The year 1760, however, was to bring to Sterne more solid gains than that of mere celebrity, or even than the somewhat precarious money profits which depend on literary vogue.  Only a few weeks after his arrival in town he was presented by Lord Falconberg with the curacy of Coxwold, “a sweet retirement,” as he describes it, “in comparison of Sutton,” at which he was in future to pass most of the time spent by him in Yorkshire.  What obtained him this piece of preferment is unknown.  It may be that Tristram Shandy drew the Yorkshire peer’s attention to the fact that there was a Yorkshireman of genius living within a few miles of a then vacant benefice in his lordship’s gift, and that this was enough for him.  But Sterne himself says—­in writing a year or so afterwards to a lady of his acquaintance—­“I hope I have been of some service to his lordship, and he has sufficiently requited me;” and in the face of this plain assertion, confirmed as it is by the fact that Lord Falconberg was on terms of friendly intimacy with the Vicar of Coxwold at a much later date than this, we may dismiss idle tales about Sterne’s having “black-mailed” the patron out of a presentation to a benefice worth no more, after all, than some 70L a year net.

There is somewhat more substance, however, in the scandal which got abroad with reference to a certain alleged transaction between Sterne and Warburton.  Before Sterne had been many days in London, and while yet his person and doings were the natural subjects of the newest gossip, a story found its way into currency to the effect that the new-made Bishop of Gloucester had found it advisable to protect himself against the satiric humour of the author of the Tristram Shandy by a substantial present of money.  Coming to Garrick’s ears, it was repeated by him—­whether seriously or in jest—­to Sterne, from whom it evoked a curious letter, which in Madame de Medalle’s collection has been studiously hidden away amongst the correspondence of seven years later. “’Twas for all the world,” he began, “like a cut across my finger with a sharp pen-knife.  I saw the blood—­gave it a suck, wrapt it up, and thought no more about it....  The story you told me of Tristram’s pretended tutor this morning”—­(the scandal was, that Warburton had been threatened with caricature in the next volume of the novel, under the guise of the hero’s tutor)—­“this vile story, I say, though I then saw both how and where it wounded, I felt little from it at first, or, to speak more honestly (though it ruins my simile), I felt a great deal of pain from it, but affected an air, usual in such accidents, of feeling less than I had.”  And he goes on to repudiate, it will be observed, not so much the moral offence of corruption, in receiving money to spare Warburton, as the intellectual solecism of selecting him for ridicule.  “What the devil!” he exclaims, “is there no one learned blockhead throughout the schools of misapplied science in the Christian