once more, and was took on a warrant for assaulting Sturk. 'Twas the women talking as they did excited the officers' vigilance. I have lain in prison since. The date of my committal and discharge are, I suppose, there."

And so ends this rough draught, with the initials, I suppose, in his own hand, C. N., at the foot.

At about half-past four o'clock Nutter came out to the Mills in a coach. He did not drive through Chapelizod; he was shy, and wished to feel his way a little. So he came home privily by the Knockmaroon and the Park Gate. Poor little Sally rose into a sort of heroine. With a wild cry, and "Oh, Charlie !" she threw her arms about his neck; and the "good little crayture,' as Magnolia was wont to call her, had fainted. Nutter said nothing, but carried her in his arms to the sofa, and himself sobbed very violently for about a minute, supporting her tenderly. She came to herself very quickly, and hugged her Charlie with such a torrent of incoherent endearments, welcomes, and benedictions as I cannot at all undertake to describe. Nutter

didn't speak. His arms were about her neck, and with wet eyes, and biting his nether-lip, and smiling, he looked into her poor little wild, delighted face with an unspeakable world of emotion and affection beaming from the homely lines and knots of that old mahogany countenance; and the maids smiling, blessing, courtesying, and welcoming him home again, added to the pleasant uproar which amazed even the tipsy coachman from the hall.

"Oh! Charlie, I have you fast, my darling. Oh! but it's wonderful; you, yourself-my Charlie, your own self-never, never, never to part again!" and so on.

And so, for a rapturous hour, it seemed as if they had passed the dark valley, and were immortal; and no more pain, sorrow, or separation for them. And perhaps these blessed illusions are permitted now and again to mortals, like momentary gleams of paradise, and distant views of the delectable mountains, to cheer poor pilgrims with a foretaste of those meetings beyond the river, where the separated and beloved shall embrace.

I. THE PARSON'S LADY.

ANOTHER blessing was to wait on this preferment. Amanda was now returned to York, but in deplorable health. Mr. Sterne calls her illness a consumption; yet this does not seem likely, for she is to live perseveringly for forty years and upwards. She has returned from Stafford, from staying with that sister, wife of the Rev. Botham, who may have all this time been working counter to Mr. Sterne's interests, looking coldly on the young clergyman's suit. But now that prebends and such honours were being heaped upon him in such abundance, and "the men with silver rods" were walking before him, obstacles may have insensibly faded away. Amanda may have appeared now sufficiently

rich, and he "not too poor." With whatever view, here she is again restored to York, coming to reside for her consumption in that most unsuitable of all wintry climates. It can scarcely be called the Nice of England.

All this while Amandus must have had a shrewd suspicion that he was tolerably secure. He believed "she was partly determined to have me, but would not say so." A curious tone of mind which is yet not unknown to the Ars amoris. Nor was this alliance divested of those other charmsworldly, yet necessary-which might be desirable for a young clergyman entering on life. There was

the

good Staffordshire family," connected also by local ties with Yorkshire. She had a portion, which, as will be seen presently, must have been respectable. And finally, a good "friend

in the south," who had a piece of preferment in the cathedral to give away, had promised her that if she married a Yorkshire clergyman, it should be his.

She, however, grew worse. Mr. Sterne used to come and sit with her in those old lodgings, which, it may be presumed, he had resigned to her. The faithful Fanny may have resumed her useful offices with "the hartshorn" and other preparations; but it does not appear that that useful person, "the good Miss S.," again came upon the stage, or sympathised in a dressing-room. The affair, however, was rapidly drawing to a crisis. One night he was with her, and much distressed at the progress of her malady. Sitting by her," he says, "with an almost broken heart, to see her so ill;" when of a sudden she turned to him and said"My dear Lawry, I can never be yours, for, I verily believe, I have not long to live. But I have left you every shilling of my fortune." And upon that she showed Mr. Sterne her will. No wonder he was overpowered by such generosity. There is nothing so genuinely sentimental in all the chapters of the "Sentimental Journey." Nor should it be forgotten, when long after, we hear the world coupling his name with cold and unconjugal conduct, with what feeling and tender recollection he tells this story to his daughter, Lydia.

