a goose" (a thoroughly Shandian catastrophe); and thence to Jamaica,
where, "with a constitution impaired" by the sword-thrust earned in
his anserine quarrel, he was defeated in a more deadly duel with the
"country fever," and died. "His malady," writes his son, with a touch
of feeling struggling through his dislocated grammar, "took away his
senses first, and made a child of him; and then in a month or two
walking about continually without complaining, till the moment he sat
down in an arm-chair and breathed his last."

[Footnote 1: "It was in this parish," says Sterne, "that I had that
wonderful escape in falling through a mill race while the mill was
going, and being taken up unhurt; the story is incredible, but known
to all that part of Ireland, where hundreds of the common people
flocked to seeme." More incredible still does it seem that Thoresby
should relate the occurrence of an accident of precisely the same kind
to Sterne's great-grandfather, the Archbishop. "Playing near a mill,
he fell within a claw; there was but one board or bucket wanting in
the whole wheel, but a gracious Providence so ordered it that the void
place came down at that moment, else he had been crushed to death; but
was reserved to be a grand benefactor afterwards." (Thoresby, ii. 15.)
But what will probably strike the reader as more extraordinary even
than this coincidence is that Sterne should have been either unaware
of it, or should have omitted mention of it in the above passage.]

There is, as has been observed, a certain mixture of the comic and the
pathetic in the life-history of this obscure father of a famous
son. His life was clearly not a fortunate one, so far as external
circumstances go; but its misfortunes had no sort of consoling dignity
about them. 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. He was obviously
a typical specimen of that class of men who are destitute alike of the
virtues and failings of the "respectable" and successful; whom many
people love and no one respects; whom everybody pities in their
struggles and difficulties, but whom few pity without a smile.

It is evident, howev