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A sixty-mile trip during three or four hours of the afternoon gave us the opportunity of seeing two abbey ruins, Helmsley Castle and Laurence Sterne's cottage at Coxwold. Our route led over a series of steep hills almost due north to Helmsley, a town with unbroken traditions from the time of the Conqueror.
But Sterne himself says in writing a year or so afterwards to a lady of his acquaintance "I hope I have been of some service to his lordship, and he has sufficiently requited me;" and in the face of this plain assertion, confirmed as it is by the fact that Lord Falconberg was on terms of friendly intimacy with the Vicar of Coxwold at a much later date than this, we may dismiss 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.
On our return from Helmsley, we noticed a byway leading across the moorland with a sign-board pointing the way "to Coxwold." We were reminded that in this out-of-the-way village Laurence Sterne, "the father of the English novel," had lived many years and that his cottage and church might still be seen.
My wife but I hate," he adds, with remarkable presence of mind, "to praise my wife. 'Tis as much as decency will allow to praise my daughter. I suppose," he concludes, "they will return next summer to France. They leave me in a month to reside at York for the winter, and I stay at Coxwold till the 1st of January."
It was, indeed, another triumph; and all through this spring up to midsummer did Sterne remain in London to enjoy it. But, with three distinct flocks awaiting a renewal of his pastoral ministrations in Yorkshire, it would scarcely have done for him, even in those easy-going days of the Establishment, to take up his permanent abode at the capital; and early in July he returned to Coxwold.
Perhaps Sterne's "Sentimental Journey," in its total absence of sentiment on any subject but humanity, and its entire want of notice of anything at Geneva, which might not as well have been seen at Coxwold, is the most striking instance I could give you; and if you compare with this negation of feeling on one side, the interludes of Molière, in which shepherds and shepherdesses are introduced in court dress, you will have a very accurate conception of the general spirit of the age.
On prying about the belfry we discovered an old helmet, with the gilding on it still discernible, which we at first supposed to be intended as a decoration to some tomb; but its weight and size precluded that supposition. In the church of Coxwold, the moralist might amass tomes of knowledge, and acquire the most forcible conviction of the fleeting nature of earth and its possessors.
His wife and daughter were about to rejoin him in the autumn, and he looked forward to settling them at a hired house in York before going up to town to publish his new volumes. On the 1st of October the two ladies arrived at York, and the next day the reunited family went on to Coxwold.
Four miles from Byland is Coxwold, once the residence of the celebrated Laurence Sterne, author of Tristram Shandy, &c. It is a beautiful and romantic retreat, excelling the "laughing vine-clad hills of France," which attracted the spirit of our English Rabelais to luxuriate amidst them.
Shandy Hall, as he christened his pretty parsonage at Coxwold, and as the house, still standing, is called to this day, soon became irksome to him. The very reaction begotten of unwonted quietude acted on his temperament with a dispiriting rather than a soothing effect.
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