English Lands Letters and Kings Part 14

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_Laurence Sterne._

[Sidenote: A sentimentalist.]

Just two years before Chatterton died in Holborn, another noted literary character--Laurence Sterne[13]--died in Old Bond Street, at what were fashionable lodgings then, and what is now a fashionable tailor's shop; died there almost alone; for he was not a man who wins such friendships as hold through all weathers. A well known friend of the sick man--Mr. Crawford--was giving a dinner that day a few doors off; and Garrick was a guest at his table; so was David Hume, the historian; half through the dinner, the host told his footman to go over and ask after the sick man; and this is the report the footman gave to outsiders: "I went to the gentleman's lodgings, and the mistress opened the door. Says I--'How is Mr. Sterne to-day?' She told me to go up to the nurse; so I went, and he was just a-dying; I waited a while; but in {212} five minutes he said, 'Now it's come.'

Then he put up his hand, as if to stop a blow, and died in a minute.

The gentlemen were all very sorry." And all the sorrow anywhere--save in the heart of his poor daughter Lydia--was, I suspect, of the same stamp. His wife certainly would get on very well without him: she had for a good many years already.

[Sidenote: Laurence Sterne.]

You know the name of Mr. Sterne, I daresay, a great deal better than his works; and it is well enough that you should. A good many fragments drift about in books of miscellany which you are very likely to know and to admire; for some of them are surely of most exquisite quality. Take for instance that talk of Corporal Trim with Uncle Toby about the poor lieutenant, and of his ways and times of saying his prayers:--

"When the Lieutenant had taken his gla.s.s of sack and toast he felt himself a little revived, and sent down into the kitchen to let me know that in about ten minutes he would be glad if I would step upstairs.

'I believe,' said the landlord, 'he is going to say his prayers, for there was a book laid on the chair by the bedside, and as I shut the door I saw him take up a cushion.'

"'I thought,' said the curate, 'that you gentlemen of the army, Mr.

Trim, never said your prayers at all."

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"'A soldier, an' please your Reverence,' said I, 'prays as often as a parson; and when he is fighting for his king and for his own life, and for his honor too, he has the most reason to pray to G.o.d of any one in the whole world.'

"''Twas _well_ said of thee, Trim!' said my Uncle Toby.

"'But when a soldier,' said I, 'an' please your Reverence, has been standing for twelve hours together in the trenches, up to his knees in cold water, or engaged for months together in long and dangerous marches--detached here--countermanded there; benumbed in his joints;--perhaps without straw in his tent to kneel on, he must say his prayers how and when he can.' 'I believe', said I, for I was piqued, quoth the Corporal, 'for the reputation of the army--I believe, an't please your Reverence--that when a soldier gets time to pray he prays as heartily as a Parson--though not with all his fuss and hypocrisy."

"'Thou should'st not have said _that_, Trim,' said my uncle Toby; 'for G.o.d only knows who is a hypocrite and who is not. At the great and general review of us all, Corporal, at the day of judgment (and not till then) it will be seen who have done their duties in this world and who have not, and we shall be advanced, Trim, accordingly.'

"'I hope we shall,' said Trim.

"'It is the Scripture,' said my uncle Toby, 'and I will show it thee in the morning.'"

Now this beautiful naturalness, this delightful, artistic abstention from all rant or extravagance, makes us wish overmuch that the whole guileless character of my uncle Toby had been as {214} charmingly and as decently set in the text; but unfortunately, there is a continuous embroidery of it all with ribald blotches, and far-fetched foulness of speech; nor is his coa.r.s.eness--like that of Fielding--half excused by the coa.r.s.eness of the age; it is inherent and vital: Fielding, indeed, is vulgar and coa.r.s.e, and obstreperous--with the scent of bad spirits and bad company on him;[14] but this other, though a parson, and perfumed, and wearing may-be, satin small-clothes, has vile and grovelling tastes that overflow in double-meanings of lewdness: even Goldsmith, who was not squeamish, calls him "the blackguard parson."

