a daughter was born, and named Lydia after Mrs.
Sterne's favourite sister. This daughter was
baptised on the day of her birth, and buried on
the day following.

Next year the prebendal stall and small living
of Stillington, with forty-eight pounds a year,
fell vacant. Stillington is but two miles from
Sutton, and Sterne had the preferment from
Lord Fairfax, in whose gift it was, and with
whose family the Sternes had a marriage
connexion. Mr. Fitzgerald believes that Lord
Fairfax, who had estates in Kent, was "the
friend in the south," who is said to have
promised Miss Lumley, before her marriage,
that if she became the wife of a Yorkshire
clergyman, he should have, when it fell vacant,
a Yorkshire living that was in his gift.

At this time Sterne's college friend, Stevenson
—Yorick's Eugenius—was lord of Skelton
Castle, near Guisborough, and this place
became, under its Shandean name of "Crazy
Castle," the Vicar of Button's second home.
Hence Stevenson, who was one of the
shameless fraternity of the "Twelve Monks of
Medmenham," issued his indecent "Crazy Tales."
In the library at Skelton the vicar—who was
known among the jovial souls of Crazy Castle
as "The Blackbird"—could pasture at will on
French Anas and Facetious Histories. Here
he fastened upon Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy,
great furnisher of second-hand erudition,
not to a Sterne only, but to a hundred men who
have aimed, as Sterne did not, at a cheaply-
earned repute for scholarship. Here were all the
other books that gave its flavour of curious
out-of-the-way reading to Tristram Shandy. It
was even here, too, that Sterne read Don
Quixote and the Essays of Montaigne, and had
a host enthusiastic as himself for Rabelais.

At this time also there practised at York a
Dr. Burton, Fellow of the Royal and
Antiquarian Societies, who is said to survive yet as
the Dr. Slop of Tristram Shandy. Dr. Burton,
who had studied abroad and been a pupil of
Boerhaave, was an accoucheur and an
antiquary, and in each character he wrote a book,
his unpublished antiquarian work being a folio
called the Yorkshire Monasticon. He died at
the age of seventy-five, in the year seventeen
'seventy-two. In the small political world of York,
Dr. Burton was at war with the ultra-loyal Whigs,
to whose party Laurence Sterne and his uncle
belonged. During the troubles of 'forty-five, Dr.
Jaques Sterne, as a local magistrate, contrived
excuse for clapping Dr. Burton into prison,
sending him to London, and causing him to be kept
nearly a year in custody. For it had been said
that the Highlanders—in the days before
Culloden—were come as far as Kendal, and Dr.
Burton, who had estates with some hundred and
twenty pounds of loose money lying by the
Yorkshire road, got leave to go out and secure his
property. He went, was captured, set free, and
returned to York, when Dr. Sterne most
zealously improved the occasion to the hurt of
his political antagonist. For this he was afterwards
reprimanded by Lord Carteret. But it was
with Jaques Sterne that the Duke of Cumberland,
when on his way through York after the
battle of Culloden, chose to take up his lodging.

Against Dr. Burton and others, Dr. Sterne,
the uncle, fought by newspaper paragraphs
that he expected Laurence to be ready at all
times to take his share in writing. Uncle and
nephew quarrelled over this work, and to this
cause alone the Vicar of Sutton ascribed a feud
which arose and lasted to the uncle's death in
seventeen 'fifty-nine, a few months before the
publication of the first volume of Tristram
Shandy. "He became," says Laurence Sterne,
"my bitterest enemy." Clearly, however, that
is not the whole truth, for Laurence Sterne
speaks of the younger of his surviving sisters,
Catherine—who was eleven years younger than
himself—as being "most unhappily estranged
from me by my uncle's wickedness and her own
folly." The only light we get upon these family
matters is from Horace Walpole, whose words
Mr. Fitzgerald does what he fairly can to
soften: "I know, from indubitable authority,
that his mother, who kept a school, having run
into debt on account of an extravagant daughter,
would have rotted in a jail, if the parents of her
scholars had not raised a subscription for her.
Her own son had too much sentiment to have
any feeling. A dead ass was more important to
him than a living mother."

Presently, about two years after the birth
and death of his first child, Laurence Sterne
became the father of another Lydia—the
daughter who survived him—born and baptised
on the first of December, seventeen 'forty-
seven. It was the year in which also, for the
first time, a work of his appeared in print—a
charity sermon—with Elijah and the Widow of
Zarephath for its subject. This was followed
by the assize sermon, preached in York
Cathedral, which, seven or eight years later,
Sterne gave to Corporal Trim, "who held
the sermon loosely, not carelessly, in his left
hand, raised something above his stomach,
and detached a little from his breast," for
delivery to the critical ears of Dr. Slop, Mr.
Shandy, and Uncle Toby. "Can the reader
believe that this sermon of Yorick's was
preached at an assize, in the cathedral, before
a thousand witnesses ready to give oath of it,
by a certain prebendary of that church?"

"Setting aside," says Mr. Fitzgerald, "any
exemplary observance of the special duties of
his profession, which, in his age, were not
popularly expected, the whole current of Mr.
Sterne's life and manners was tinged by
sentiment. Here is his amatory profession of faith:
"I must ever have some Dulcinea in my head;
it harmonises the soul.'" So, at the age of
six-and-forty, with a wife and daughter at his
Sutton vicarage, Mr. Sterne found his soul
harmonised at York by Miss Catherine de
Fourmantelle—a young French lady, of an
exiled Huguenot family. Her elder sister had
conformed to the religious tests which enabled
her to enjoy the family possessions; while with
her mother at York lived the Catherine to whom