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Updated: May 29, 2025
The figure of Roger Sterne alone stands out with any clearness by the side of the ceaselessly flitting mother and phantasmal children of Laurence Sterne's Memoir; and it is touched in with strokes so vivid and characteristic that critics have been tempted to find in it the original of the most famous portrait in the Shandy gallery.
The stone was erected by the pious hands of "two brother Masons," many years, it is said, after the event which it purports to record; and from the wording of the epitaph which commences, "Near this place lyes the body," &c., it obviously does not profess to indicate what, doubtless, there was no longer any means of tracing the exact spot in which Sterne's remains were laid.
He is painting a little picture 'Sterne recovering his Manuscripts from the Curls of his Hostess at Lyons. I have been sitting to him for the head of Sterne, whom he thinks I resemble very strongly. At any rate, he has made no alteration in the character of the face from the one he had drawn from Sterne's portrait, and has simply attended to the expression.
But before finally quitting this part of my subject it may be as well, perhaps, to deal somewhat at length with a matter which will doubtless have to be many times incidentally referred to in the course of this study, but which I now hope to relieve myself from the necessity of doing more than touch upon hereafter. I refer of course to Sterne's perpetually recurring flirtations.
This was the reason why Mr. Sterne's confidential communication, delivered hurriedly on the shore alongside the dark silent ship, had disturbed his equanimity. It was the most incomprehensible and unexpected thing that could happen; and the perturbation of his spirit was so great that, forgetting all about his letters, he ran rapidly up the bridge ladder.
And hence it might be rash to predict that Sterne's days will be as long in the land of literary memory as the two great writers aforesaid. Banked, as he still is, among "English classics," he undergoes, I suspect, even more than an English classic's ordinary share of reverential neglect.
I am glad to hear that my starlings chatter so pleasantly; at all events the refrain is not that of Sterne's. They can get out; and do get out; and shall get out as much as they please. I am no gaoler, and shut up nobody but myself. I have always thought that young people have too little liberty. My principle has been to make little free men and women of them from the first.
It is not merely that we don't want to know how the scene affected him, and that we resent as an impertinence the elaborate account of his tender emotions; we don't wish to be reminded of his presence at all. But, in truth, this whole episode of Maria of Moulines was, like more than one of Sterne's efforts after the pathetic, condemned to failure from the very conditions of its birth.
Roger Sterne's lot in the world was not so much an unhappy as an uncomfortable one; and discomfort earns little sympathy, and absolutely no admiration, for its sufferers. He somehow reminds us of one of those Irish heroes good-natured, peppery, debt-loaded, light-hearted, shiftless whose fortunes we follow with mirthful and half-contemptuous sympathy in the pages of Thackeray.
A sentimental journey in Canada is not like Sterne's, all about corking-pins and remises, monks and Marias, nor is it likely, in this utilitarian age, even if Sterne could be revived to write it, to be as immortal; nevertheless, let us ramble.
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