It is not probable that Goldsmith ever encountered him; nor did Dr.

Johnson. Beauclerk, Garrick, and Walpole would have been more in his line; for he loved the glint, and the capital letters, and the showy tag-rags of fashion. And on the strength of his literary reputation, which had sudden and brilliant burst, and of his good family--since a not far-off ancestor had been Archbishop of York--he {215} conquered and enjoyed, for his little day, all that London fashion had to offer.

I suspect he took a solid comfort in dying in so respectable a quarter as Old Bond Street. He was buried over Bayswater way, not far from the Marble Arch, in the graveyard then pertaining to St. George's (Hanover Square) church. And there was a story, supported by a good deal of circ.u.mstantial evidence, that his body was spirited away and recognized a few days afterward by a medical student among the spoils of a dissecting-room. This story would horrify more than it did, had it attached to an author whose humor had kindled love;--as if this man did somehow deserve a more effective "cutting-up" after death than he ever received before it.

The Rev. Laurence Sterne had--I should have told you--a church-living down in Yorkshire, to which was afterward added, by adroit diplomacy of his friends, an official position in connection with York Cathedral. I do not think the people of his parish missed him much when he was away; and I am very sure they missed him a good deal, whenever he was--nominally--there: painting, {216} fiddling, shooting, and dining-out, took very much of his parochial time; and _Tristram Shandy_ and its success, literary and pecuniary, introduced him to a career in London, and in Paris afterward--for he was always an immense favorite with the French (instance Tony Johannot's ill.u.s.trations)--to which he yielded himself with a graceful acquiescence that, I am afraid, put his parishioners more out of mind than the fiddling and the shooting had done.

I believe that he loved his daughter Lydia with an honest love; with respect to his wife, one cannot be so sure; some of the most tender letters he left, are addressed to a Mrs. Draper, who was his "dear Eliza"--through a great many quires of paper. He was a Cambridge man and well taught;--of abundant reading, which he made to serve his turn in various ways, and conspicuously by his stealings; he stole from Rabelais; he stole from Shakespeare; he stole from Fuller;[15] he stole {217} from Burton's _Anatomy of Melancholy_; not a stealing of ideas only, but of words and sentences and half-pages together, without a sign of obligation; and yet he did so wrap about these thefts with the strings and lappets of his own abounding humor and drollery, as to give to the whole--thieving and Shandyism combined--a stamp of individuality. Ten to one that these old authors who had suffered the pilfering, would have lost cognizance of their expressions, in the new surroundings of the Yorkshire parson; and joined in the common grin of applause with which the world welcomed and forgave them.

But I linger longer on this name than the man deserves. Pathos there is in his stories, to be sure, that makes you wilt in spite of yourself; but a mile away from those Bond Street chambers where this pale, thin, silk-stockinged clergyman lives, and has his dinner invitations ten deep, is that old scar-faced Dr. Johnson about whom the beggars crowd; who can put no such pathos into his {218} c.u.mbrous sentences indeed; but the presence of that old, blind, petulant woman in his house--who had waited on his lost wife--is itself a bit of pathos that I think will outlast the story of _Maria_--and that should do so forty times over. I wish I could blot out the silk stockings, the rustling ca.s.sock, the simper, the pestilent love letters, the pretences, the artificialities of the man; they are oppressive; they rob his words of weight. Wit--to be sure, and humor--truculent, sparkling--more than enough; for the rest, there is hypocrisy, pretension--beastliness--untruth--all pinned under a satinquilted cloak of vague and unreal piety.

[1] Charles James Fox, b. 1749; d. 1806. Elected to club membership in 1774. His great great-grandmother was the d.u.c.h.ess of Portsmouth; and the Lord Holland so well known for his entertainments at Holland House, early in this century, was a nephew of Charles James Fox. Life by George Otto Trevelyan.

