mother, within an hour or two of her birth, and died next day. On 1 Dec. 1747 a second child, again a daughter, was born, and was also baptised in the name of Lydia on the same day. There were no other children of the marriage. The second Lydia reached maturity, and the genuine affection that Sterne lavished until his death on his only child forms the pleasantest feature of his domestic life. A proof of the amity existing on occasion in the household during Lydia's early girlhood is extant in the register of marriages celebrated by Sterne among his poor parishioners at Sutton between 1755 and 1757. Mrs. Sterne more than once signed her name as a witness of the ceremony, and from the age of nine Lydia, who grew into a frolicsome girl, frequently served in the same capacity, on the first occasion signing her name beneath her mother's (31 Jan. 1757).
With others of his kinsfolk Sterne's relations were far less harmonious. His elder sister, Mary, was, as he wrote, ‘most unfortunate. She married one Weemans in Dublin, who used her most unmercifully, spent his substance, became a bankrupt, and left my poor sister to shift for herself, which she was able to do but for a few months, for she went to a friend's house in the country and died of a broken heart.’ His mother and younger sister (Catherine), of whom he apparently lost sight between his father's death and his marriage, proved sources of graver embarrassment. Soon after his marriage the news reached them in Ireland that his wife was a woman of fortune. They straightway crossed to Liverpool with a view to subsisting at Chester or York on Sterne's or his wife's bounty. His mother visited Sutton, was dismissed with difficulty with 20l. and a gift of clothes, and, in spite of Laurence's remonstrances, took up her residence with her daughter at Chester. In 1744 Sterne's sister Catherine travelled to Sutton to announce their pecuniary distress. His wife offered to set Catherine up as a mantua-maker or milliner in London, and actually secured for her a situation in a nobleman's family, but the arrangement was treated with scorn. Between 1743 and 1750 Sterne reckoned that he forwarded to his mother and sister sums amounting to 90l. Just before the second Lydia was born, in November 1747, the elder Mrs. Sterne again swooped down on Sutton, and, while accepting ten guineas, declined an offer of an annuity of 8l. unless it was legally settled on her. From Sutton she passed to York to complain to Sterne's uncle of her son's neglect. Much of her story was false, and in 1751 Sterne, after defending himself from her charges in a long letter to his uncle, with whom he was then involved in a bitter quarrel, declared that her pension of 20l. was adequate for her needs, and that he could not rob his wife and daughter in her interest (Brit. Mus. Addit. MS. 25479, f. 12). His mother remained at York, and in 1759 he wrote of paying her and other friends a visit, as if he were on tolerable terms with her (Fitzgerald, i. 91). Some years later she died an insolvent debtor in ‘a wretched condition’ either in the common gaol at York ‘or soon after she was released’ (Croft). In her last days it is said that a subscription was set on foot to relieve her, and that Sterne made no sign (ib.) He was sensitive to public opinion, and it seems incredible that, had he known of her extremity, he should not have come to her rescue. His relations with her were passably amicable in 1759. After that date he was often absent from York, and the chances are that the news of her tragic end reached him when all was over. That he shirked his responsibilities in this as in other relations of life is possible; and in view of his published avowals of sensibility to all forms of distress, Byron's epigrammatic denunciation of him as the man who could whine over a dead ass while he let his mother starve has apparent justification. But allowance must be made for his early efforts to aid her, for her difficult temper, and for her malevolence in widening the breach between him and his influential uncle by retailing fanciful statements of his neglect of her when the quarrel was at its height.
For Sterne's alienation from his uncle, which began after 1745, two causes have been assigned. Jaques Sterne was an active whig politician. He corresponded with the Duke of Newcastle (cf. his manuscript letters in the Newcastle Correspondence in the British Museum), and his nephew, although he had no interest in politics, for a time deemed it wise to propitiate him by sending paragraphs to a York newspaper in the whig interest. When in 1745 a defence fund was raised in York at the outbreak of the Jacobite rebellion, Laurence subscribed 10l., while his uncle subscribed 50l.; and Laurence wrote soon after for ‘Lloyd's Evening Post’ a congratulatory article on the arrest of Dr. Burton, a York physician, who, as a suspected Jacobite, had incurred his uncle's enmity. Sterne afterwards immortalised Burton as ‘Dr. Slop.’ In 1747 the elder Sterne, who was archdeacon of Cleveland in 1735 and of the East Riding from 1750, printed a charge to the clergy entitled ‘The Danger arising to our Civil and Religious Liberty from the
