Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 54.djvu/221

 in Clifford Street. The Dukes of Grafton and Roxburghe were there, with the Earls of March and Ossory, Garrick, Hume, and James. Crawford's Scottish footman, James Macdonald, who afterwards published memoirs, was sent by the company to Old Bond Street to make inquiries. Macdonald was told by the landlady to go to Sterne's bedroom. As he approached the bedside he heard the dying man mutter, ‘Now it has come,’ and a few moments later life was extinct. According to Dr. Ferriar, the lodging-house servant, who was his sole attendant, tore the gold buttons from the sleeves of the garment he was wearing while he was uttering his last breath. Croft says that many compromising letters from ladies of rank were found in his rooms and were burnt by a friendly hand. There seems little ground for crediting Sterne's London hosts and patrons with neglect in his last hours. James was constantly with him in his last days. Late in the evening of his death Lady Mary Coke met some of his titled friends. ‘Lord Ossory told us,’ she wrote, ‘that the famous Dr. Sterne dyed that morning; he seem'd to lament him very much. Lord Eglinton said (but not in a ludicrous manner) that he had taken his “Sentimental Journey”’ (, Letters and Journal, ii. 216).

Sterne was buried on the 22nd in the St. George's burial-ground in the Bayswater Road. According to a ghastly story that seems authentic, on 24 March, two days after the burial, the body was ‘resurrected’ and sold for purposes of dissection to Charles Collignon [q. v.], the professor of anatomy at Cambridge. The features are said to have been recognised by a friend who stood beside the dissecting table. The skeleton, it is stated, was long preserved at Cambridge. A monumental stone, with an inscription (inaccurate as to the date of death), was afterwards erected near the site of his grave in the St. George's burial-ground by ‘two brother masons,’ a disinterested act of reverence which they assigned to Sterne's possession of all the qualities that freemasonry honoured, although Sterne himself was not of the fraternity. The burial-ground, long neglected, has lately been put in good order, and the stone has been recut and placed in the mortuary chapel.

Sterne left no will, and his widow took out letters of administration on 4 June. His books were sold to Messrs. Sotheran & Todd, booksellers, of York, and many of them figured among the 5,500 entries in the catalogue, published by Todd in 1775, ‘of several libraries and parcels of books lately purchased, containing upwards of ten thousand volumes’ (copy in Hailstone Library in York Minster). Sterne's debts amounted to 1,100l., and his assets to 400l. Mrs. Sterne, with an income of only 40l. a year in her own right, was not in a position either to pay the creditors or to provide for herself satisfactorily. Sterne's vicarage at Sutton, which had been burnt down, was still in ruins, and when a suit was instituted against his widow to recover damages, she made an oath of insolvency, but subsequently tendered 60l. which was accepted, although the cost of rebuilding amounted to near 600l. (Sutton Parish Reg.) In August, under Hall-Stevenson's auspices, 800l. was collected for her and her daughter at the York races. Early next year three further volumes of sermons were issued for their benefit, and subscribers were numerous (cf. Brit. Mus. Addit. MS. 22261, f. 48, receipt by Mrs. Sterne of a payment by Lady Strafford). Resolving to dispose of the rest of Sterne's manuscripts to the best advantage, widow and daughter travelled to London, and took lodgings in Gerrard Street. But they rapidly alienated most of Sterne's friends by the reckless indifference to either his or their own reputation which they displayed in their efforts to make money out of Sterne's literary remains. Mrs. Draper, on learning of Sterne's death from Mrs. James, and of his wife's and daughter's distress, collected six hundred rupees herself in their behalf, and induced a friend, Colonel Donald Campbell, to collect an equal sum among his fellow officers. Campbell brought the money to Miss Sterne with an introduction from Mrs. Draper, who thought he might prove an eligible suitor. In any case, Mrs. Draper offered to provide for Lydia if she would join her in India. Lydia wrote resenting Mrs. Draper's patronage, and defending her mother's character from the aspersions her father had cast on it. With less excuse she joined her mother in a threat to publish, from copies in their possession, Sterne's letters to Mrs. Draper unless a heavy sum of money was at once remitted to them. Mrs. Draper, violently perturbed, wrote to Becket the bookseller, promising any reasonable recompense if he would secure the letters in case they were offered for sale, and hand them to Mrs. James. Mrs. Sterne was better than her word, and the letters did not at the time pass out of her hands. Meanwhile Lydia applied to Wilkes to write a full biography of her father (cf. Brit. Mus. Addit. MSS., Wilkes MS. 30877, ff. 70–8). Wilkes assented, and Hall-Stevenson promised his cooperation. In the summer of 1769 Lydia