[2] Instance, speech on French affairs and the question of making peace with Napoleon--just then elected First Consul. Date of February, 1800.

[3] William Pitt, b. 1759; d. 1806. Younger son of the Earl of Chatham. He entered Pembroke Hall, Cambridge, 1773.

[4] Wraxall in his Memoirs (p. 344) cites special instance in the speech, where he deprecates new alliance between North and Fox--alluding to personal results to himself:--

"Fortuna saevo laeta negotio et----"

(leaving out the _mea virtute_) then pounding on the table, and adding with oratorical vim

"----probamque Pauperiem sine dole quaero."

Here (says Wraxall, who was an auditor) he cast his eyes down--pa.s.sing his handkerchief across his lips--to recover breath only. Certainly he was grandly clear of anything like avarice; no great statesman of England (unless Gladstone) ever thought so little of money.

[5] See Francis Horner article in _Edinburgh Review_, October, 1843.

[6] Richard Brinsley Sheridan, b. 1751; d. 1816. Moore's Biography, interesting but not authoritative. Mrs. Oliphant's sketch in the Morley _Lives_, is one of that lady's most charming books.

[7] It was on February 7, 1787, that Sheridan made his first notable speech on the Begum charge in the House of Commons; the second, in the impeachment trial in Westminster Hall, in June, 1788. Others followed of less interest toward the close of the trial in 1794. The best reports are of the speeches made in 1788, published at the instigation of Sir Cornewall Lewis, in 1859. See _Wilkes, Sheridan, and Fox_, by W. Fraser Rae. 1874.

[8] A fearful account of Sheridan's condition in his last days is to be found in the _Croker Papers_ (1884), chap. x. It is embodied in what purports to be a literal transcript of a conversational narrative by George IV., J. Wilson Croker being interlocutor and listener.

[9] [OE]lia (Humphry Ward's version).

[10] Thomas Chatterton, b. 1752; d. 1770. Tyrwhitt's edition, "Poems supposed to have been written by Thomas Rowley," etc., dates from 1777.

[11] Foster's Goldsmith, vol. ii., p. 248.

[12] Dr. Skeat--as a philologist--is naturally severe upon a thief of archaisms, whose robberies and arrogance did puzzle for a while even the archaeologists.

_Per contra_--there is a disposition among many recent critics to rank him high among the pioneers of the "New Romantic" movement in England; _Vid._ Rodin Noel--_Essays on the Poets_; also, _Athenaeum_, No. 3073.

[13] Sterne: b. 1713; d. 1768. _Life_, by H. D. Traill; a fuller one by Percy Fitzgerald.

[14] Notwithstanding there was almost always evidence of gentlemanly instincts at bottom; and under the scoriae of a dissipated life and habits the sparkling of a soul of honor.

[15] In a sermon read by Corporal Trim (p. 209, _Tristram Shandy_, vol.

i., London, 1790) are a good many strong points taken, without acknowledgment, from one of Richard Bentley's sermons, preached at Cambridge against Popery, on November 5th--shortly after the first attempt of "the Pretender." This strange similitude is not noticed in Dr. Ferrier's summing up of Sterne's sinning in this line.

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CHAPTER VI.

We had sight of George III. in our last chapter, and we shall catch sight of him again from time to time; for he was a persistent lingerer, and a most obstinate liver. We had glimpses, too, of that cheery, sunny-faced, eloquent, ill-balanced man, Charles James Fox, whom we ought to remember as a true friend to America, in those critical days when taxation was swelling into tyranny. William Pitt, whom we also saw, and to whom we would have been delighted to listen, would never have won greatly upon American sympathies; too cold, too austere, too cla.s.sic, too fine. Sheridan, on the other hand, would, and did, conquer hearts everywhere; but unfortunately spending his forces in great paroxysms of effort; one while the greatest comedist, and again the greatest orator, always the greatest spendthrift; {220} and anon the greatest debtor, who only pays his debts by dying.