It was in the year 1759 that the Vicar of Sutton and Prebendary of York—­already, no doubt, a stone of stumbling and a rock of offence to many worthy people in the county—­conceived the idea of astonishing and scandalizing them still further after a new and original fashion.  His impulses to literary production were probably various, and not all of them, or perhaps the strongest of them, of the artistic order.  The first and most urgent was, it may be suspected, the simplest and most common of all such motive forces.  Sterne, in all likelihood, was in want of money.  He was not, perhaps, under the actual instruction of that magister artium whom the Roman satirist has celebrated; for he declared, indeed, afterwards, that “he wrote not to be fed, but to be famous.”  But the context of the passage shows that he only meant to deny any absolute compulsion to write for mere subsistence.  Between this sort of constraint and that gentler form of pressure which arises from the wish to increase an income sufficient for one’s needs, but inadequate to one’s desires, there is a considerable difference; and to repudiate the one is not to disclaim the other.  It is, at any rate, certain that Sterne engaged at one time of his life in a rather speculative sort of farming, and we have it from himself in a passage in one of his letters, which may be jest, but reads more like earnest, that it was his losses in this business that first turned his attention to literature.[1] His thoughts once set in that direction, his peculiar choice of subject and method of treatment are easily comprehensible.  Pantagruelic burlesque came to him, if not naturally, at any rate by “second nature.”  He had a strong and sedulously cultivated taste for Rabelaisian humour; his head was crammed with all sorts of out-of-the-way learning constantly tickling his comic sense by its very uselessness; he relished more keenly than any man the solemn futilities of mediaeval doctors, and the pedantic indecencies of casuist fathers; and, along with all these temptations to an enterprise of the kind upon which he entered, he had been experiencing a steady relaxation of deterrent restraints.  He had fallen out with his uncle some years since,[2] and the quarrel had freed him from at least one influence making for clerical propriety of behaviour.  His incorrigible levities had probably lost him the countenance of most of his more serious acquaintances; his satirical humour had as probably gained him personal enemies not a few, and it may be that he had gradually contracted something of that “naughty-boy” temper, as we may call it, for which the deliberate and ostentatious repetition of offences has an inexplicable charm.  It seems clear, too, that, growth for growth with this spirit of bravado, there had sprung up—­in somewhat incongruous companionship, perhaps—­a certain sense of wrong.  Along with the impulse to give an additional shock to the prejudices he had already offended, Sterne felt impelled to vindicate what he considered the genuine moral worth underlying the indiscretions of the offender.  What, then, could better suit him than to compose a novel in which he might give full play to his simious humour, startle more hideously than ever his straighter-laced neighbours, defiantly defend his own character, and caricature whatever eccentric figure in the society around him might offer the most tempting butt for ridicule?