After so pretty a tableau, the dropscene was sure not to be long in coming down, Miss Lumley's health began to mend. "It pleased God that she recovered," and they were married, in 1741. Unluckily, the proper form of the children's nursery tales, "and they lived happily together for ever after," may not be added, at least, at this stage.

So ends this Rosa Matilda lovestory. Amandus and Amanda are at last wedded. The polyanthus is blooming for the present, sheltered by the friendly wall; but Mr. Sterne is only five-and-twenty years old, and has not yet set out upon his sentimental travels.

The wedding took place with all the solemnity proper to a prebendary's nuptials. York-minster was the scene, and the Reverend Doctor Osbaldeston, Dean of York, performed the ceremony. A marriage in a cathedral is always a stately function. The anxious lovers had to wait over the Lent; and the festive season of Easter Monday, the earliest day that could be chosen, is a significant hint of their impatience. By licence, too. No doubt this is one of those " favours and civilities" to which Mr. Sterne alludes in his dedication of a sermon to Doctor Osbaldeston. When he gets home to Sutton, he walks into his vestry, takes down the marriage registry, and with a triumphant flourish records the event. It may be read there now.

many

'Laurence Sterne, A.M., Vicar of Sutton on the Forest and Prebendary of York, was married by the Reverend Dr. Osbaldeston, Dean of York, to Elizabeth Lumley, the 30th day of March, 1741 (being Easter Monday), in the Cathedral, by licence."*

Strange to say, he does not set out her full style and titles, there being always indulgence for flourishing on such an occasion. He should have added, "daughter to the Reverend Mr. Lumley, late Rector of Bedal." Thus Amanda, the clergyman's daughter, was married to her clergyman, Amandus. Thus was Mr. Sterne still inclining in a clerical direction.

The next act of this little piece discovers the pastoral little village, which has become Mr. Sterne's new parish. A pretty spot, with a musicallysounding name, stretching along the banks of the Derwent, in an irregular street of nearly a-mile, and not brought together compactly, which would be much more convenient for parochial visitations. Elvington, too, but a pleasant walk away; and, most acceptable charm of all, York, with its good society in mansions and coffee-houses," within easy riding distance of eight miles. The cure of souls at Sutton might reasonably be coveted.

All his amatory tortures happily composed, Amanda is now become prosaic

Mrs. Sterne; and with such a stock of raptures for a foundation, there is every fair presumption that, like the good children, in the fairy stories, they will live happily together for ever after.

Now was to begin the serious business, as it was to prove in his special case, of working out the grand problem of nuptial life-the solving of those puzzling riddles "in the married state," of which, as Mr. Shandy assured his brother Toby, "there are more asses' loads than all Job's stock of asses could have carried." Here is almost as great a responsibility as that more sacred yoke so recently taken up; and both, it is to be feared, shall be found hereafter of fatal inconvenience. The nuptial garment, as well as the ecclesiastical cassock, may have been equally unsuited to his shoulders. Nor was he conscious at this moment that he should live to cry out, how strange it was that "Nature, who makes everything so well to answer its destination, and yet, at the same time, should so eternally bungle it, as she does, in making so simple a thing as a married man."

59

It is a nice office to determine with whom rests the balance of fault. Nature herself may have tripped, "whether it is in the choice of the clay, or that it is frequently spoiled in the baking, by an excess of which a husband may turn out too crusty, you know, on the one hand, or not enough so through excess of heat on the other; or that her ladyship scarcely knows what sort of a husband will do." It requires nice scales to appreciate these defects, and yet Mr. Sterne abstains from hinting at what fault may lie in the baking of that finer porcelain which is usually found in the set of the marriage service of China.

We may, therefore, in all fairness, look back and try and make out in the dim light, what manner of life was the life at Sutton, and what sort of person was the mistress of the establishment. Not the young bride newly recovered from her consumption, and barely rescued from an untimely grave, whom the Reverend Laurence had taken home with him to adorn

his parsonage. Not as she appeared standing in all the glory of Mr. Gray's "purple light of love," which in the two or three earlier nuptial years is a little dazzling. A somewhat wider view is necessary. At this season the character is new to the situation; but later on, when the gilding is more or less rubbed off the gingerbread, and, possibly, the scales fallen from the eyes, it will then become time to visit plain Mrs. Sterne, the vicar's wife, keeping house, doing the school visiting and parochial needlework, in the retired thatched house" at Sutton.

