation to dinner because some of the guests are unbelievers. Sterne's journey through life resembled his journey through the South of France. "By stop ping and talking to every soul I met, who was not in a full trot, joining all parties before me, waiting for every soul behind, hailing all those who were coming through cross-roads, arresting all kinds of beggars, pilgrims, fiddlers, friars, not passing by a woman in a mulberry-tree without commending her legs, and tempting her into conversation with a pinch of snuff; in short, by seizing every handle, of what size or shape soever, which chance held out to me in this journey, I turned my plain into a city. I was always in company, and in great variety, too; and as my mule loved society as well as I did, and had some proposals always on his part to offer to every beast he met, I am confident we could have passed through Pall-Mall or St. James's Street for a month together with fewer adventures, and seen less of human nature."

Tired of living in France, and somewhat improved in health, Sterne returned to England in the spring of 1764. With the exception of some months spent in Italy, his remaining summers were passed in Yorkshire and his winters in London, where he died in lodgings, March 18, 1768. A hired attend

ant chafed his limbs "with one hand, and stole his sleevebuttons with the other"; a footman, sent by a friend to inquire after his health, found him breathing his last, and announced the fact at a dinner-party where Garrick and Hume were guests; his body was followed to the grave by a single mourning-coach containing two persons whose names are unknown; was exhumed as if to complete the resemblance to Hamlet's Yorick-by body-snatchers, and dissected by a professor at Cambridge, the features not being recognized until the knife had done its work. Garrick lamented in verse that no monument marked the place

"Where genius, wit, and humor sleep with Sterne";

and two Freemasons, years afterwards, put up a slab "near" the spot where his remains were supposed to lie, inscribing thereupon an incorrect date and singularly inappropriate words of eulogy.

She

A collection at the York races more than enabled Mrs. Sterne to pay her husband's debts, and the sale of "the sweepings of his study " added a little to her scanty means. died in France, where her daughter, who had married a Frenchman named Medalle or Medaille, was guillotined (if an unauthenticated rumor may be credited) during the Revolution. In 1775 the "Letters of Yorick to Eliza" were published by the vain woman, to whom they were addressed, and shortly afterwards appeared those of Sterne's letters, which were in Mrs. Medalle's possession, her mother having directed her to print them in case others from the same hand should be printed. These last were "wretchedly put together," complains Mr. Fitzgerald, "and with a shameful carelessness, which has fatally injured Sterne's fame and memory. . . . . No writer has ever been so cruelly dealt with, and there are but few writers who could stand the test of having every line in their letters printed without alteration."

Whether this last statement be well founded or not, the practice of suppressing or altering a dead man's letters before their publication is a pernicious one. Lydia Sterne should be thanked for printing those of her father as she found them, Shandyism and all. Had she "cut and trimmed at all points in the style of your female epistolizers," letters which had