an original humor, concocted of a half maudlin mirth, a half maudlin pathos and acute sensibility to both. He was author also of a journal and of many letters addressed to various ladies not his wife, steeped in the perfume of sentiment and enlivened by delicate intimations that if God should open the gate (and take Mrs. Sterne to himself), he, Parson Yorick, had already in mind the boudoir which he would fit up in his parsonage for her successor.
I don't know just how to go to work to quarrel with people who hold that this sort of thing is infinitely more detestable than the "healthy animality" of Tom Jones. Think it out for yourself, set down your reasons, and balance them.
Judged as a "man of God" or as a "Christian citizen," Laurence Sterne was a ridiculous fellow. It was part of his own absurdity that his great-grandfather had been an Archbishop of York. His father, & poor ensign in the army, was run through in a duel over a goose. His mother—a "fruitful vine" and little else—produced seven children, four of whom died in infancy, and the three others, including Laurence, were, as he remarked of the brood, of delicate frame, "not made to last long." By the kindness of a cousin he was sent to Jesus College, Cambridge, and there he formed a lifelong cronyship with John Hall-Stevenson, apparently originating in their common fondness for idling under a walnut tree, reading Rabelais and swapping bawdy stories. In his senior year he had a hemorrhage of the lungs and got well into debt. And so, by a natural rather than logical process of reasoning, he accepted the advice of his uncle, a canon of York, and entered the Church, which in the mid-eighteenth century, was notoriously a refuge for
