His father died not long afterwards, at Gibraltar, from the effect of a wound which he had received in a duel; and it is indicative of the code of honor in that day, that the duel was about a goose at the mess-table!  What little Lawrence learned in his brief military experience was put to good use afterwards in his army reminiscences and portraitures in Tristram Shandy.  No doubt My Uncle Toby and Corporal Trim are sketches from his early recollections.  Aided by his mother’s relations, he studied at Cambridge, and afterwards, without an inward call, but in accordance with the custom of the day, he entered into holy orders, and was presented to a living, of which he stood very much in need.

HIS SERMONS.—­With no spirit for parochial work, it must be said that he published very forcible and devout sermons, and set before his people and the English world a pious standard of life, by which, however, he did not choose to measure his own:  he preached, but did not practise.  In a letter to Mr. Foley, he says:  “I have made a good campaign in the field of the literati:  ... two volumes of sermons which I shall print very soon will bring me a considerable sum....  ’Tis but a crown for sixteen sermons—­dog cheap; but I am in quest of honor, not money.”

These discourses abound in excellent instruction and in pithy expressions; but it is painful to see how often his pointed rebukes are undesignedly aimed at his own conduct.  In one of them he says:  “When such a man tells you that a thing goes against his conscience, always believe he means exactly the same thing as when he tells you it goes against his stomach—­a present want of appetite being generally the true cause of both.”  In his discourse on The Forgiveness of Injuries, we have the following striking sentiment:  “The brave only know how to forgive:  it is the most refined and generous pitch of virtue human nature can arrive at.  Cowards have done good and kind actions; cowards have even fought, nay, sometimes even conquered; but a coward never forgave.”  All readers of Tristram Shandy will recall his sermon on the text, “For we trust we have a good conscience,” so affecting to Corporal Trim and so overwhelming to Dr. Slop.

But if his sermons are so pious and good, we look in vain into his entertaining Letters for a corresponding piety in his life.  They are witty, jolly, occasionally licentious.  They touch and adorn every topic except religion; and so it may be feared that all his religion was written, printed, bound, and sold by subscription, in those famous sermons, sixteen for a crown—­“dog cheap!”

TRISTRAM SHANDY.—­In 1759 appeared the first part of Tristram Shandy—­a strange, desultory work, in which many of the curious bits of philosophy are taken from Montaigne, Burton, Rabelais, and others; but which has, besides, great originality in the handling and in the portraiture of characters.  Much of what Sterne borrowed from these writers passed for his own in that day, when there were comparatively few readers of the authors mentioned.  As to the charge of plagiarism, we may say that Sterne’s hero is like the Gargantua of Rabelais in many particulars; but he is a man instead of a monster; while the chapter on Hobby-Horses is a reproduction, in a new form of crystallization, of Gargantua’s wooden horses.