Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 54.djvu/209

 what appeared to be a consumption. Thereupon she confided to her leisurely lover that she had bequeathed him all her property. ‘This generosity,’ Sterne confessed, ‘overpowered me. It pleased God she recovered.’ He married her in York Minster on Easter Monday (30 March) 1741, Richard Osbaldeston, the dean, officiating (Yorkshire Archæological Journal, iii. 93). Mrs. Sterne refused to have her fortune of some 40l. a year settled on her, wishing ‘for no better security’ than her husband's honour (, i. 75).

Sterne supplied much autobiographic detail in his account of Parson Yorick in ‘Tristram Shandy,’ and he there credited Yorick with making a hasty journey through Europe in 1741 as governor to ‘Mr. Noddy's eldest son’ (bk. i. chap. xi.). It is quite possible that Sterne travelled abroad soon after his marriage, and that his pupil was related to Charles Gordon, fourth earl of Aboyne (1726–1794), as whose chaplain he was officially described two years later. In any case he improved his position at home early in 1742 by contriving to exchange his prebend of Givendale for that of North Newbald, which was of greater value (5 Jan. 1741–2), and gave him a house in Stonegate; the lease was at one time held by the York bookseller, Thomas Gent [q. v.], who recorded Sterne's succession to the property in his autobiography (, Life, 1832, pp. 194–5). A year later, on 13 March 1742–3, Sterne was instituted to the living of Stillington—the parish adjoining Sutton—which he was permitted to hold in conjunction with his other preferments. The dispensation described him as chaplain to the Earl of Aboyne. Sterne owed Stillington to his wife's influence. ‘A friend of hers in the south,’ Sterne wrote, ‘had promised her that if she married a clergyman in Yorkshire, when the living became vacant he would make her a compliment of it.’ The actual patron who presented Sterne was Richard Levett, prebendary of Stillington in York Cathedral. The parsonage-house at Stillington he never occupied (cf. Brit. Mus. Addit. MSS. 16158–66, comprising Sterne's certificates of ordination and of his institution to benefices).

For more than twenty years (1738–59) Sterne resided at Sutton, and followed the ordinary pursuits of a rural parson who enjoyed substantial preferment. His income amounted to some 200l. a year. When he was not officiating in York, he preached each Sunday morning at Sutton and every Sunday afternoon at Stillington, walking thither across the fields from Sutton. But parochial duties were irksome to him. His parishioners did not understand the light-hearted indifference with which he viewed them and his sacred functions. He was a good shot, and the story is told that one Sunday, when ‘his pointer dog’ sprang a covey of partridges on his way to Stillington, he went home for his gun, and his congregation waited for him in vain. In the winter he skated, and was once nearly drowned by the breaking of the ice at Stillington and the unreadiness of his parishioners to rescue him. Following the example of other rural parsons, he endeavoured to increase his income by farming. With his wife's money he purchased some land in Sutton parish, and established a dairy farm. He kept seven milch cows, but his and his wife's only notion of business was to sell their butter cheaper than their neighbours, with the result that they lost money and increased their local unpopularity. Frequently Sterne recorded in his registers his planting of fruit-trees in his garden, and his extant correspondence (before 1760) contains many references to the annual yields of his barley and oats. But his agricultural experiments rarely ended successfully. ‘The following up of that affair (I mean farming),’ he wrote to a friend on 19 Sept. 1767 (Letter 107), ‘made me lose my temper, and a cart-load of turnips was (I thought) very dear at two hundred pounds.’ In his later years at Sutton he tried to ‘clear his hands and head of all country entanglements’ by finding tenants for his glebe and freehold, and by letting out his tithes (, i. 92). His dealings in land were not unsuccessful. With characteristic disregard of the rights of his poor parishioners, he, in his capacity, not of clergyman, but of owner of land outside his glebe, actively supported Lord Fauconberg, the lord of the manor of Sutton, and his neighbour, Philip Harland, in securing the passage through parliament in 1756 of a private act ‘for dividing and enclosing several fields, meadows, and commons in the township of Sutton upon the Forest.’ The act recites how Laurence Sterne was ‘seized in his own right of a messuage and certain lands in the said township,’ and how, by arrangement with his two fellow-beneficiaries, he was granted various parcels of land in addition to his former holding, amounting in the aggregate to sixty acres, two roods, and ten perches (cf. Sutton Enclosure Act, 29 Geo. II). At a later date (in 1766) he interested himself in a similar act of enclosure in his parish of Stillington, when a share in the common land was bestowed on him in consideration of his surrender of ‘the tythes of wool and