somehow deserve a more effective "cutting-up" after death than he ever received before it. The Rev. Laurence Sterne had--I should have told you--a church-living down in Yorkshire, to which was afterward added, by adroit diplomacy of his friends, an official position in connection with York Cathedral. I do not think the people of his parish missed him much when he was away; and I am very sure they missed him a good deal, whenever he was--nominally--there: painting, {216} fiddling, shooting, and dining-out, took very much of his parochial time; and _Tristram Shandy_ and its success, literary and pecuniary, introduced him to a career in London, and in Paris afterward--for he was always an immense favorite with the French (instance Tony Johannot's illustrations)--to which he yielded himself with a graceful acquiescence that, I am afraid, put his parishioners more out of mind than the fiddling and the shooting had done. I believe that he loved his daughter Lydia with an honest love; with respect to his wife, one cannot be so sure; some of the most tender letters he left, are addressed to a Mrs. Draper, who was his "dear Eliza"--through a great many quires of paper. He was a Cambridge man and well taught;--of abundant reading, which he made to serve his turn in various ways, and conspicuously by his stealings; he stole from Rabelais; he stole from Shakespeare; he stole from Fuller;[15] he stole {217} from Burton's _Anatomy of Melancholy_; not a stealing of ideas only, but of words and sentences and half-pages together, without a sign of obligation; and yet he did so wrap about these thefts with the strings and lappets of his own abounding humor and drollery, as to give to the whole--thieving and Shandyism combined--a stamp of individuality. Ten to one that these old authors who had suffered the pilfering, would have lost cognizance of their expressions, in the new surroundings of the Yorkshire parson; and joined in the common grin of applause with which the world welcomed and forgave them.