It can hardly be said that Sterne was an unfortunate person during his lifetime, though he seems to have thought himself so. His childhood was indeed a little necessitous, and he died early, and in debt, after some years of very bad health. But from the time when he went to Cambridge, things went on the whole very fairly well with him in respect of fortune; his ill-health does not seem to have caused him much disquiet; his last ten years gave him fame, flirting, wandering, and other pleasures and diversions to his heart’s content; and his debts only troubled those he left behind him. He delighted in his daughter; he was able to get rid of his wife, when he was more than usually fatigatus et aegrotus of her, with singular ease. During the unknown, or almost unknown, middle of his life he had friends of the kind most congenial to him; and both in his time of preparation and his time of production in literature, he was able to indulge his genius in a way by no means common with men of letters. If his wish to die in a certain manner and circumstance was only bravado—and borrowed bravado—still it was granted; and it is quite certain that to him an old age of real illness would have been unmitigated torture. Even if we admit the ghastly stories of the fate of his remains, there was very little reason why anyone should not have anticipated Mr. Swinburne’s words on the morrow of Sterne’s death and said, “Oh! brother, the gods were good to you,” though even then he might have said it with a sort of mental reservation on the question whether Sterne had been very good to the gods.
Nemesis, for the purpose of adjusting things, played him the exceptionally savage trick of using the intervention of his idolised daughter. Little or nothing seems to be known of “Lydia Sterne de Medalle,” as she was pleased to sign herself; “ Mrs. Medalle,” as her bluff British contemporaries call her. But that she must have been either a very