--"TRISTRAM SHANDY," VOL. IX.--"THE SENTIMENTAL JOURNEY"
CHAPTER VIII.
(1768.)
LAST DAYS AND DEATH
CHAPTER IX.
STERNE AS A WRITER.--THE CHARGE OF PLAGIARISM.--DR. FERRIAR'S
"ILLUSTRATIONS"
CHAPTER X.
STYLE AND GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS.--HUMOUR AND SENTIMENT
CHAPTER XI.
CREATIVE AND DRAMATIC POWER.--PLACE IN ENGLISH LITERATURE
STERNE.
CHAPTER I.
BIRTH, PARENTAGE, AND EARLY YEARS.
(1713-1724.)
Towards the close of the month of November, 1713, one of the last of
the English regiments which had been detained in Flanders to supervise
the execution of the treaty of Utrecht arrived at Clonmel from
Dunkirk. The day after its arrival the regiment was disbanded; and
yet a few days later, on the 24th of the month, the wife of one of its
subalterns gave birth to a son. The child who thus early displayed the
perversity of his humour by so inopportune an appearance was Laurence
Sterne. "My birthday," he says, in the slipshod, loosely-strung
notes by which he has been somewhat grandiloquently said to have
"anticipated the labours" of the biographer--"my birthday was ominous
to my poor father, who was the day after our arrival, with many other
brave officers, broke and sent adrift into the wide world with a wife
and two children.
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