Gray, born three years later than Sterne, had entered a
year after him at Cambridge as a pensioner of Peterhouse, and the two
students went through their terms together, though the poet at the
time took no degree. There was probably little enough in common
between the shy, fastidious, slightly effeminate pensioner of
Peterhouse, and a scholar of Jesus, whose chief friend and comrade was
a man like Hall; and no close intimacy between the two men, if they
had come across each other, would have been very likely to arise.
But it does not appear that they could have ever met or heard of each
other, for Gray writes of Sterne, after _Tristram Shandy_ had made
him famous, in terms which clearly show that he did not recall his
fellow-undergraduate.
In January, 1736, Sterne took his B.A. degree, and quitted Cambridge
for York, where another of his father's brothers now makes his
appearance as his patron. Dr. Jacques Sterne was the second son of
Simon Sterne, of Elvington, and a man apparently of more marked and
vigorous character than any of his brothers. What induced him now to
take notice of the nephew, whom in boyhood and early youth he had left
to the unshared guardianship of his brother, and brother's son,
does not appear; but the personal history of this energetic
pluralist--Prebendary of Durham, Archdeacon of Cleveland, Canon
Residentiary, Precentor, Prebendary, and Archdeacon of York, Rector of
Rise, and Rector of Hornsey-cum-Riston--suggests the surmise that he
detected qualities in the young Cambridge graduate which would
make him useful.
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