been written "with the careless irregularity of an easy heart," they would have been worthless. All the world would have known that the Rev. Mr. Sterne, decorous and dignified, moderate in language, careful not to offend, was not "the man Sterne" who wrote Tristram Shandy; nor Parson Yorick, who said "what came uppermost." Had they been tampered with, however slightly, no trustworthy conclusions regarding the writer's character could have been drawn from them. It is the fact that they are printed as written which gives them a biographical value. They would be still more useful had dates been supplied, and full names given instead of initials.

In these letters the character of Sterne as husband and as father is to be sought. All that he writes to his daughter, or about her, is admirable. "In his last letter," says Thackeray, who has judged him with extreme severity, "there is one sign of grace, the real affection with which he entreats a friend to be a guardian to his daughter Lydia. All his letters to her are artless, kind, affectionate, and not sentimental; as a hundred pages in his writings are beautiful and full, not of surprising humor merely, but of genuine love and kindness.” His conjugal relations require closer scrutiny.

"At York," says Sterne's Autobiography, "I became acquainted with your mother, and courted her for two years. She owned she liked me; but thought herself not rich enough, or me too poor, to be joined together. She went to her sister's in S, and I wrote to her often. I believe that she was partly determined to have me, but would not say so. At her return she fell into a consumption; and one evening that I was sitting by her with an almost broken heart to see her so ill, she said, 'My dear Laurey, I never can be yours, for I verily believe I have not long to live! but I have left you every shilling of my fortune!' Upon that she showed me her will. This generosity overpowered me. It pleased God that she recovered, and I married her in the year 1741." He "wrote to her often"; but only four of the letters to Miss L (Miss Elizabeth Lumley, daughter of the Rev. Mr. Lumley, Rector of Bedal) are preserved. They are what one would expect from the pen of an intelligent young man of uncommon sensibility. The writer proposes

to "let the human tempest and hurricane rage at a distance"; to shelter her whom he calls "my L, like a polyanthus under a friendly wall, from the biting winds"; to "banish the gloomy family of care and distrust"; to sing in duet with "my L-" "choral songs of gratitude, and rejoice to the end of our pilgrimage." He "languishes,” and takes to his bed, "worn out with fevers of all kinds, but most by that fever of the heart" with which he has been "wasting these two years." He is "rent to pieces" whenever he sees "the good Miss S," a "mutual friend"; 66 bursts into tears a dozen different times in an hour, and in such affectionate gusts of passion that she was constrained to leave the room, and sympathize in her dressing-room." He has hired the lodgings just vacated by "my L-"; but can eat nothing. "One solitary plate," he cries, "one knife, one fork, one glass! I gave a thousand pensive, penetrating looks at the chair thou hast so often graced in those quiet and sentimental repasts, then laid down my knife and fork, and took out my handkerchief and wept like a child. I do so this very moment, my L-; for as I take up my pen, my poor pulse quickens, my pale face glows, and tears are trickling down upon the paper, as I trace the word L" He who finds in these rhapsodies, which are subdued by more quiet passages, evidence that Sterne was an insincere sentimentalist should glance at his own youthful effusions.

No one now living knows how long the honeymoon shone upon the young couple, nor under what planetary influences they passed after its setting. None of their letters during the first eighteen years of their married life are preserved; no visitor at the Sutton parsonage has spoken; and no parish gossip about the husband or the wife survives.

But in December, 1767, twenty-six years after the wedding, Sterne writes to his Excellency Sir G. M.: "The deuce take all sentiments! I wish there was not one in the world! My wife is come to pay me a sentimental visit as far as from Avignon; and the politesse arising from such a proof of her urbanity has robbed me of a month's writing, or I had been in town now." And in the same month he writes from a York coffee-house an epistle in dog-Latin, of which this is an ex

tract: "Nescio quid est materia cum me, sed sum fatigatus & ægrotus de mea uxore plus quam unquam, sum possessus cum diabolo qui pellet me in urbem." Fatigatus & ægrotus, sick and tired of that polyanthus which Laurey and "the good Miss S," sympathizing in her dressing-room," — had watered with so many tears! "Listen, I pray you," writes Sterne in a sermon, "to the stories of the disappointed in marriage; collect all their complaints; hear their mutual reproaches! Upon what fatal hinge do the greatest part of them turn? 'They were mistaken in the person.' Some disguise, either of body or mind, is seen through in the first domestic scuffle; some fair ornament perhaps the very one that won the heart, the ornament of a meek and quiet spirit falls off. It is not the Rachel for whom I have served; why hast thou then beguiled me?" Did Mr. Sterne, when penning this paragraph, have the Rachel in mind for whom he served more than two years? Had she proved a Leah? Seen through the medium of her husband's letters, not to insist upon her supposed resemblance to Mrs. Shandy, nor upon the disagreeable expression of her portraits, she appears an uninteresting woman, devoid of sympathy with a man who lived by sympathy, incapable of appreciating his best qualities, incapable of influencing a heart peculiarly susceptible to feminine influence, curious, jealous, suspicious, narrow, prosaic, provincial, without tact, without enterprise, without decision. Her coquetry during the courtship was business-like; before she could leave Yorkshire to rejoin her husband in Paris, she required suggestions from him on all subjects, including her own dresses, coffee-pots, cookery-books, and Scotch snuff, in which she, like Mrs. Shandy, indulged; in the South of France she pursued Mr. Sterne everywhere, according to M. Tollot, a French friend; wished to have a hand in everything that he did, and insisted on knowing the contents of all his letters from England. After his return to Yorkshire, she remained on the Continent in order to save money, but spent more than the amount she had fixed for herself. Her reception of her husband at Avignon, two years later, he calls "cordial, &c."; but she declined his invitation to return to England, although "melancholy" on account of his ill-health. She kept Lydia by her

