kind and by a very different
sort of man appeared in 1759--the first and second volume of "Tristram
Shandy," by Laurence Sterne.

Seldom, perhaps, has an author experienced a stranger bringing up than
that which fell to the lot of Sterne. His father, Roger Sterne, was
one of those luckless persons who seem to be the especial sport of a
malicious destiny, in whose hands nothing prospers, from whose hands
thievish Fortune filches all opportunities. Roger Sterne was a
gentleman of good family and narrow means, who {300} had adopted arms
as his profession and had not prospered therein. He had married a wife
who was herself a sutler's widow, and who blessed Ensign Sterne with a
swift and steady succession of offspring, of whom Laurence was the
second. It was chance, acting through the impulses of the War Office,
which caused little Laurence to see the light on Irish soil; but though
he was born in the melodiously named Valley of Honey, there was little
of honeyed sweetness, and much bitterness as of gall and coloquintida,
in his early boyhood. Poverty and the eccentric evolutions of a
marching regiment contributed to make his a most unenviable childhood.
The record, as we can read it in his own account, is disastrous and
dreary enough. The regiment to which Roger Sterne belonged was
perpetually on the move; the births and deaths of Mrs. Sterne's
children succeeded each other with painful rapidity; again and again
was little Laurence in imminent peril of shipwreck on the stormiest
seas; he experienced in his earliest years all that was worst and most
disagreeable in the life of camp-followers. Some account must
necessarily be taken of this by those who review Sterne's writings. A
child brought up under such conditions is not likely to have a very
keen appreciation of the finer phases of life, and must inevitably have
a precocious and most unfortunate familiarity with the seamy side of
existence. What is commonly called knowledge of the world, which means
knowledge of what is worst in the world, as "seeing life" generally
means seeing its dirtiest places, undoubtedly Sterne got in plenty, and
the future divine was not improved by the education of the camp.

The misfortunes that had attended so persistently upon the career of
Roger Sterne culminated at last most tragically, yet at the same time
most ludicrously, as if Destiny had determined to the end to make the
luckless ensign her sport. At Gibraltar a quarrel wit