he was inducted a few days afterwards.  Other preferments followed, to be noted hereafter; and it must be admitted that until the quarrel occurred about the “party paragraphs” the Archdeacon did his duty by his nephew after the peculiar fashion of that time.  When that quarrel came, however, it seems to have snapped more ties than one, for in the Memoir Sterne speaks of his youngest sister Catherine as “still living, but most unhappily estranged from me by my uncle’s wickedness and her own folly.”  Of his elder sister Mary, who was born at Lille a year before himself, he records that “she married one Weemans in Dublin, who used her most unmercifully, spent his substance, became a bankrupt, and left my poor sister to shift for herself, which she was able to do but for a few months, for she went to a friend’s house in the country and died of a broken heart.”  Truly an unlucky family.[1] Only three to survive the hardships among which the years of their infancy were passed, and this to be the history of two out of the three survivors!

[Footnote 1:  The mother, Mrs. Sterne, makes her appearance once more for a moment in or about the year 1758.  Horace Walpole, and after him Byron, accused Sterne of having “preferred whining over a dead ass to relieving a living mother,” and the former went so far as to declare “on indubitable authority” that Mrs. Sterne, “who kept a school (in Ireland), having run in debt on account of an extravagant daughter, would have rotted in a gaol if the parents of her scholars had not raised a subscription for her.”  Even “the indubitable authority,” however, does not positively assert—­whatever may be meant to be insinuated—­that Sterne himself did nothing to assist his mother, and Mr. Fitzgerald justly points out that to pay the whole debts of a bankrupt school might well have been beyond a Yorkshire clergyman’s means.  Anyhow there is evidence that Sterne at a later date than this was actively concerning himself about his mother’s interests.  She afterwards came to York, whither he went to meet her; and he then writes to a friend:  “I trust my poor mother’s affair is by this time ended to our comfort and hers.”]

CHAPTER III.

LIFE AT SUTTON.—­MARRIAGE.—­THE PARISH PRIEST.

(1738-1759.)

Great writers who spring late and suddenly from obscurity into fame and yet die early, must always form more or less perplexing subjects of literary biography.  The processes of their intellectual and artistic growth lie hidden in nameless years; their genius is not revealed to the world until it has reached its full maturity, and many aspects of it, which, perhaps, would have easily explained themselves if the gradual development had gone on before men’s eyes, remain often unexplained to the last.  By few, if any, of the more celebrated English men of letters is this observation so forcibly illustrated as it is in the