been accorded a place in the university curriculum, awoke in him enthusiasm (cf. Tristram, i. 11, 86, 194, 203–4). Locke's perspicuity exerted a permanent influence on his mind, and evoked his intolerance of mock-learning and scholastic pedantry.
Sterne was of too volatile a temperament to make many friends at college, but at the close of his third year there entered Jesus College, as a fellow-commoner, John Hall, afterwards John Hall-Stevenson [q. v.], a precocious lad of seventeen, whose main delight was in coarse jesting and the perusal of obscene literature. With Hall-Stevenson, Sterne, despite his seniority, formed a close intimacy, which was only interrupted by death. They claimed to be distant cousins, but knew little of each other till they met at Cambridge. The tradition of their friendship during the only year (1735–6) that they were at college together was long current. ‘They used to study together under a large wallnutt tree in the inner court, where one of 'em wrote underneath these lines:
This shou'd be the Tree of Knowledge,
As it stands in so very wise a colledge’
(Croft, Anecdotes in Whitefoord's Papers, p. 229). In January 1736 Sterne graduated B.A., and he proceeded M.A. in due course in 1740. But he did not quit the university under the best auspices. Despite the allowances made him while an undergraduate by the college and by his cousin, he ran into debt, which long embarrassed him. In his last year at the university, too, an attack of hæmorrhage of the lungs bore witness to a permanent weakness of constitution.
His start in life he owed to his uncle Jaques, who, as precentor and canon of York, the holder of two rectories (Rise and Hornsea-cum-Riston), and an active whig politician, possessed much influence in clerical and political circles. Acting under his uncle's advice, Laurence took holy orders. He had no fitness for the vocation, but at the time the church was regarded, in the north especially, as a whig fortress against Jacobitism and toryism. Spiritual fervour was the last qualification expected in an aspirant to ecclesiastical preferment. Sterne was ordained deacon by Richard Reynolds [q. v.], bishop of Lincoln, on 6 March 1736, at Buckden, and appears to have served a curacy there. On 20 Aug. 1738 he was ordained priest by Samuel Peploe, bishop of Chester, and four days later, on 24 Aug. 1738, he was collated by the patron, the archbishop of York, on the recommendation of his uncle Jaques, to the vicarage of Sutton-in-the-Forest (of Galtres). This village, which was ‘in the forest’ only in name, lay on low ground, within eight miles north of York. The parish included the hamlet of Huby, more than a mile distant, and covered an area of 10,650 acres. Entries in Sterne's handwriting in the registers date from 1739. But Sterne kept a curate from 1740, and passed much time at York. His uncle added to his emoluments and duties by procuring his appointment, on 15 Jan. 1740–1, to the prebendal stall of Givendale in York Cathedral. About the same time he was appointed commissary of the court of Pickering and Pocklington, a sinecure office, which entitled him to a share of the fees on the issue of marriage licenses in those parishes. The prebend was worth about 40l. a year. Sterne thenceforth took his turn as a preacher in the cathedral; but he never acquired much fame in that capacity at York. It was reported that as soon as he mounted the pulpit ‘half of the congregation usually left the church, as his delivery and voice [were] so very disagreeable’ (Croft).
In 1739 there was living, in solitary seclusion in Little Alice Lane, under the shadow of the minster, a lady under thirty years of age named Elizabeth or Eliza Lumley. Both her parents were dead. Her father, Richard Lumley, held from 1721 to 1732 the rich rectory of Bedale, and brought up his family ‘in style.’ Her mother, Lydia, daughter of Anthony Light of Durham, had married the rector of Bedale, after the death in 1709 of a first husband, Thomas Kirke of Cookridge, near Leeds, ‘a great virtuoso in all sorts of learning.’ ‘Though Miss Lumley was but a homely woman, still she had many admirers, as she was reported to have a fortune, and she possessed a first-rate understanding’ (Croft). For two years Sterne courted her. ‘She owned,’ he wrote, ‘she liked me, but thought herself not rich enough or me too poor to be joined together.’ At the end of two years the lady paid a prolonged visit to a sister who lived in rural retreat in Staffordshire, and Sterne wrote to her of his desolation. These letters are the earliest extant examples of that tendency to lachrymose emotion or nervous sensibility which Sterne turned later to account in his literary work. In reminding the absent Miss Lumley in 1740 of ‘the sentimental repasts’ which he and she had enjoyed together, Sterne, for the first time in the known history of the language, used the epithet which was, under his auspices, to designate for all time a definite condition of the tender emotions.
On Miss Lumley's return to York, Sterne resumed his visits. The lady soon fell into