side, regardless of the idolizing father's claims, and remained with her in the house he had taken for them in York while he was dying in London. Seven years before Sterne wrote that he was 66 more sick and tired of her than ever," he had written that she declared herself, "in pure, sober good sense, built on sound experience," happier without him. She manifested at no time impatience to see him, or anxiety on his account, but voluntarily made the rash experiment of leaving him for three consecutive years.

That such a woman should bore Mr. Sterne was natural; that he should mention the fact to an old friend was natural; and that he should seek elsewhere the sympathy denied him at his own fireside was natural also. The " quiet and sentimental repasts" at "my L-'s" lodgings were succeeded - how long after the marriage is unknown, but certainly within less than a score of years-by other repasts; the "friendly wall" sheltered other flowers as sweet as the Lumley polyanthus. Sterne's letters to Kitty, Miss Catherine Fourmantelle of York; to Lady P., wife of that Earl of Percy who led a British column to Lexington on the 19th of April, 1775; to "my dearest Eliza," Mrs. Elizabeth, wife of Daniel Draper, Esq., chief of the factory at Surat, -leave no doubt on this point. Mr. Sterne's relations with these ladies were neither paternal nor clerical; his professions of attachment to them are inexcusably ardent; his allusion, whether in jest or in earnest, to the possible removal of the “ one obstacle" to his happiness with Kitty,* and his plain proposal to Eliza eight years subsequently—and when she was at death's door herself - to marry her after the decease of her husband, whom she was about to rejoin in India, and of his own wife, who "cannot live long," - but who, however, out

lived him, deserve severe censure. But did he pass from

censurable words to criminal actions? Was he unfaithful to the letter, as he was to the spirit of his marriage vows? The warmth of his epistles usually increases or decreases in the ratio of the distance between him and his correspondent.

"These separa

* In another letter, published by Mr. Fitzgerald, Sterne says: tions, my dear Kitty, however grievous to us both, must be for the present. God will open a Dore when we shall some time be more together."

He can hardly find time to see Kitty in London, although a few days before her arrival he had written to her at York : "I am so miserable to be separated from my dear, dear Kitty." "Would to God I was at your elbow, and would give a guinea for a squeeze of your hand; I send my soul perpetually out to see what you are doing, — wish I could send my body with it." Eliza, as Jules Janin has remarked, occupies his mind much more when absent than when by his side. "Il était un peu dans les goûts de cet amant, qui quittait sa maitresse pour lui écrire et pour penser plus librement à elle." He did not even go down from London to Deal to see Eliza off, though the ship lay in the roads several days. Amongst his expressions of attachment to her, and his minute suggestions for her comfort during the voyage, occurs the expression, repeated in different forms, "REVERENCE THYSELF." The confidants of this "friendship," through whose hands several of his letters passed, were Mr. and Mrs. James, the excellent persons to whose kindness his daughter was bequeathed.

Sterne's weakness for women increased with his years. "God bless them all!" says he in the Sentimental Journey, "there is not a man on the earth who loves them so much as I do. After all the foibles I have seen, and all the satires I have read against them, still I love them; being firmly persuaded that a man who has not a sort of an affection for the whole sex is incapable of ever loving a single one as he ought." "I must always have a Dulcinea in my head," he writes to a friend; "it harmonizes the soul." The Dulcinea most successful in harmonizing this susceptible soul was a woman in distress. His attachment to Eliza was largely attributable to her ill-health and her low spirits. It was sweet sorrow for him to be "rent to pieces at the house of "the good Miss S"; to fancy himself sitting with the lady of the Calais remise, handkerchief in hand, all night in tears; and to stand with Maria, like the "poor hairy fool" whom Jaques saw, "On the extremest verge of the swift brook, Augmenting it with tears."

"At six I awoke," says he to Eliza, "with the bosom of my shirt steeped in tears." "Praised be God," he writes to a gentleman friend, "for my sensibility! Though it has