The Life of John Sterling | Page 6

through
life, is capable of interesting the greatest man; that all men are to an
unspeakable degree brothers, each man's life a strange emblem of every

man's; and that Human Portraits, faithfully drawn, are of all pictures the
welcomest on human walls. Monitions and moralities enough may lie
in this small Work, if honestly written and honestly read;--and, in
particular, if any image of John Sterling and his Pilgrimage through our
poor Nineteenth Century be one day wanted by the world, and they can
find some shadow of a true image here, my swift scribbling (which
shall be very swift and immediate) may prove useful by and by.

CHAPTER II.
BIRTH AND PARENTAGE.
John Sterling was born at Kaimes Castle, a kind of dilapidated baronial
residence to which a small farm was then attached, rented by his Father,
in the Isle of Bute,--on the 20th July, 1806. Both his parents were Irish
by birth, Scotch by extraction; and became, as he himself did,
essentially English by long residence and habit. Of John himself
Scotland has little or nothing to claim except the birth and genealogy,
for he left it almost before the years of memory; and in his mature days
regarded it, if with a little more recognition and intelligence, yet
without more participation in any of its accents outward or inward, than
others natives of Middlesex or Surrey, where the scene of his chief
education lay.
The climate of Bute is rainy, soft of temperature; with skies of unusual
depth and brilliancy, while the weather is fair. In that soft rainy climate,
on that wild-wooded rocky coast, with its gnarled mountains and green
silent valleys, with its seething rain-storms and many-sounding seas,
was young Sterling ushered into his first schooling in this world. I
remember one little anecdote his Father told me of those first years:
One of the cows had calved; young John, still in petticoats, was
permitted to go, holding by his father's hand, and look at the newly
arrived calf; a mystery which he surveyed with open intent eyes, and
the silent exercise of all the scientific faculties he had;--very strange
mystery indeed, this new arrival, and fresh denizen of our Universe:
"Wull't eat a-body?" said John in his first practical Scotch, inquiring
into the tendencies this mystery might have to fall upon a little fellow
and consume him as provision: "Will it eat one, Father?"--Poor little
open-eyed John: the family long bantered him with this anecdote; and

we, in far other years, laughed heartily on hearing it.--Simple peasant
laborers, ploughers, house-servants, occasional fisher-people too; and
the sight of ships, and crops, and Nature's doings where Art has little
meddled with her: this was the kind of schooling our young friend had,
first of all; on this bench of the grand world-school did he sit, for the
first four years of his life.
Edward Sterling his Father, a man who subsequently came to
considerable notice in the world, was originally of Waterford in
Munster; son of the Episcopalian Clergyman there; and chief
representative of a family of some standing in those parts. Family
founded, it appears, by a Colonel Robert Sterling, called also Sir Robert
Sterling; a Scottish Gustavus-Adolphus soldier, whom the breaking out
of the Civil War had recalled from his German campaignings, and had
before long, though not till after some waverings on his part, attached
firmly to the Duke of Ormond and to the King's Party in that quarrel. A
little bit of genealogy, since it lies ready to my hand, gathered long ago
out of wider studies, and pleasantly connects things individual and
present with the dim universal crowd of things past,--may as well be
inserted here as thrown away.
This Colonel Robert designates himself Sterling "of Glorat;" I believe,
a younger branch of the well-known Stirlings of Keir in Stirlingshire. It
appears he prospered in his soldiering and other business, in those bad
Ormond times; being a man of energy, ardor and
intelligence,--probably prompt enough both with his word and with his
stroke. There survives yet, in the Commons Journals,[2] dim notice of
his controversies and adventures; especially of one controversy he had
got into with certain victorious Parliamentary official parties, while his
own party lay vanquished, during what was called the Ormond
Cessation, or Temporary Peace made by Ormond with the Parliament
in 1646:--in which controversy Colonel Robert, after repeated
applications, journeyings to London, attendances upon committees, and
such like, finds himself worsted, declared to be in the wrong; and so
vanishes from the Commons Journals.
What became of him when Cromwell got to Ireland, and to Munster, I
have not heard: his knighthood, dating from the very year of
Cromwell's Invasion (1649), indicates a man expected to do his best on
the occasion:--as in all probability he did; had not