II. DOMESTIC LIFE.

VERY lately some one turns up an old and bleared etching worked in pen and ink, skilfully enough, a sort of profile, with Pigrich Fecit in the corner, and the name "Mrs. Sterne" written under.* The expression is very plain and "unprepossessing." In such a scrap there is no manner of authenticity, and yet by some incident the thing may have drifted down to our day. Uneasy suspicions will disturb us, that the young and romantic Miss Lumley has turned into a plain and prosaic Mrs. Sterne. An excellent housewife, a good manager, but with a cold, clear eye, and utter incomprehension of her lively husband's humour. The quips and shafts fly off harmless and utterly unintelligible. "Books, painting, shooting, and fiddling were my amusements," says Mr. Sterne. In the last of these accomplishments her aid must have been serviceable, for she had "a fine voice and a good taste in music ;" and when our Vicar used to perform at his own or neighbouring houses, she would "accompany him on his bass viol much to the entertainment of himself and friends." In that dull Yorkshire country Mr. and Mrs. Sterne and the "bass viol" would have been very welcome. Nor is it merely the harmony of staves and crotchets which this conjugal partnership and "accompaniment on the bass viol" tends to promote. Who was sitting to Mr. Sterne, uneonsciously knitting while he wrote, for

this graphic portrait, quite as significant of an original, as those of "Doctor Slop" and "Captain Shandy ?""She had a way, and that was never to refuse her assent and consent to any proposition my father laid before her, merely because she did not understand it, or had no ideas to the principal word or term of art upon which the tenet or proposition rolled. She contented herself with doing all that her godfathers and godmothers promised for her, but no more; and so would go on, using a hard word twenty years together, and replying to it, too, if it was a verb, in all its moods and tenses, without giving herself any trouble to inquire about it." There is a little vexation as of personal experience, underlying this complaint; a sort of dismal protest as of one who had suffered much in this direction. And it was almost exasperating for a man of his humour, to find his sly rich bits of Rabelais humour, his mediæval double entendres, his quolibets, and qui proquos, modelled on Scarron, accepted complacently, and with an air of pleasant comprehension. No wonder that "this was an eternal source of misery," and that it "broke the neck, at the first setting out, of more good dialogues between them, than could have done the most petulant contradiction." Productive too of all those "pish's" and impatient bursts which Mr. Shandy could not restrain. Should we play Asmodeus for a few seconds, and lift the roof off Sutton Vicarage, we shall hear a snatch of this curious duet going on, not this time with harpsichord and "bass viol." "I wish" says Mr. Sterne, raising his voice, “the whole science of fortification at the devil, with all its trumpery of saps, mines, blinds, gabions, fausse-brays"

"They are foolish things," says Mrs. Sterne.

"Not that they are, properly speaking, Mrs. Wadman's premises," said Mr. Sterne, partly correcting himself, "because she is but tenant for life."

"That makes a great difference," says Mrs. Sterne, with placid assent. "In a fool's head," replies Mr. Sterne.

Looking on then through many years, during the nineteen or so of

Mr. Sterne's provincial banishment, we are by the aid of scraps from letters, and hints in Tristram, helped to a rough average portrait of this parson's lady. She is like to have settled down into a plain, well-meaning, orderly, humdrum sort of housewife, excellent for school work, for cottage visiting, for marketing, for sweeping up, and weekly washings, excellent as a social labourer of life, yet unhappily with a literal turn of mind, and on which her husband's brilliant rockets might explode harmlessly, quite unfelt, and unappreciated. A rigid and fatal ignoring of any non-natural sense, or witty metaphor. All good work-a-day qualities, but, as a long experience has shown, very ill-suited to the menage of your brilliant eccentric. She either damps his powder utterly, and he has to go abroad to light up his catherine wheels; or he boldly projects them on the domestic hearth, and furnishes himself with infinite amusement from her insensibility.

