h. But, be this as it may, it
is more than probable that from the time when he was sent to Halifax
School the whole care and cost of the boy's education was borne by his
Yorkshire relatives. The Memoir says that, "by God's care of me, my
cousin Sterne, of Elvington, became a father to me, and sent me to
the University, &c., &c.;" and it is to be inferred from this that the
benevolent guardianship of Sterne's uncle Richard (who died in 1732,
the year before Laurence was admitted of Jesus College, Cambridge)
must have been taken up by his son. Of his school course--though it
lasted for over seven years--the autobiographer has little to say;
nothing, indeed, except that he "cannot omit mentioning" that anecdote
with which everybody, I suppose, who has ever come across the briefest
notice of Sterne's life is familiar. The schoolmaster "had the ceiling
of the schoolroom new-whitewashed, and the ladder remained there. I,
one unlucky day, mounted it, and wrote with a brush, in large capital
letters, LAU. STERNE for which the usher severely whipped me. My
master was very much hurt at this, and said before me that never
should that name be effaced, for I was a boy of genius, and he was
sure I should come to preferment. This expression made me forget the
blows I had received." It is hardly to be supposed, of course, that
this story is pure romance; but it is difficult, on the other hand,
to believe that the incident has been related by Sterne exactly as it
happened. That the recorded prediction may have been made in jest--or
even in earnest (for penetrating teachers have these prophetic moments
sometimes)--is, of course, possible; but that Sterne's master was
"very much hurt" at the boy's having been justly punished for an act
of wanton mischief, or that he recognized it as the natural privilege
of nascent genius to deface newly-whitewashed ceilings, must have been
a delusion of the humourist's later years. The extreme fatuity which
it would compel us to attribute to the schoolmaster seems inconsistent
with the power of detecting intellectual capacity in any one else. On
the whole, one inclines to suspect that the remark belonged to that
order of half sardonic, half kindly jest which a certain sort
of pedagogue sometimes throws off, for the consolation of a
recently-caned boy; and that Sterne's vanity, either then or
afterwards (for it remained juvenile all his life), translated it into
a serious prophecy. In itself, however, the