That Laurence Sterne passed the first eleven years of his life with such an exemplar of these simple virtues of kindliness, guilelessness, and courage ever before him, is perhaps the best that can be said for the lot in which his early days were cast.  In almost all other respects there could hardly have been—­for a quick-witted, precocious, imitative boy—­a worse bringing-up.  No one, I should imagine, ever more needed discipline in his youth than Sterne; and the camp is a place of discipline for the soldier only.  To all others whom necessity attaches to it, and to the young especially, it is rather a school of license and irregularity.  It is fair to remember these disadvantages of Sterne’s early training, in judging of the many defects as a man, and laxities as a writer, which marked his later life; though, on the other hand, there is no denying the reality and value of some of the countervailing advantages which came to him from his boyish surroundings.  The conception of my Uncle Toby need not have been taken whole from Roger Sterne, or from any one actual captain of a marching regiment; but the constant sight of, and converse with, many captains and many corporals may undoubtedly have contributed much to the vigour and vitality of Toby Shandy and Corporal Trim.  So far as the externals of portraiture were concerned, there can be no doubt that his art benefited much from his early military life.  His soldiers have the true stamp of the soldier about them in air and language; and when his captain and corporal fight their Flemish battles over again we are thoroughly conscious that we are listening, under the dramatic form, to one who must himself have heard many a chapter of the same splendid story from the lips of the very men who had helped to break the pride of the Grand Monarque under Marlborough and Eugene.

CHAPTER II.

SCHOOL AND UNIVERSITY.—­HALIFAX AND CAMBRIDGE.

(1723-1738.)

It was not—­as we have seen from the Memoir—­till the autumn of 1723, “or the spring of the following year,” that Roger Sterne obtained leave of his colonel to “fix” his son at school; and this would bring Laurence to the tolerably advanced age of ten before beginning his education in any systematic way.  He records, under date of 1721, that “in this year I learned to write, &c.;” but it is not probable that the “&c.”—­that indolent symbol of which Sterne makes such irritating use in all his familiar writing—­covers, in this case, any wide extent of educational advance.  The boy, most likely, could just read and write, and no more, at the time when he was fixed at school, “near Halifax, with an able master:”  a judicious selection, no doubt, both of place as well as teacher.  Mr. Fitzgerald, to whose researches we owe as much light as is ever likely to be thrown upon this obscure and probably not very interesting period of Sterne’s life, has pointed out that Richard Sterne, eldest