Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 54.djvu/207

 the following year Roger's regiment was ordered to Clonmel in Tipperary; and Laurence was born there on 24 Nov. 1713, within a few days of the family's arrival. Chudleigh's regiment was reduced the same day, and the father, thus placed on half-pay, carried his wife and children to his mother's house at Elvington. There for nearly two years they subsisted on her bounty. In May 1715 the regiment was re-formed, and Roger resumed active service (, Records of 34th Foot). Wife and children followed him to Dublin, and thence, moving in the track of the regiment, to Exeter. In 1719 Ensign Roger left his family in the Isle of Wight while he served in the expedition to Vigo, but in 1720 they rejoined him at the barracks at Wicklow. At the end of a year Mrs. Sterne took the children on a half-year's visit to a relative, one Fetherston, parson of the neighbouring parish of Animo. There Laurence had ‘a wonderful escape in falling through the mill-race whilst the mill was going, and of being taken up unhurt.’ Like sojourns (each of about a year's duration) followed in barracks or with pitying kinsfolk—at Dublin (where, in the course of 1721, Laurence learned to write), at Mullingar, and at Carrickfergus. Meanwhile the family was growing, but most of Sterne's brothers and sisters were ‘of a fine delicate frame,’ ‘not made to last long.’ Four children—two sons and two daughters—who were born between 1715 and 1722, died before completing their fourth year. Only two children besides Laurence survived infancy: his sisters—Mary, the eldest of the family, and Catherine, the youngest (born at Londonderry in 1724).

In the autumn of 1723, when he was ten years old, Sterne's father ‘got leave of his colonel to fix him at a school at Halifax.’ Thus Sterne's wanderings for the time ceased, but the deep impression that soldiers and barrack life made on him was attested in his portraits of Uncle Toby, Corporal Trim, and Lieutenant Le Fever. At school he spent ‘eight long years or more’ chafing at the tedium of ‘typtōing it at Latin and Greek.’ ‘He would learn when he pleased,’ but was ‘inquisitive after all kinds of knowledge,’ and spent his slender store of pocket money on chap-books. An exceptional sensitiveness to pain and pleasure soon declared itself, and in the class-room the stories of the ‘Iliad’ moved him to uncontrollable tears or laughter (cf. Tristram Shandy, bk. vi. chap. 32). Though of delicate constitution, he liked the open air and field sports, and was on occasion whimsically mischievous. When the schoolroom had been newly whitewashed, he mounted the workmen's ladder and ‘wrote with a brush in large capital letters “Lau. Sterne,” for which the usher severely whipped’ him. But the master, according to Sterne's account, took a different view of his freak, and declared that ‘that name should never be effaced, for [the lad] was a boy of genius and sure to come to preferment.’

Meanwhile in 1727 his father played a part in the defence of Gibraltar, and there ‘was run through the body by Captain [Christopher] Phillips in a duel: the quarrel began about a goose.’ His health was permanently injured, and when he subsequently went with his regiment to Jamaica in 1729, an attack of ‘the country fever’ ‘made a child of him.’ He died suddenly at Port Antonio in March 1731, holding the rank of lieutenant. All that he left his widow and children was a pension of 20l. a year. Mrs. Sterne, with her two daughters, was at the time of her husband's death with her relatives in Ireland. Her husband's family were unwilling to aid her, and she opened an embroidery school in her native land—probably at Clonmel. For eleven years her son heard little of her.

Sterne left school soon after his father's death, ‘without a shilling in the world.’ For two years he lived in idleness, apparently at Elvington, on the bounty of his first cousin, Richard Sterne—who alone of his father's kindred showed much disposition to help him. In 1733 this cousin, who became, he says, ‘a father to’ him, offered him 30l. a year wherewith to go to the university. Of Jesus College, Cambridge, his great-grandfather, the archbishop, had been master and benefactor, and his uncle Jaques a scholar. Accordingly, on 6 July 1733, when nearly twenty—an unusually late age—Laurence was admitted a sizar of the college. A year later, on 30 July 1734, he was promoted to an exhibition on the foundation of the archbishop. He did not matriculate in the university till 29 March 1735. The long break in his educational career between leaving school and going to Cambridge reinforced his natural impatience of disciplinary restraint, and the educational system in vogue in the university excited his abhorrence. For mathematics he had an inherent incapacity, and he discovered only matter for jesting in the terminology of formal logic and the writings of Aristotle, to which his tutors mainly directed his attention. But his time at Cambridge was not wasted. The classics he read with appreciation in a desultory fashion, and one academic text-book—Locke's ‘Essay on the Human Understanding’—which had recently