lamb’ (cf. Stillington Enclosure Act, 6 Geo. III).
While in the country Sterne sought relaxation within doors, ‘according as the fly stung,’ in ‘books, painting, and fiddling.’ He describes his proficiency on the bass-viol in ‘Tristram Shandy,’ and used familiarly the technical terms of harmony and counterpoint (cf. Tristram, i. 59, ii. 231; Sentimental Journey, pp. 36, 99, 104). As an amateur artist ‘he chiefly copied portraits; he had a good idea of drawing, but not the least of mixing his colours’ (Croft). Some designs by him were engraved in Woodhull's poems (1772). At the end of the eighteenth century many of his pictures were in private hands at York. James Atkinson, the author of ‘Medical Bibliography,’ showed to Thomas Frognall Dibdin [q. v.], when on a visit to York in 1820, a coarse painting in oils in which Sterne figured as a mountebank at a fair, and a friend, Thomas Brydges, as a quack doctor. The latter figure was by Sterne and the former by Brydges (see print in Dibdin's Bibliographical Tour, 1838, i. 212). An offensive caricature-sketch of Mrs. Sterne, signed ‘Pigrich fecit,’ and engraved in M. Paul Stapfer's ‘Life,’ is also assigned to Sterne's pencil. But it was on books and society that he chiefly depended to relieve the monotony of rural existence. His reading while at Sutton was multifarious and incessant. He rarely rode about the parish without a book in his hand. Rabelais and Cervantes he was constantly quoting, and he pored over romances in French and English, medical and military treatises, and collections of facetiæ. He was a book-collector, but the purchase of works in his favourite lines of study was often beyond his means. His friend, John Hall-Stevenson, on marrying an heiress, had, however, settled down at Skelton Hall in Cleveland, and acquired a large and curious library, which was freely at Sterne's disposal.
Congenial society was not wholly out of Sterne's reach at Sutton. If the farmers pitied his levity as proof of a cracked brain, Stephen Croft, the squire of Stillington, delighted in Sterne's whimsical vein of humour, and showed him ‘every kindness.’ With Philip Harland, the squire of Sutton, he was never ‘on a friendly footing,’ although he made various efforts to ingratiate himself with him. But at Newburgh Priory, near Coxwold, within nine or ten miles of Sutton, lived Lord Fauconberg, the lord of the manor of Sutton, who extended a profuse hospitality to Sterne and his wife. At York they regularly frequented concerts and balls. Sterne spent many an afternoon in jesting to an admiring audience at the coffee-house which served him as a club, or in visiting the booksellers. A week or two was occasionally spent at Scarborough or London. Outside his immediate neighbourhood he found his most boisterous recreation in sojourns with Hall-Stevenson at Skelton. Hall-Stevenson gathered there at certain seasons of the year a crew of kindred spirits drawn from the clergy and squirearchy of the county, whom he christened the club of ‘Demoniacks.’ It is said that Sterne was never formally enrolled a member, but he often joined in the orgies of drink and coarse merriment with which the ‘Demoniacks’ celebrated their meetings.
Throughout his career Sterne's health was a frequent source of anxiety. His lungs were always weak, and the wet climate and low-lying situation of Sutton encouraged a tendency to asthma. His love of social festivities was not salutary, but after a midnight debauch he usually dosed himself religiously with Bishop Berkeley's tar-water. He had his share of domestic worries, and, although they were largely of his own making, he was not on that account the less oppressed by them. The commonly accepted notion that Sterne drew his wife's portrait in Mrs. Shandy—both were named Elizabeth—has little to support it. Mrs. Sterne had none of Mrs. Shandy's placidity, taciturnity, or stupidity. She was of excitable and bustling temperament, and, while frugal in trifles, lacked capacity for orderly or economical housekeeping. But her husband was never blind to her intellectual ability. Even when smarting under her voluble rebukes and abusing her ill-humour to his friends, he admitted that ‘in point of understanding and finished address’ few of her sex rivalled her (Addit. MS. 34527, f. 50). She is said to have aided him in composing his sermons (Croft). Nor, in an irresponsible fashion, was he indifferent to her happiness. He claimed to be ‘easy’ with her, and he convinced himself that if he left her at liberty to go her own way, he might fairly go his undisturbed. But he never viewed his marital obligations seriously, and his immoral and self-indulgent temperament rendered sustained felicity impossible. He used no figurative language in his often repeated confession that it was his unhappy lot to be ‘always miserably in love with some one’ outside the domestic circle. There were, however, seasons of calm in the conjugal atmosphere. As parents both husband and wife appear in a favourable light. Their first child—a daughter—who was born on 1 Oct. 1745, was christened Lydia, after Mrs. Sterne's
