If, however, the marriage, which, difficulties being removed, took place on Easter Monday, March 30, 1741, did not bring lasting happiness to Sterne, it probably brought him some at the time, and it certainly brought him an accession of fortune; for in addition to what little money Miss Lumley had, a friend of hers bestowed the additional living of Stillington on her husband. These various sources of income must have made a tolerable revenue, which, after the publication of _Tristram_, was further supplemented by yet another benefice given him by Lord Falconbridge at Coxwold, a living of no great value, but a pleasant place of residence. Add to this the profits of his books in the last eight years of his life, which were for that day considerable, and it will be seen that, as has been said above, Sterne might have been much worse off in this world’s goods than he was. He seems, like other people, to have made some rather costly experiments in farming; and his way of life latterly, what with his own journeys and sojourns in London, and the long separate residence of his wife and daughter in France, was expensive. But he complains little of poverty; and though he died in debt, much of that debt was due to no fault of his, but to the burning of the parsonage of Sutton. It is all the more remarkable in one way, though the absence of any pressure of want may explain it in another, that Sterne’s great literary gifts should have remained so long without finding any kind of literary expression, unless it was in the newspaper way, in respect to which he first obliged and afterwards disobliged his uncle. There is, I believe, no dispute about the fact that he distances, and that by many years, every other man of letters of anything like his rank--except Cowper, whose affliction puts him out of comparison--in the lateness of his fruiting time. All but a quarter of a century had passed since he took his degree when _Tristram Shandy_ appeared; and, putting sermons aside, the very earliest thing of his known, _The History of a Good Watch Coat_, only antedated _Tristram_ by two years or rather less. He was no doubt “making himself all this time;” but the making must have been an uncommonly slow process. Nor did he, like a good many writers, occupy the time in preparing what he was afterwards to publish, unless in the case of a few of his sermons. It is positively known that _Tristram_ was written merely as it was published, and the _Journey_ likewise. Nor is even the first by any means a long book. It is as nearly as possible the same length as Fielding’s _Amelia_ when printed straight on; and even then more allowance has to be made, not merely for its free and audacious plagiarisms, but for its constantly broken paragraphs, stars, dashes, and other trickeries. If it were possible to squeeze it up, as one squeezes a sponge, into the solid texture of an ordinary book, I doubt whether it would be very much longer than _Joseph Andrews_.