Mr. Sterne wrote fervently as "Dear, dear
Kitty," "I love you to distraction, Kitty, and
will love you to eternity!" The first of the
notes to her, with a present of Calcavella, is
signed "Yorick;" and it was about this time
that Tristram Shandy was begun. Of his
wife he wrote to his Kitty, "I have but one
obstacle to my happiness, and what that is you
know as well as I;" "God will open a door
when we shall some time be much more
together." He sent sweetmeats to his Kitty,
and he sent her his charity sermon, because he
found in her something of the tender and
compassionate nature of Elijah.

A humorous and metaphorical account, by
Sterne, of a cathedral squabble over "a good
warm watch-coat"—some small question of
preferment to a patent place, in which a Dr.
Topham, described by the name of "Trim,"
a name presently put to better use, was the
greedy mover of discord—was on the point
of publication, but laid by unpublished at
the close of the dispute; while Tristram
Shandy, begun early in the year seventeen
'fifty-nine, was being rapidly produced. His
"vile asthma" was still troubling him, and he
had been trying Bishop Berkeley's tar-water.
It became known in his own part of the world
that he was "busy writing an extraordinary
book." "Till you read my Tristram," he
wrote to Mrs. Ferguson, "do not, like some
people, condemn it. Laugh, I am sure you
will, at some passages."

The first instalment of three volumes—at the
end of which the hero was not even born—being
finished, the book was offered for fifty pounds
to Dodsley, who declined it. Sterne, when he
could not sell, offered to pay the cost of print
and paper in a "lean" experimental edition,
cutting away provincial allusions, and so recasting
the work as to make the satire general. In
this state it first came out at York. Its price
was only five shillings, Mr. Dodsley's name in
the London advertisement followed that of the
local publisher, and it formed two miniature
pocket volumes, which came out at the end
of December, in the year seventeen 'fifty-nine.
It was advertised in London only once or twice,
but Miss Fourmantelle wrote to commend it
strongly to the attention of an influential London
friend, and a draft of it found among her papers
in Sterne's handwriting shows that the author
of the lady's letter was the gentleman himself,
who was described therein as having "a great
character in these parts as a man of learning
and wit." A few copies had been sent to town
in January to meet the demand at Mr. Dodsley's,
but by the middle of the year a new edition
was required, and the Yorkshire parson, who
had himself followed his book to London, where
he arrived early in the spring, became the lion
of the season, Garrick being the first and the
most cordial of those who took him by the hand.
Rapturous accounts of the honours paid him by
"your great people of the first rank," including
"all the bishops," were sent by Sterne to his
dear, dear Kitty. His wife, who saved all his
letters, had not a line to show that he made her
a sharer in his happiness. Mr. Fitzgerald more
than half believes those who attributed to
Warburton at this time the bribe of a purse of gold
to Sterne, to save himself from being lampooned.
To this story there is no reference in Mr.
Watson's recent life of Warburton, that gives,
as Mr. Fitzgerald also does, the text of letters
of friendly admonition written by Warburton
to Sterne at this period. But we must not
discuss. We can here give only the dry
skeleton of that strange piece of life which Mr.
Fitzgerald clothes with its own flesh, and into which
he sets the warm blood flowing. From Lord
Falconberg, Sterne got, at any rate, a perpetual
curacy at Coxwould, not twenty miles from
Sutton, that fell vacant in this first season of his
lion-hood. It was worth a hundred a year, and
it was this which made him say in exultation
to his Kitty, "I have but one obstacle to my
happiness now left, and what that is you know
as well as I."

Not many weeks later, dear Kitty arrived in
London. Sterne saw her on a Sunday afternoon,
wrote hurriedly in the middle of the week
that "every minute of his time was so pre-
engaged, &c."—might meet her on Friday—"I
beg, dear girl, you will believe I do not spend
an hour where I wish, for I wish to be with you
always; but fate orders my steps, God knows
how, for the present." Mr. Fitzgerald knows
and tells us now. Fate took him "to balls,
parties, visits, dinners, a fortnight deep, Ranelagh,
and the Drury-lane coulisses. This is our
last glimpse of dear Kitty. The car of Mr.
Sterne swept by her."

For Mr. Sterne was in a flurry of heart
content. There was a new game of cards called
Tristram Shandy. There was a Shandy Salad.
There was a "Tristram Shandy " horse in the
Irish steeple-chases, and in Dublin cheap pirated
copies of the book were sold for sixpence.

The second edition of Tristram, with a frontispiece
by Hogarth and a dedication to Pitt, was
followed almost immediately by two volumes of
Sermons of Mr. Yorick, adorned with a print from
Sir Thomas Lawrance's portrait of Sterne; Dodsley
paying for the new edition and the sermons
four hundred and eighty pounds. Goldsmith
and Johnson shrunk instinctively from the new
star of the dinner-tables; but Gray found him
to be a good man in his sermons. As for
Johnson, "A lady asked the Doctor how he
liked Yorick's Sermons. In his rough blunt
way he answered her, 'I know nothing about
them, madam!' Later on, the subject was
renewed, and he then censured them with much
severity. The lady, who had not forgotten his
plain reply, sharply retorted: 'I understood,
sir, you had not read them.' 'No, madam,'
roared the sage, 'I did read them, but it was in
a stage-coach; I should not even have deigned
to look at them had I been at large.'" Garrick,
who had been the first to welcome Sterne to
town, did not retain a good opinion of him, but
said "he degenerated in London like an ill
transplanted shrub. The incense of the great