The Pointer 285 
regard to any one of the many related incidents of his career. He was a 
boy at Eton when Lawrence Sterne was connected with York Cathedral, 
and it was a forgotten appointment of the Dean of York to meet Judge 
Topham that was the means of Sterne first entering upon his literary life, 
the Dean getting him to write a pamphlet entitled ““The Adventure of a 
Watch-coat,” Judge Topham being the watchman of the tale, and the 
future major the boy for which he was supposed to want to make a pair 
of small clothes out of part of the parish watch-coat. Sterne was in York- 
shire from 1740 to 1760, and we are not far wrong in giving the date of 
about 1740 for Major Topham’s birth. He was eleven years at Eton and 
four at Cambridge, went abroad for eighteen months, and then travelled 
through Scotland, describing the latter trip in his “Letters from Edin- 
burgh.” He entered the regiment of First Life Guards, was soon appointed 
adjutant and so much did he improve the morale of the regiment that he 
was caricatured in the prints of the period as “The Tip-Top Adjutant.” 
His hobby, however, was literary; he was one of the most popular writers 
of epilogues for the plays of the day and numbered among his intimates 
quite a different class of men from what was usually the custom with wealthy 
young English officers of crack cavalry regiments. 
Being a gentleman of education, of travel, and accustomed to demand 
exactness in his subordinates, we may claim with some degree of confidence 
that he must have had reasons for specifying the pointer as the dog used 
to find the game for coursing. So far as his reference to the time of King 
John, he could not have had any more knowledge than we possess now, 
but he could learn from first-hand knowledge what was the custom about 
1700 and have accurate information regarding 1650. 
Speaking personally on this subject of recollection, we are about the 
age Major Topham must have been when he wrote, exactly one hundred 
years ago, and probably our earliest memory, outside of family occurrences, 
is the death of the Duke of Wellington, November, 1852, and seeing the 
pictures of his funeral in the shop windows in Edinburgh. Then came 
the war in the Crimea, followed by the Indian mutiny, all before the end 
of 1858, and of the main incidents of both wars our recollection is very 
clear. As to what we were told by eye-witnesses, those of our own family 
related incidents of the Bonaparte invasion scares, of the French prisoners, 
the unknown author of “Waverley,” the Battle of Waterloo and the rejoic- 
ings at the downfall of “Boney.” That period goes back to 1810. Beyond 
