this occasion he was present at the September races, and then he stayed on to drink the waters, from which he would have received "marvellous strength," had he not dissipated it as fast as he gained it "by playing the good fellow with Lord Granby and Co. too much." At a convenient distance from his flock also, lived John Hall-Stevenson, the Dear Cousin Anthony of the letters and the discreet Eugenius of Tristram Shandy, though he was anything but discreet. The two men first met as students at Cambridge, each "loved a jest in his heart," and "ever after their friendship continued one and indivisible through life." They were in quaint contemporary phrase -"elemented together": they read the same books and enjoyed the same dissipations. After making the grand tour, Stevenson settled at Skelton Castle, a rambling Tudor mansion overlooking a melancholy lake near Guisborough -not far from the Yorkshire coast. Here in Crazy Castle, as he called it, he indulged to the full his taste for Rabelaisian literature-collecting a large library of facetiæ, and scribbling verse-tales in imitation of the looser French fabulists. The Vicar of Sutton was a frequent visitor at Skelton for days and

for weeks. In the library there he found the curious books-the long line of French and English jesters that were to prepare him for writing Tristram Shandy. The one as eccentric as the other, the Parson and the Squire used to amuse themselves on an afternoon by racing chariots over the sand on the neighboring shore "with one wheel in the sea.' This sport they kept up until within a few months of Sterne's death. At Guisborough they formed sentimental friendships with "Mrs. C- and Miss C-, &c.";— to whom on one occasion Sterne sent via Stevenson the Apostolic greeting. O'nights there were "joyous deliriums with Stevenson over the Burgundy. There at Skelton Sterne also made the acquaintance of a company of boisterous squires and parsons whom Stevenson had united into a club called the Demoniacs. What What part Sterne may have taken in their rites performed under the disguise of the Roman ritual is an inquiry upon which we will not enter. But he found the Demoniacs most congenial, and rarely wrote to Stevenson without sending his services or blessing to what he was pleased to call "the household of faith." He was particularly fond of a man of his own cloth who was known

among the Demoniacs as Pantagruel, or Panty, for short, so nicknamed of course from the hero in Rabelais. It may seem incredible that Sterne should have so forgotten the dignity of his profession as to close his letters to Stevenson with a parody of the benedictory prayers of St. Paul. But such was a custom. "Remember me," he writes, "sometimes in your potations-bid Panty pray for me, when he prays for the Holy Catholic Church -- present - and be my compliments to Mrs. Ferguson in peace and charity with all mankind and the blessing of "- It is unnecessary to finish.

Writers who have taken Sterne as their theme have commonly thought it necessary either to denounce him or to defend him. The result has been a distorted portrait. According to Thackeray, Sterne was a "foul Satyr." Walter Bagehot took issue with Thackeray and summed Sterne up easily by calling him "an old flirt." "These," he added, "are short and expressive words, and they tell the whole truth. There is no good reason to suspect his morals, but he dawdled about pretty women.' The view of Thackeray may be maintained; but the view of Bagehot recent discoveries render impossible. Thus far I have aimed to

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mark the general tenor of Sterne's life so far as it can be determined from authentic documents and justifiable inferences from them, while he was an obscure parson in North England. What he was at York and Skelton, that he was afterwards, it may be taken for granted, among the wits of London. The narrative speaks for itself. There is no need of comment, and much less of fret over Yorick's moral lapses.

It strikes me that Thackeray's famous sketch of Sterne in the lectures on the English Humourists is sadly lacking in historical perspective. Sterne is handled to the delight of a Philistine audience as if he were their contemporary. As Thackeray well knew, the morals of the clergy in the mid-eighteenth century were at the lowest point that they have been since the Reformation. To Thackeray's George the Second only, is it necessary to turn for the picture. "I read," says Thackeray there," that Lady Yarmouth (my most religious and gracious King's favourite) sold a bishopric to a clergyman for 5,000l. (He betted her 5,000l. that he would not be made a bishop, and he lost, and paid her.) Was he the only prelate of his time led up by such hands

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for consecration? As I peep into George II.'s St. James's, I see crowds of cassocks rustling up the back-stairs of the ladies of the Court; stealthy clergy slipping purses into their laps; that godless old King yawning under his canopy in his Chapel Royal, as the chaplain before him is discoursing." The picture is completed by a description of "the Queen's chaplains mumbling through their morning office in their ante-room, under the picture of the great Venus, with the door opened into the adjoining chamber, where the Queen is dressing, talking scandal to Lord Hervey, or uttering sneers at Lady Suffolk, who is kneeling with the basin at her mistress's side." "No wonder," remarks Thackeray, "that the clergy were corrupt and indifferent amidst this indifference and corruption." The court fixed the standard of morals for the English clergy at large. There still survived, it is true, the eccentric parson, honest, learned, kindly, and unacquainted with the ways of the world, a type who appears, variously shaded, in the pages of Fielding and Goldsmith, under the names of Adams, Harrison, and Primrose. No doubt he was a common type, especially in remoter districts, else he would not have appeared so