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STEREOSCOPE 78 STERNE fleeting stereoscope are distinguished by the names pseudoscope, iconoscope, tele- stereoscope, and polistereoscope, the last being an apparatus which serves the pur- poses of all the others. STEREOTYPE, fixed type; hence a plate cast from a plaster, papier-mache, or composition mold, on which is a fac- simile of the page of type as set up by the compositor, and which, when fitted to a block, may be used under the press, exactly as movable type. STERNE, LAURENCE, a British au- thor, was the son of Lieutenant Roger Sterne of the British Army, and Agnes Nuttle, an Irishwoman, widow of a Cap- tain Hebert. He was born in Clonmel, Ireland, on Nov. 24, 1713, and went to school in Halifax from the age of 10 till his father's death in 1731. Two years later he was sent at the expense of a cousin to Jesus College, Cambridge, where he graduated B. A. in 1736 and M. A. in 1740. Though quite unfitted for the church, he took orders and after a period as curate at Buckden, became vicar of Sutton-in-the-Forest in York- shire. He engaged a curate to attend to the parish, while he spent most of his time in York, where he was a prebendary in the Cathedral. In 1741 he married Eliza Lumley, the o^>ihan daughter of a clergyman, who brought him £40 a year, and in correspondence with whom he in- vented the term "sentimental" which his writings established in the language to describe a certain phase of tender emo- tion. In 1743 he added to his other offi- ces the living of Stillington, adjoining Sutton, but continued till 1759 to live at Sutton, preaching there in the morn- ing and at Stillington in the afternoon. He was a "sporting parson," experi- mented unsuccessfully with farming, and did not get along with his parishioners. Within doors he dabbled in music and painting, read widely, and enjoyed a quite unclerical society, a leader in which was his old college friend, John Hall- Stevenson, at v/hose house at Skelton met a club called the "Demoniacks." His health was poor and was not improved by his debauches, and his married life was far from calm, as he was always engaged in sentimental love affairs. For his only child, Lydia, he seems to have had a genuine affection. In 1759, while his wife was suffering from an attack of insanity, partly brought on by her husband's misbehavior, he began to write "Tristram Shandy." He had previously published a couple of sermons and had amused his friends with a satirical skit on a local ecclesiastical quarrel. The first two volumes of "Tris- tram Shandy," having been refused by a London publisher, were printed at York, and its style and wit, in spite of its rambling digressions, gave it an imme- diate and sensational success. He went up to London where he was lionized and engaged in innumerable flirtations, while his book was attacked in Yorkshire for its caricatures of local personages and in London by severer critics for its im- propriety. On his return he added to his livings the curacy of Coxv/old, where he went to live, and spent lavishly the considerable sums he now received from his publishers. The third and fourth vol- umes of "Tristram" took him to London again in 1760, where he renewed his so- cial triumphs, leaving his wife, now recovered, but hardly happier, at Cox- wold. The fifth and sixth volumes fol- lowed in 1761, and in the following year, to recover from a severe illness, he went to Paris. There he was received with great distinction, but suffered another attack of haemorrhage of the lungs and went to the south with his wife and daughter. In the end of 1764 he re- turned to England alone, bringing the seventh and eighth volumes; and in the next year he made a tour of France and Italy, which formed the basis of his "Sen- timental Journey." The ninth and last volume of "Tristram Shandy" appeared in 1767, and the two volumes of "A Sen- timental Journey" in 1768. Meantime Sterne had made the ac- quaintance of Elizabeth Draper, the wife of an Indian official, with whom he formed a sentimental relation and to whom he wrote his "Journal to Eliza." He never saw her after her return to India in 1767. "A Sentimental Journey" enhanced his reputation, but Sterne's health was get- ting worse and worse, and he died in London on March 18, 1768, and was buried in St. George's burial ground. Many of his sermons and letters were published after his death by his wife and daughter, who had been left only debts and manuscripts as a legacy. Of Sterne's character very little good can be said. His emotional sensibility was unregulated by moral principles, and both the humor and indecency of his writings were genuine expressions of his temperament. But he was master of an easy and graceful English style, a subtle humorist, and an acute observer of human nature. He set agoing a senti- mental craze that spread all over Europe and evoked imitations in many languages. He lives now, not by his sentimentality, which has become repellent to modem taste, but by his humor and his style, in regard to which he has few equals.