volume of
the novel, under the guise of the hero's tutor)--"this vile story, I
say, though I then saw both how and where it wounded, I felt little
from it at first, or, to speak more honestly (though it ruins my
simile), I felt a great deal of pain from it, but affected an air,
usual in such accidents, of feeling less than I had." And he goes on
to repudiate, it will be observed, not so much the moral offence of
corruption, in receiving money to spare Warburton, as the intellectual
solecism of selecting him for ridicule. "What the devil!" he
exclaims, "is there no one learned blockhead throughout the schools
of misapplied science in the Christian world to make a tutor of for
my Tristram--are we so run out of stock that there is no one
lumber-headed, muddle-headed, mortar-headed, pudding-head chap amongst
our doctors...but I must disable my judgment by choosing a Warburton?"
Later on, in a letter to his friend, Mr. Croft, at Stillington, whom
the scandal had reached through a "society journal" of the time, he
asks whether people would suppose he would be "such a fool as to fall
foul of Dr. Warburton, my best friend, by representing him so weak a
man; or by telling such a lie of him as his giving me a purse to buy
off the tutorship of Tristram--or that I should be fool enough to own
that I had taken a purse for that purpose?" It will be remarked that
Sterne does not here deny having received a purse from Warburton,
but only his having received it by way of black-mail: and the most
mysterious part of the affair is that Sterne did actually receive the
strange present of a "purse of gold" from Warburton (whom at that time
he did not know nor had ever seen); and that he admits as much in one
of his letters to Miss Fourmantelle. "I had a purse of guineas given
me yesterday by a Bishop," he writes, triumphantly, but without
volunteering any explanation of this extraordinary gift. Sterne's
letter to Garrick was forwarded, it would seem, to Warburton; and the
Bishop thanks Garrick for having procured for him "the confutation of
an impertinent story the first moment I heard of it." This, however,
can hardly count for much. If Warburton had really wished Sterne to
abstain from caricaturing him, he would be as anxious--and for much
the same reasons--to conceal the fact as to suppress the caricature.
He would naturally have the disclosure of it reported to Sterne
for formal contradiction, as in fulfilment of a virtual term in the
bar