and there is some humour in the way in which the parson (the Archbishop) discovers that his incautious assent to Trim’s request had been given ultra vires. Looking through the parish register, at the request of a labourer who wished to ascertain his age, the parson finds express words of bequest leaving the watch-coat “for the sole use of the sextons of the church for ever, to be worn by them respectively on winterly cold nights,” and at the moment when he is exclaiming, “Just Heaven! what an escape have I had!  Give this for a petticoat to Trim’s wife!” he is interrupted by Trim himself entering the vestry with “the coat actually ript and cut out” ready for conversion into a petticoat for his wife.  And we get a foretaste of the familiar Shandian impertinence in the remark which follows, that “there are many good similes subsisting in the world, but which I have neither time to recollect nor look for,” which would give you an idea of the parson’s astonishment at Trim’s impudence.  The emoluments of “Pickering and Pocklington” appear under the figure of a “pair of black velvet plush breeches” which ultimately “got into the possession of one Lorry Slim (Sterne himself, of course), an unlucky wight, by whom they are still worn:  in truth, as you will guess, they are very thin by this time.”

The whole thing is the very slightest of “skits;” and the quarrel having been accommodated before it could be published, it was not given to the world until after its author’s death.  But it is interesting, as his first known attempt in this line of composition, and the grasping sexton deserves remembrance, if only as having handed down his name to a far more famous descendant.

CHAPTER IV.

“TRISTRAM SHANDY,” VOLS.  I. AND II.

(1759-1760.)

Hitherto we have had to construct our conception of Sterne out of materials of more or less plausible conjecture.  We are now at last approaching the region of positive evidence, and henceforward, down almost to the last scene of all, Sterne’s doings will be chronicled, and his character revealed, by one who happens, in this case, to be the best of all possible biographers—­the man himself.  Not that such records are by any means always the most trustworthy of evidence.  There are some men whose real character is never more effectually concealed than in their correspondence.  But it is not so with Sterne.  The careless, slipshod letters which Madame de Medalle “pitchforked” into the book-market, rather than edited, are highly valuable as pieces of autobiography.  They are easy, naive, and natural, rich in simple self-disclosure in almost every page; and if they have more to tell us about the man than the writer, they are yet not wanting in instructive hints as to Sterne’s methods of composition and his theories of art.