idle tales about Sterne's having "black-mailed" the patron out of a
presentation to a benefice worth no more, after all, than some 70£ a
year net.

There is somewhat more substance, however, in the scandal which got
abroad with reference to a certain alleged transaction between Sterne
and Warburton. Before Sterne had been many days in London, and while
yet his person and doings were the natural subjects of the newest
gossip, a story found its way into currency to the effect that the
new-made Bishop of Gloucester had found it advisable to protect
himself against the satiric humour of the author of the _Tristram
Shandy_ by a substantial present of money. Coming to Garrick's ears,
it was repeated by him--whether seriously or in jest--to Sterne,
from whom it evoked a curious letter, which in Madame de Medalle's
collection has been studiously hidden away amongst the correspondence
of seven years later. "'Twas for all the world," he began, "like a cut
across my finger with a sharp pen-knife. I saw the blood--gave it a
suck, wrapt it up, and thought no more about it.... The story you told
me of Tristram's pretended tutor this morning"--(the scandal was, that
Warburton had been threatened with caricature in the next volume of
the novel, under the guise of the hero's tutor)--"this vile story, I
say, though I then saw both how and where it wounded, I felt little
from it at first, or, to speak more honestly (though it ruins my
simile), I felt a great deal of pain from it, but affected an air,
usual in such accidents, of feeling less than I had." And he goes on
to repudiate, it will be observed, not so much the moral offence of
corruption, in receiving money to spare Warburton, as the intellectual
solecism of selecting him for ridicule. "What the devil!" he
exclaims, "is there no one learned blockhead throughout the schools
of misapplied science in the Christian world to make a tutor of for