STKKN 



STERNE 



vain hope of staving off his inevitable doom. In 

 Knghtndhe lived in turn at Clifton, Kalnioiitli, and 

 Ventnor, and here he died, 18lh Septeinlwr 1843. 



Julius Hare edited Storting's Emaiii and Talti (2 vols. 

 1848) with a memoir, wliich seemed to Carlyle so incom- 

 plete, u dwelling too exclusively on his ecclesiastical 

 side a brief accident in his career that he himself deter- 

 mined to write his life, to give a faithful picture of his 

 friend. The result was a masterpiece of biography which 

 will keep the name of John Sterling from ever being 

 forgotten. 



Stern, DANIEL. See AQOULT. 



Members, town of Austria, 12 miles by 

 rail N. of Olniutz, with cotton and linen manu- 

 factured. Pop. (1890) 15,395. 



Sterne, LAURENCE, one of the greatest of Eng- 

 lish humoratR, was born at Clonmel in Ireland, on 

 the 24th of December 1713. His father, Roger 

 Sterne, at that time an ensign in the 34th or Chud- 

 leigh's regiment of foot, was the grandson of an 

 archbishop of York who had played an active part 

 as a Cavalier ecclesiastic in the troubles of the 

 previous century. Of his mother we know only 

 that she was the daughter of a ' noted sutler ' of 

 the name of Nuttle, and the widow of a soldier, 

 probably a comrade of her second husband. To 

 Roger Sterne she bore seven children, of whom, 

 however, but three survived the period of infancy. 

 The family, continually recruited by births and 

 reduced by deaths, accompanied their parents in 

 the ceaseless wanderings necessitated by the father's 

 military duties ; and it was not till Laurence was 

 eleven years old that it was found possible, or at 

 least convenient, to give him any systematic edu- 

 cation. He was then sent to Halifax grammar- 

 school, where he remained for over seven years, and 

 whence he was by the assistance of his kinsman, 

 Simon Sterne of Elvington, sent to Jesus College, 

 Cambridge. Here he obtained a sizarship, and in 

 1736, after taking his B.A. degree, he quitted 

 Cambridge for York, where his father's brother, Dr 

 Jacques Sterne, held, together with a goodly num- 

 ber of ecclesiastical offices, the archdeaconry of the 

 diocese. Through this uncle's influence Laurence, 

 who had been ordained three months after taking 

 his degree, and who took priest's orders in 1738, 

 was presented to the living of Sutton-in-the- Forest, 

 and then or immediately afterwards appointed a 

 prel>endary of York. 



Three years later, in 1741, he married Miss Eliza- 

 beth Lumley, by whom he bad one daughter, Lydia, 

 born in 174~>, to whom IK; was all his life tenderly 

 attached, and who published an edition of his Letters 

 after bin death. Of hit* life in hi* Yorkshire parish 

 during the next nineteen years little or nothing 

 i- known, except that at some time, probably 

 near the end of this period, a quarrel took place 

 between him and his uncle, because ( to quote the 

 former's account of it) 'I would not write party- 

 paragraphs in the newspapers ; though be was a 

 party man I was not, ana detested such dirty work. 

 thinking it beneath me.' In 1759 be wrote the first 

 two volumes of the work \vliieli was destined to 

 make him famous, The Life nnd Opinions of Tris- 

 tram S/ui/ii/i/. mid which, after being first published 

 at York in the autumn of that year by a local 

 bookseller, was brought to London by its author 

 in 1700, and there |>ulilishcd anew. Its success 

 was immediate and signal, ami Sterne at once 

 became a ' lion ' of the fashionable world. The 

 first edition of the book was exhausted in three 

 months. In April Dodsley brought out a second, 

 and this was shortly afterwards followed somewhat 

 incongruously bv a volume of the Hrrmon* of the 

 ' Rev. Mr Yorick.' By the end of the year vols. iii. 

 and iv. of Trixtrnm Sfcatdj/, for which Doddajp bad 

 given 380 in advance, were already in the press, 



and in January 1761 they made their api>earanoe to 

 receive from tfie town as heartily amused a welcome 

 as their two predecessors. 



Meanwhile Sterne, who had in the previous year 

 been presented by one of his new friends of rank. 

 Lord Falconberg, to the living of Coxwold, had 

 transferred his residence to the parsonage of that 

 place, which was thenceforth to he his home ; and 

 throughout the greater part of 1761 he was l>u-\ 

 there upon the fifth and sixth volumes of hi* 

 novel. They were published in December, and 

 three weeks later Sterne, whose health, never robust, 

 was already beginning to fail, left England for 

 France, where he was received with high honours 

 by the literary society of the time, and where 

 he prolonged his stay until the summer of 1764. 

 In January 1765 vols. vii. and viii. of Tristram 

 Shandy were given to the world, ami met with a 

 more favourable reception than the two preceding 

 volumes, the public interest in which had slightly 

 flagged. They were followed by the publication 

 of a second -cries of Sermons of a far more unclerioal 

 character than their predecessors, and, indeed, 

 abounding in quaint touches of their author's 

 peculiar humour. The autumn and winter of 1765 

 were spent in a tour through France and Italy, 

 which supplied the material of the work to which, 

 in the former of those countries, he still owes his 

 fame. The summer of the following year saw him 

 at work again at Coxwold on the ninth and last 

 volume of Tristram Shandy, which appeared in 

 January 1767. The rest of that year was occupied 

 in the preparation of the first two volumes of The 

 Sentimental Journey throiujli Fraiif? mnl Italy, and 

 in the last days of February 1768 they were pub- 

 lished. Their "author's health, however, was now 

 completely wrecked ; the pulmonary malady from 

 which he had long suffered advanced with rapid 

 strides ; and, attacked by pleurisy in the early 

 days of March, he breathed his last in his London 

 lodgings on the 18th of that month. His funeral, 

 which was attended by only two mourners, one of 

 whom was his publisher, took place four days all IT, 

 at the Bayswater burying-ground of the parish of St. 

 George's, Hanover Square. A grim legend later 

 obtained currency to the effect that two days after 

 their interment Sterne's remains were stolen by 

 body-snatchers and disposed of to the professor of 

 Anatomy at Cambridge, bv whom, a friend of the 

 deceased, they were actually recognised on the dis- 

 secting-table. There seems, however, to lie no other 

 warrant for this ghastly story than is to lie found in 

 the fact, attested by the records of contemporary 

 journals, that similar desecrations of this particular 

 graveyard had about that time been common. The 

 tnith, however, as to the exact spot of Sterne's sepul- 

 ture cannot now be ascertained. A stone erected 

 many years later with an inscription recording 

 (inaccurately) the date of his death, declares his 

 body to be lying ' near to this place,' but that is all. 

 Hi- position in English literature is almost in 

 like case; for there is much the same difficulty in 

 assigning their true place to his literary remain-. 

 It is, on the one hand, undeniable that there have 

 been few writers of any age or country who have 

 displayed such mastery over every form of humour, 

 from the lowest to the highest, as .-i- cviri-ed 

 from his very first entrance into the field of author- 

 ship by this Yorkshire clergyman who never pub- 

 lished a line till he was close upon fifty, and who 

 had somehow qualified himself tor immediate and 

 enthusiastic reception in the world of letters hy a 

 twcnu \ears" Bojourn in a conn try parsonage. Yet, 

 on the "other hand, the impeifections of his art, 

 and that in point not only of execution, but also 

 of artistic conception and spirit, it is impossible to 

 overlook. The wild eccentricity of his manner and 

 arrangement, though it is of course a deliberate 



