ines to
the memory of the departed humourist, and with a statement, inaccurate
by eight months, of the date of his death, and a year out as to his
age. Dying, as has been seen, on the 18th of March, 1768, at the age
of fifty-four, he is declared on this slab to have died on the 13th of
November, aged fifty-three years. There is more excuse, however, for
this want of veracity than sepulchral inscriptions can usually plead.
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. But, wherever the grave really was,
the body interred in it, according to the strange story to which I
have referred, is no longer there. That story goes: that two days
after the burial, on the night of the 24th of March, the corpse was
stolen by body-snatchers, and by them disposed of to M. Collignon,
Professor of Anatomy at Cambridge; that the Professor invited a few
scientific friends to witness a demonstration, and that among these
was one who had been acquainted with Sterne, and who fainted with
horror on recognizing in the already partially dissected "subject" the
features of his friend. So, at least, this very gruesome and Poe-like
legend runs; but it must be confessed that all the evidence which
Mr. Fitzgerald has been able to collect in its favour is of the very
loosest and vaguest description. On the other hand, it is, of course,
only fair to recollect that, in days when respectable surgeons and
grave scientific professors had to depend upon the assistance of
law-breakers for the prosecution of their studies and teachings, every
effort would naturally be made to hush up any such unfortunate affair.
There is, moreover, independent evidence to the fact that similar
desecrations of this grave-yard had of late been very common; and
that at least one previous attempt to check the operations of the
"resurrection-men" had been attended with peculiarly infelicitous
results. In the _St. James's Chronicle_ for November 26, 1767, we find
it recorded that "the Burying Ground in Oxford Road, belonging to the
Parish of St. George's, Hanover Square, having been lately robbed of
several dead bodies, a Watcher was placed there, attended