stituted, and named after him. A list of the members signed ‘James Spedding, secretary,’ and dated 8 Aug. 1838, is printed in Carlyle's ‘Life of Sterling’ (pt. ii. chap. vi.). The winter of 1838–9 was spent at Rome, a pilgrimage disparaged by Carlyle, but justly considered by Hare as momentous in its effect on Sterling's mental development. It was now hoped that he might be able to reside entirely in England, and with this view he took a house at Clifton, where he gained the friendship of Francis Newman, to whom he afterwards bequeathed the guardianship of his son. Here Sterling wrote his article on Carlyle in the ‘Westminster,’ which went far to complete his intellectual estrangement (there never was any other) from his old friends. This was further promoted by the assent which he found himself no longer able to refuse to some of the propositions of Strauss. He was beginning his tragedy of ‘Strafford,’ when, in November, a violent attack of hæmorrhage drove him to Falmouth, where he was introduced by his friend Calvert to the amiable and accomplished quaker family of Fox. Stuart Mill was also there, tending his dying brother Henry, and the social intercourse of the visitors and their Cornish entertainers is delightfully depicted in the diary of Caroline Fox [q. v.], which entirely confirms the testimony of Sterling's older friends to his amiability and charm.
The rest of Sterling's life was a hopeless struggle against consumption. On 18 April 1843 his mother and his wife both died within a few hours of each other, but he pursued his literary work in the face of every discouragement. ‘The Election: a Poem in seven books’ (London, 12mo), analysed and on the whole not dispraised by Carlyle, appeared in 1841; it is a pleasant exhibition of the humours of an election, somewhat in the manner of Crabbe, comic but not farcical, and linked to a pretty story. ‘Strafford: a Tragedy’ (London, 8vo), published in 1843, with a graceful dedication to Emerson, has much beautiful writing, but is undramatic. Of the eight cantos of ‘Richard Cœur de Lion,’ an ‘Orlandish or Odyssean serio-comic poem’ in octaves, after the pattern of Berni, only three have been published. They appeared in ‘Fraser’ after the author's death, and by their humour and narrative faculty deserve the praise Carlyle bestows upon them. The writer in the ‘Prospective Review’—doubtless Francis Newman—however, states that nearly all the part specially commended by Carlyle was afterwards cancelled and rewritten by Sterling, one proof among many that his judgment was not in such bondage to his friend's as has been stated. One of his last efforts was his review in the ‘Quarterly’ of Tennyson's ‘Poems’ (September 1842), in which, after an apology for the paucity of poetic power in England at the time, praise is lavished upon the homely and domestic at the expense of the more purely imaginative poems. He died on 18 Sept. 1844 at Ventnor, where he had dwelt since June 1843, and was interred in the old churchyard at Bonchurch. His writings were edited in 1848 by Julius Hare (‘Essays and Tales by John Sterling,’ 2 vols. London, 8vo), with a memoir in many respects most admirable, but its inadequacy, inevitable from the writer's point of view, stimulated Carlyle to the composition in 1851 of the biography which has made Sterling almost as widely and intimately known as Carlyle himself. The book is remarkable for its inversion of the usual proportion between biographer and hero. Johnson for once writes upon Boswell. Sterling is a remarkable instance of a man of letters of no ordinary talent and desert who nevertheless owes his reputation to a genius, not for literature, but for friendship.
A fine sculptured head, engraved by J. Brown is prefixed to Hare's issue of Sterling's ‘Essays and Tales,’ and a portrait of 1830, after Delacour, by the same engraver, to Carlyle's ‘Life’ (1851).
[Of all sources of information respecting Sterling, Carlyle's biography is infinitely the most important; next are to be named Archdeacon Hare's memoir, prefixed to Essays and Tales in 1848; the invaluable notices in Caroline Fox's diary, and the article in the Prospective Review, vol. viii. General Maurice's biography of his father and Froude's publications on Carlyle and Mrs. Carlyle also afford many interesting notices. Numerous letters are published in the Letters and Memorials of Archbishop Trench; and the correspondence between Sterling and Emerson appeared in the Atlantic Monthly for July 1897, and was republished in book form ‘with a sketch of Sterling's life by Edward Waldo Emerson,’ Boston, 1897. Twelve letters on religious subjects to Sterling's cousin, William Coningham, afterwards M.P. for Brighton, were printed in 1851.]
STERN, HENRY AARON (1820–1885), missionary and captive in Abyssinia, youngest son of Aaron Stern, a Jew, and Hannah his wife, was born at Unterreichenbach, near Gelnhausen in the Duchy of Hesse-Cassel in Germany, on 11 April 1820. He received his education at a school in Frankfort-on-the-Maine, to which place his parents had removed when he was young. His father destined him for the medical profession, but,
