The only
living persons who could possibly be affected by it, for good or
evil, were those surviving friends of the dead man, to whom Sterne's
allusion to what he called Dr. Mead's "droll foible" was calculated to
cause the deepest pain and shame.
The other matter of offence to Sterne's Yorkshire readers was of a
much more elaborate kind. In the person of Dr. Slop, the grotesque
man-midwife, who was to have assisted, but missed assisting, at
Tristram's entry into the world, the good people of York were not slow
to recognize the physical peculiarities and professional antecedents
of Dr. Burton, the local accoucheur, whom Archdeacon Sterne had
arrested as a Jacobite. That the portrait was faithful to anything
but the external traits of the original, or was intended to reproduce
anything more than these, Sterne afterwards denied; and we have
certainly no ground for thinking that Burton had invited ridicule on
any other than the somewhat unworthy ground of the curious ugliness
of his face and figure. It is most unlikely that his success as a
practitioner in a branch of the medical art in which imposture is the
most easily detected, could have been earned by mere quackery; and
he seems, moreover, to have been a man of learning in more kinds than
one.
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