Long after, when she and her daughter were to set out from York to join him at Paris, a very serious journey, his letters of instruction,— showered thickly on her, filled with minutest directions, such as one would impress on a child,-point to the same view. So many things are to be got, all enumerated in language purposely childish and simple. Then, at the end, all are again summed up in a short epitome, as though he had called her back to impress all on her once more. Comic, too, is his caution,

"Mind you keep these things distinct in your head;" which tone shows a lack of confidence in the powers of Mrs. Sterne's intellect. Later still, at a French wateringplace, she excites the amusement of an acute Frenchman by her persevering adherence to her husband, pursuing him everywhere with a painful jealousy; a proceeding, -even allowing for a Frenchman's peculiar view of the conjugal relations, somewhat injudicious.

With the walls of that Tristram Gallery tolerably well decorated with notorious characters, figures from the neighbourhood fearlessly made free with, and hung up for posterity to laugh at, it is not likely that he would refrain from picking up any

crooked sticks lying by his own hearth. If such suited his bundle he would not have much delicacy about the matter; nay, his own special humour would be amazingly tickled by this fireside study, and relish hugely her pleasant unconsciousness that any little peculiarity of her's was being described. There are touches in Mrs. Shandy eminently life-like, and that seem copied from the maturer Mrs. Sterne. That lady, as we have seen, had to be carefully fortified for her journey, with the minutest directions. But Mrs. Shandy, with a dull indifference to the world, chose to remain behind, when all her family departed on a similar expedition, "being taken up with the project of knitting my father a pair of large worsted breeches, (the thing is common sense), and she not caring to be put out of her way, staid at home at Shandy Hall during the expedition." We may be sure she had the "thin, blue, chill, pellucid crystal, with all its humours, at rest," which distinguished the eyes of Mrs. Shandy, and that "a temperate current of blood ran orderly through her veins in all months of the year." It is to be lamented that these temperate currents should not always mix harmoniously with the noisy and zig-zag stream which tumbles noisily from the hills.

It is not likely that Mr. and Mrs. Sterne ever debated seriously that immortal "breeches" question; yet it seems impossible not to believe that some such exquisitely ludicrous discussions repeatedly took place. With his comic theories and odd expressions, fetched up mainly out of that quaint black-letter mine he was so fond of, there was sure to follow on the other side a constant misapprehension, or else a settled and tranquil indifference arising from an utter hopelessness of comprehension, from which dulness was to result in one of Mr. Sterne's quick and mercurial temper, all manner of impatient protest, more, however, in the shape of a comic displeasure than grim anger. "As to matrimony," said he, long after, "my wife is easy, and I should be a beast to rail at it." And this easiness extended not so much to a mere tolerance of his faults as to a general placid acceptance of any

thing that was proposed to her. The Recording Angel, therefore, should be tender with that impatient burst of Mr. Shandy, by whose mouth Mr. Sterne made his own comic protest, "Cursed luck," said he, biting his lip, "for a man to be master of one of the finest chains of reasoning in nature, and have a wife at the same time with such a head-piece that he cannot hang up a single inference within side of it to save his soul from destruction."

III. SUTTON VICARAGE.

AND now that our Rev. Laurence is fairly afloat with his parochial duties, provided, too, with a Mrs. Sterne to play vicar's lady, let us look into this Yorkshire parish of Sutton, and see how he will adapt himself to a newer and more pastoral shape of life. He must be content here with the monotonous round of country duties, which will be found dreary after York festivals, trying his ministry upon rude agricultural hearts, almost as rough and unbroken as their own Yorkshire clods of earth. This sort of spiritual farming will scarcely suit one of his tastes and habits. Long after, when laying his book at the feet of the great minister, he tells him that the quarter of England whence it comes is "a bycorner of the kingdom," and that the house in which it was written was "a retired thatched house." Three or four years after, the "retired thatched house" was not standing.

The incumbent of Sutton-in-theForest, when he brought home his bride, found his parsonage sadly out of repair; the "retired thatched house in the "by-corner of the kingdom" had been bequeathed to him in no very habitable condition, and some little outlay must be ineurred before the newly-married pair could settle themselves comfortably. The chimneys were decayed, the flooring wanted renewing, and the thatch and plastering needed restoration generally. When the business was done, and the bill paid, the Rev. Laurence went into his vestry, opened his registry, and made the following truly Shandean entry :