"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." The life of the new baby was one of
perpetual hurry and scurry; his mother, who had been an old campaigner,
daughter of what her son calls "a noted suttler" called Nuttle, had been
the widow of a soldier before she married Roger Sterne. In the
extraordinary fashion of the army of those days, the regiment was
hurried from place to place--as was that of the father of the infant
Borrow a century later--and with it hastened the unhappy Mrs. Sterne,
for ever bearing and for ever losing children, "most rueful journeys,"
marked by a long succession of little tombstones left behind. Finally,
at Gibraltar, the weary father, pugnacious to the last, picked a quarrel
about a goose and was pinked through the body, surviving in a thoroughly
damaged condition, to die, poor exhausted pilgrim of Bellona, in
barracks in Jamaica.

It would be difficult to imagine a childhood better calculated than this
to encourage pathos in a humorist and fun in a sentimentalist. His
account, in his brief autobiography, of the appearance and
disappearance of his hapless brothers and sisters is a proof of how
early life appealed to Laurence Sterne in the dappled colours of an
April day. We read there of how at Wicklow "we lost poor Joram, a pretty
boy"; how "Anne, that pretty blossom, fell in the barracks of Dublin";
how little Devijehar was "left behind" in Carrickfergus. We know not
whether to sob or to giggle, so tragic is the rapid catalogue of dying
babies, so ridiculous are their names and fates. Here, then, I think, we
have revealed to us the prime characteristic of Sterne, from which all
his other characteristics branch away, for evil or for good. As no other
writer since Shakespeare, and in a different and perhaps more intimate
way than even Shakespeare, he possessed the key of those tears that