Sterne | Page 4

boy's
share in the family wanderings was at an end. But his father had yet to
be ordered from Carrickfergus to Londonderry, where at last a
permanent child, Catherine, was born; and thence to Gibraltar, to take
part in the Defence of that famous Rock, where the much-enduring
campaigner was run through the body in a duel, "about a goose" (a
thoroughly Shandian catastrophe); and thence to Jamaica, where, "with
a constitution impaired" by the sword-thrust earned in his anserine
quarrel, he was defeated in a more deadly duel with the "country
fever," and died. "His malady," writes his son, with a touch of feeling
struggling through his dislocated grammar, "took away his senses first,
and made a child of him; and then in a month or two walking about
continually without complaining, till the moment he sat down in an
arm-chair and breathed his last."
[Footnote 1: "It was in this parish," says Sterne, "that I had that
wonderful escape in falling through a mill race while the mill was
going, and being taken up unhurt; the story is incredible, but known to
all that part of Ireland, where hundreds of the common people flocked
to seeme." More incredible still does it seem that Thoresby should
relate the occurrence of an accident of precisely the same kind to
Sterne's great-grandfather, the Archbishop. "Playing near a mill, he fell
within a claw; there was but one board or bucket wanting in the whole
wheel, but a gracious Providence so ordered it that the void place came

down at that moment, else he had been crushed to death; but was
reserved to be a grand benefactor afterwards." (Thoresby, ii. 15.) But
what will probably strike the reader as more extraordinary even than
this coincidence is that Sterne should have been either unaware of it, or
should have omitted mention of it in the above passage.]
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.
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