How thoroughly he relished the delights of celebrity is revealed, with a simple vanity which almost disarms criticism, in many a passage of his correspondence.  In one of his earliest letters to Miss Fourmantelle we find him proudly relating to her how already he “was engaged to ten noblemen and men of fashion.”  Of Garrick, who had warmly welcomed the humourist whose merits he had been the first to discover, Sterne says that he had “promised him at dinner to numbers of great people.”  Amongst these great people who sought him out for themselves was that discerning patron of ability in every shape, Lord Rockingham.  In one of the many letters which Madame de Medalle flung dateless upon the world, but which from internal evidence we can assign to the early months of 1760, Sterne writes that he is about to “set off with a grand retinue of Lord Rockingham’s (in whose suite I move) for Windsor” to witness, it should seem, an installation of a Knight of the Garter.  It is in his letters to Miss Fourmantelle, however, that his almost boyish exultation at his London triumph discloses itself most frankly.  “My rooms,” he writes, “are filling every hour with great people of the first rank, who strive who shall most honour me.”  Never, he believes, had such homage been rendered to any man by devotees so distinguished.  “The honours paid me were the greatest that were ever known from the great.”

The self-painted portrait is not, it must be confessed, altogether an attractive one.  It is somewhat wanting in dignity, and its air of over-inflated complacency is at times slightly ridiculous.  But we must not judge Sterne in this matter by too severe a standard.  He was by nature neither a dignified nor a self-contained man:  he had a head particularly unfitted to stand sudden elevation; and it must be allowed that few men’s power of resisting giddiness at previously unexplored altitudes was ever so severely tried.  It was not only “the great” in the sense of the high in rank and social distinction by whom he was courted; he was welcomed also by the eminent in genius and learning; and it would be no very difficult task for him to flatter himself that it was the latter form of recognition which, he really valued most.  Much, at any rate, in the way of undue elation may be forgiven to a country clergyman who suddenly found himself the centre of a court, which was regularly attended by statesmen, wits, and leaders of fashion, and with whom even bishops condescended to open gracious diplomatic communication.  “Even all the bishops,” he writes, “have sent their compliments;” and though this can hardly have been true of the whole Episcopal Bench, it is certain that Sterne received something more than a compliment from one bishop, who was a host in himself.  He was introduced by Garrick to Warburton, and received high encouragement from that formidable prelate.[1]

[Footnote 1:  It is admitted, moreover, in the correspondence with Miss Fourmantelle that Sterne received something more substantial from the Bishop, in the shape of a purse of gold; and this strange present gave rise to a scandal on which something will be said hereafter.]