younger sons, a hospital for lame ducks, a club for bibulous old scholars and antiquarians.
Sterne married early, and, in a country parsonage about eight miles from York, slumped down into the indolent bosom of the Church, precisely as scores of other impecunious, ungodly, place-hunting young men were doing—the feebler ones starving, the stronger reaching out fat, greedy hands crammed full of benefices, to see if they could not, by skilfully crooking a little finger, rake in one more. Sterne vegetated, almost unheard of, in his parish till he was forty-six years old.
What was he doing all that time? Well, he preached twice on Sundays when he had no curate, and when he had a sermon ready, and when he felt like it, though it is related that, crossing the fields one afternoon to deliver his second discourse, he started up a covey of partridges, and, returning to the parsonage for his gun, left his congregation gaping for the sacred word in vain. And then, to eke out his slender clerical living, he dabbled in dairy farming and agriculture, till he found that turnips at £200 the load were too dear. In early years he wrote some political paragraphs for the uncle who had beneficed him, but he thought that dirty work, and he was more congenially occupied with hunting and with fiddling on the bass viol and with painting, mainly copying portraits. Besides, he frequented York society, and was a member of the carousing, free-thinking Demoniacks Club, a society of squires and parsons who drank and jested at Crazy Castle, the tumble-down seat of his crony, John Hall-Stevenson, where there was, furthermore, a library very rich in Curiosa, tempting to a parson whom the Lord had not anointed.
