There is, as has been observed, a certain mixture of the comic and the pathetic in the life-history of this obscure father of a famous son.  His life was clearly not a fortunate one, so far as external circumstances go; but its misfortunes had no sort of consoling dignity about them.  Roger Sterne’s lot in the world was not so much an unhappy as an uncomfortable one; and discomfort earns little sympathy, and absolutely no admiration, for its sufferers.  He somehow reminds us of one of those Irish heroes—­good-natured, peppery, debt-loaded, light-hearted, shiftless—­whose fortunes we follow with mirthful and half-contemptuous sympathy in the pages of Thackeray.  He was obviously a typical specimen of that class of men who are destitute alike of the virtues and failings of the “respectable” and successful; whom many people love and no one respects; whom everybody pities in their struggles and difficulties, but whom few pity without a smile.

It is evident, however, that he succeeded in winning the affection of one who had not too much affection of the deeper kind to spare for any one.  The figure of Roger Sterne alone stands out with any clearness by the side of the ceaselessly flitting mother and phantasmal children of Laurence Sterne’s Memoir; and it is touched in with strokes so vivid and characteristic that critics have been tempted to find in it the original of the most famous portrait in the Shandy gallery.  “My father,” says Sterne, “was a little, smart man, active to the last degree in all exercises, most patient of fatigue and disappointments, of which it pleased God to give him full measure.  He was, in his temper, somewhat rapid and hasty, but of a kindly, sweet disposition, void of all design, and so innocent in his own intentions, that he suspected no one; so that you might have cheated him ten times a day, if nine had not been sufficient for your purpose.”  This is a captivating little picture; and it no doubt presents traits which may have impressed themselves early and deeply on the imagination which was afterwards to give birth to “My Uncle Toby.”  The simplicity of nature and the “kindly, sweet disposition” are common to both the ensign of real life and to the immortal Captain Shandy of fiction; but the criticism which professes to find traces of Roger Sterne’s “rapid and hasty temper” in my Uncle Toby is compelled to strain itself considerably.  And, on the whole, there seems no reason to believe that Sterne borrowed more from the character of his father than any writer must necessarily, and perhaps unconsciously, borrow from his observation of the moral and mental qualities of those with whom he has come into most frequent contact.