were stored. He was carried away by the tumult of his nerves, and it became a paradoxical habit with him to show himself exactly the opposite of what he was expected to be. You had to unscrew him for the aroma to escape. His unseemly, passionate, pathetic life burned itself away at the age of fiftyfour, only the last eight of which had been concerned with literature. Sterne's influence on succeeding fiction has been durable but interrupted. Ever and anon his peculiar caprices, his selected elements, attract the imitation of some more or less analogous spirit. The extreme beauty of his writing has affected almost all who desire to use English prose as though it were an instrument not less delicate than English verse. Nor does the fact that a

surprising number of his "best passages" were stolen by Sterne from older writers militate against his fame, because he always makes some little adaptation, some concession to harmony, which stamps him a master, although unquestionably a deliberate plagiarist. This fantastic sentimentalist and disingenuous idealist comes close, however, to Richardson in one faculty, the value which he extracts from the juxtaposition of a variety of trifling details artfully selected so as to awaken the sensibility of ordinary minds.

Laurence Sterne (1713-1768) was the second of the many children of Ensign. Roger Sterne of Chudleigh's Foot. He was born on the 24th of November 1713 at Clonmel, where the regiment, just returned from Dunkirk, was disbanded. In less than a year the household was uprooted again, and for the next ten years was on the incessant move from one Irish barracks to another. In 1723 Sterne was sent to school at Halifax, under the protection of some Yorkshire relatives; he stayed there eight years. In the meantime, his father, having been run through the body at the rock of Gibraltar in a duel about a goose, had retired to Jamaica "with an impaired

constitution," and had died there in 1731. Laurence Sterne, still under the care of his Yorkshire cousins, was sent to Jesus College, Cambridge. Here he stayed until he took his B.A., and then in 1736 went to York to live with his uncle, Dr. Jacques Sterne, the archdeacon. He is understood to have "employed his brains" for this "ungrateful person," who nevertheless obtained for him, when he took priest's orders in 1738, the living of Sutton-in-the-Forest and two small prebends. In 1741 Sterne married Miss Elizabeth Lumley, who presently brought him another living, the Vicarage of Stillington. He was therefore not ill provided for, and he lived at Sutton for nearly twenty years, making "books, painting, fiddling, and shooting his chief amusements." He also, having become estranged from his wife, indulged in a long chain of intertwisted flirtations, some of which were of a singularly indiscreet character. The early career of Sterne, however, remains very obscure, and was doubtless very uneventful until he reached the age of forty-six, when he was led by we know not what fortunate impulse to write

Tristram Shandy; the two first volumes of this book were printed in York in 1759, and Sterne took them up to London to be published early in 1760. But he found that the fame of them had preceded him, and before he had been a day in London the lodgings he had taken in Pall Mall were besieged by fashionable callers. Sterne instantly became the lion of the season. The cause of this surprising reception was the enthusiasm of Garrick, who had been overwhelmed by the humour of Tristram Shandy, and had "promised" the author of it at dinner to numbers of great people. Sterne presently speaks of himself as moving in the suite of Lord Rockingham, and of his rooms as "filling every hour with great people of the first rank, who strive who shall most honour me." There seems to have been a widespread fear that this diabolically daring satirist would hold his contemporaries up to ridicule in ensuing volumes of his work, and prominent persons took grotesque means of preventing this in their individual cases. Bishop Warburton is said to have gone so far as to send Sterne a purse of gold, although he had never set eyes on him; he presently described him to a friend as an "irrecoverable scoundrel." Meanwhile Sterne was continuing the publication of Tristram Shandy, and beginning to issue the Sermons of Mr. Yorick, which ultimately extended to seven volumes (1760-1769). He did not stay in London too long; after three months of lionising he withdrew to Coxwold, 66 a sweet retirement " which one of his new fashionable friends had given him in 1760, and devoted himself to composition. But his fame and his fortune were not able to conceal even from his light-hearted nature the fact that his health was now seriously impaired. After another brilliant season in London, Sterne was