Sterne | Page 6

teachers have these prophetic moments
sometimes)--is, of course, possible; but that Sterne's master was "very
much hurt" at the boy's having been justly punished for an act of
wanton mischief, or that he recognized it as the natural privilege of
nascent genius to deface newly-whitewashed ceilings, must have been a
delusion of the humourist's later years. The extreme fatuity which it
would compel us to attribute to the schoolmaster seems inconsistent
with the power of detecting intellectual capacity in any one else. On the
whole, one inclines to suspect that the remark belonged to that order of
half sardonic, half kindly jest which a certain sort of pedagogue
sometimes throws off, for the consolation of a recently-caned boy; and
that Sterne's vanity, either then or afterwards (for it remained juvenile
all his life), translated it into a serious prophecy. In itself, however, the
urchin's freak was only too unhappily characteristic of the man. The
trick of befouling what was clean (and because it was clean) clung to
him most tenaciously all his days; and many a fair white surface--of
humour, of fancy, or of sentiment--was to be disfigured by him in
after-years with stains and splotches in which we can all too plainly
decipher the literary signature of Laurence Sterne.
At Halifax School the boy, as has been said, remained for about eight
years; that is, until he was nearly nineteen, and for some months after
his father's death at Port Antonio, which occurred in March, 1731. "In
the year '32," says the Memoir, "my cousin sent me to the University,
where I stayed some time." In the course of his first year he read for
and obtained a sizarship, to which the college records show that he was
duly admitted on the 6th of July, 1733. The selection of Jesus College
was a natural one: Sterne's great-grandfather, the afterwards

Archbishop, had been its Master, and had founded scholarships there,
to one of which the young sizar was, a year after his admission, elected.
No inference can, of course, be drawn from this as to Sterne's
proficiency, or even industry, in his academical studies: it is scarcely
more than a testimony to the fact of decent and regular behaviour. He
was bene natus, in the sense of being related to the right man, the
founder; and in those days he need be only very modicé doctus indeed
in order to qualify himself for admission to the enjoyment of his
kinsman's benefactions. Still he must have been orderly and
well-conducted in his ways; and this he would also seem to have been,
from the fact of his having passed through his University course
without any apparent break or hitch, and having been admitted to his
Bachelor's degree after no more than the normal period of residence.
The only remark which, in the Memoir, he vouchsafes to bestow upon
his academical career is, that "'twas there that I commenced a
friendship with Mr. H----, which has been lasting on both sides;" and it
may, perhaps, be said that this was, from one point of view, the most
important event of his Cambridge life. For Mr. H---- was John Hall,
afterwards John Hall Stevenson, the "Eugenius" of Tristram Shandy,
the master of Skelton Castle, at which Sterne was, throughout life, to be
a frequent and most familiar visitor; and, unfortunately, also a person
whose later reputation, both as a man and a writer, became such as
seriously to compromise the not very robust respectability of his
clerical comrade. Sterne and Hall were distant cousins, and it may have
been the tie of consanguinity which first drew them together. But there
was evidently a thorough congeniality of the most unlucky sort
between them; and from their first meeting, as undergraduates at Jesus,
until the premature death of the elder, they continued to supply each
other's minds with precisely that sort of occupation and stimulus of
which each by the grace of nature stood least in need. That their close
intimacy was ill-calculated to raise Sterne's reputation in later years
may be inferred from the fact that Hall Stevenson afterwards obtained
literary notoriety by the publication of Crazy Tales, a collection of
comic but extremely broad ballads, in which his clerical friend was
quite unjustly suspected of having had a hand. Mr. Hall was also
reported, whether truly or falsely, to have been a member of Wilkes's
famous confraternity of Medmenham Abbey; and from this it was an

easy step for gossip to advance to the assertion that the Rev. Mr. Sterne
had himself been admitted to that unholy order.
Among acquaintances which the young sizar of Jesus might have more
profitably made at Cambridge, but did not, was that of a student
destined, like himself, to leave behind him a name famous in English
letters. Gray,