world to make a tutor of for my Tristram—­are we so run out of stock that there is no one lumber-headed, muddle-headed, mortar-headed, pudding-head chap amongst our doctors...but I must disable my judgment by choosing a Warburton?” Later on, in a letter to his friend, Mr. Croft, at Stillington, whom the scandal had reached through a “society journal” of the time, he asks whether people would suppose he would be “such a fool as to fall foul of Dr. Warburton, my best friend, by representing him so weak a man; or by telling such a lie of him as his giving me a purse to buy off the tutorship of Tristram—­or that I should be fool enough to own that I had taken a purse for that purpose?” It will be remarked that Sterne does not here deny having received a purse from Warburton, but only his having received it by way of black-mail:  and the most mysterious part of the affair is that Sterne did actually receive the strange present of a “purse of gold” from Warburton (whom at that time he did not know nor had ever seen); and that he admits as much in one of his letters to Miss Fourmantelle.  “I had a purse of guineas given me yesterday by a Bishop,” he writes, triumphantly, but without volunteering any explanation of this extraordinary gift.  Sterne’s letter to Garrick was forwarded, it would seem, to Warburton; and the Bishop thanks Garrick for having procured for him “the confutation of an impertinent story the first moment I heard of it.”  This, however, can hardly count for much.  If Warburton had really wished Sterne to abstain from caricaturing him, he would be as anxious—­and for much the same reasons—­to conceal the fact as to suppress the caricature.  He would naturally have the disclosure of it reported to Sterne for formal contradiction, as in fulfilment of a virtual term in the bargain between them.  The epithet of “irrevocable scoundrel,” which he afterwards applied to Sterne, is of less importance, as proceeding from Warburton, than it would have been had it come from any one not habitually employing Warburton’s peculiar vocabulary; but it at least argues no very cordial feeling on the Bishop’s side.  And, on the whole, one regrets to feel, as I must honestly confess that I do feel, far less confident of the groundlessness of this rather unpleasant story than could be wished.  It is impossible to forget, however, that while the ethics of this matter were undoubtedly less strict in those days than they are—­or, at any rate, are recognized as being—­in our own, there is nothing in Sterne’s character to make us suppose him to have been at all in advance of the morality of his time.

The incumbent-designate did not go down at once to take possession of his temporalities.  His London triumph had not yet run its course.  The first edition of Vols.  I. and II. of Tristram Shandy was exhausted in some three months.  In April, Dodsley brought out a second; and, concurrently with the advertisement of its issue, there appeared—­in somewhat incongruous companionship—­the announcement,