the society of the Close. Upon his union with Miss Lumley, and, in a
somewhat curious fashion, by her means, he obtained in addition the
living of Stillington. "A friend of hers in the South had promised her
that if she married a clergyman in Yorkshire, when the living became
vacant he would make her a compliment of it;" and made accordingly
this singular "compliment" was. At Sutton Sterne remained nearly
twenty years, doing duty at both places, during which time
"books, painting, fiddling, and shooting were," he says, "my chief
amusements." With what success he shot, and with what skill he
fiddled, we know not. His writings contain not a few musical
metaphors and allusions to music, which seem to indicate a competent
acquaintance with its technicalities; but the specimen of his
powers as an artist, which Mr. Fitzgerald has reproduced from his
illustrations of a volume of poems by Mr. Woodhull, does not dispose
one to rate highly his proficiency in this accomplishment. We may
expect that, after all, it was the first-mentioned of his amusements
in which he took the greatest delight, and that neither the brush,
the bow, nor the fowling-piece was nearly so often in his hand as
the book. Within a few miles of Sutton, at Skelton Castle, an almost
unique Roman stronghold, since modernized by Gothic hands, dwelt
his college-friend John Hall Stevenson, whose well-stocked library
contained a choice but heterogeneous collection of books--old French
"ana," and the learning of mediaeval doctors--books intentionally and
books unintentionally comic, the former of which Sterne read with an
only too retentive a memory for their jests, and the latter with an
acutely humorous appreciation of their solemn trifling. Later on it
will be time to note the extent to which he utilized these results of
his widely discursive reading, and to examine the legitimacy of the
mode in which he used them: here it is enough to say generally that
the materials for many a burlesque chapter of _Tristram Shandy_ must