o have snapped more ties than one, for in the Memoir Sterne
speaks of his youngest sister Catherine as "still living, but most
unhappily estranged from me by my uncle's wickedness and her own
folly." Of his elder sister Mary, who was born at Lille a year before
himself, he records that "she married one Weemans in Dublin, who used
her most unmercifully, spent his substance, became a bankrupt, and
left my poor sister to shift for herself, which she was able to do but
for a few months, for she went to a friend's house in the country and
died of a broken heart." Truly an unlucky family.[1] Only three to
survive the hardships among which the years of their infancy were
passed, and this to be the history of two out of the three survivors!
[Footnote 1: The mother, Mrs. Sterne, makes her appearance once more
for a moment in or about the year 1758. Horace Walpole, and after him
Byron, accused Sterne of having "preferred whining over a dead ass to
relieving a living mother," and the former went so far as to declare
"on indubitable authority" that Mrs. Sterne, "who kept a school (in
Ireland), having run in debt on account of an extravagant daughter,
would have rotted in a gaol if the parents of her scholars had not
raised a subscription for her." Even "the indubitable authority,"
however, does not positively assert--whatever may be meant to be
insinuated--that Sterne himself did nothing to assist his mother, and
Mr. Fitzgerald justly points out that to pay the _whole_ debts of a
bankrupt school might well have been beyond a Yorkshire clergyman's
means. Anyhow there is evidence that Sterne at a later date than this
was actively concerning himself about his mother's interests. She
afterwards came to York, whither he went to meet her; and he then
writes to a friend: "I trust my poor mother's affair is by this time
ended to _our_ comfort and hers."]
CHAPTER III.
LIFE AT SUTTON.--MARRIAGE.--THE PARISH PRIEST.
(1738-1759.)
Great writers who spring late and suddenly from obscurity into fame
and yet die early, must always form more or less perplexing subjects
of literary biography. The processes of their intellectual and
artistic growth lie hidden in nameless years; their genius is not
revealed to the world until it has reached its full maturity, and many
aspects of it, which, perhaps, would have easily explained themselves
if the gradual development had gone on before men's eyes, remain
often unexplained to the last. B
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