A Tomb in Bayswater by Alice Meynell

Not many Londoners, it seems, know where amongst them Sterne was buried; but his tomb stands where it did, duly tended, so that the superscription is clean and clear, within perpetual sound of the voices, of the feet, of the hootings, and of the wheels on the long westward road that starts for Oxford from Tyburn Gate. Perhaps the story told by the surgeon who thought he recognized a dead man anonymous upon a dissecting table, at the time of Sterne's death in Bond-street, has discouraged the national and the local interest in an accessible London grave of the great. Yet it matters little whether the dust beneath this grey, Georgian, braggart, vain, heavy, and ungenerous headstone be now mingled with the dust that was the body of Sterne; or at least it is a question that touches no more than the fancy.

The lapse of time might be important in our thoughts on Sterne's tomb if we measured by the long years of childhood; but we do not, because it is the short mature years that are historical. Added together the adult two centuries since Sterne was born are brief enough. Never did garden, court, or house, remembered with the large remembrance of ancient and spacious infancy, so shrink before the eye of the revisiting old man as the rod of ten years dwindles in his grasp. Time is all depreciated, disproved. No device, such as Thoreau's for reducing the past to its real brevity, is necessary. He had spoken to one old woman and had wondered at the date whereto her birth referred him, but bethought himself how few of such lives as hers outstride all history and the very life of the race. But to join long life to long life is to pass in fancy by so many consecutive childhoods, for then the time will seem not short but immeasurably long. The childish years prolong time; the adult years, a man's middle years, the short years of life, make Time's changes, doing Time's work.

A mere score of such decades take us back through Wordsworth and Keats, the great English painters, the French Revolution, almost to the day when Sterne was born. What a trifle!

A score of our little adult decades have passed since the _Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus_, planned by Pope, Arbuthnot, and Swift, were a fit and actual satire upon science; since a medical pedant-learned, not a simpleton-was to be rallied for relying upon dreams and certain prescriptions of Galen, for example. (And of that best of satires since Cervantes, this Sterne, by the way, was the copyist.) It is the effect of the twenty poor decades that so fills and stuffs the narrow range of time. To unpack these years is somewhat like the unloading of a ripe bulrush, or of some other lately-closed house of seeds in autumn, whereof the wings were bound until they opened with a spring, never to close again; and the air is filled with the released burden of the slender rod.

Not because of the flight of time, then, is this solitude of brilliant sky, broad grass, and trees tossed by the summer wind, a place of interest; nor for the love of Sterne, who ought not to be too easily forgiven. Henry Morley gave us a _Tristram Shandy_ purged (or _à peu près_), but the stealthy offence is so constant in Sterne's intention that something like his own ignoble agility might be necessary for one who would at every point evade it. Morley suppressed one page in ten or so (apt action, as he avers, so to take tithes from the clergy), and he seems to have done the work as well as an honest man ought to hope to be able to do it. Of that no honest man can be precisely apprised-it would need a Sterne. All I mean to say is that for those who intend to read _Tristram Shandy_, or to read it again, Henry Morley's (in the Universal Library Series) is an edition to be welcomed; to lose one page in ten is to lose nothing essential to the masterpiece.

What moves curiosity here is the question why this bullying headstone should have been erected at the will of two anonymous ‘Brother Masons', inconsequently so called in their own inscription, inasmuch as Sterne was not of their craft. Here are the couplets, turned with the metrical ability of that day, and making slovenly thinking to move with precision. After announcing that in that place ‘lyes the body of the Reverend Laurence Sterne, A. M. '-‘Ah! molliter ossa quiescant! '-the lines run thus:

If a sound head, warm heart, and breast humane, Unsully'd worth, and soul without a stain; If mental powers could ever justly claim The well-won tribute of immortal fame; Sterne was the man who with gigantic stride Mow'd down luxuriant follies far and wide. Yet what though keenest knowledge of mankind, Unseal'd to him the springs that move the mind; What did it boot him? Ridicul'd, abus'd, By fools insulted and by prudes accus'd. In his, mild reader, view thy future fate: Like him, despise what 'twere a sin to hate.

The confusion of images and of purposes in this composition needs no exposing. Its coherence is nevertheless invested with that virtue of propriety which the age of the couplet possessed, to the extraordinary gain of all its secondary literature, and of the less than secondary. Dignity is too lofty a name for a quality so inessential; but it must be owned that two Brother Masons, owners of reasoning powers of the same order, and so angry as these two seem to have been, would to-day, or in any other day than that, have turned their verse with less self-possession and balance. Grim and weak, with a single flourish that never delighted any human eye, classical and paltry at once, is the characteristic funereal stone that bears the lines.