Laurence Sterne.
Walker & Cockerell, ph. sc.
FINIS
And now, patient reader, I, the Editress of this literary mosaic of my great-great-aunt’s letters and those of her friends, take leave of you. If life and eyesight are vouchsafed to me, I hope to write the remainder of her life some day, for she lived till 1800. Each year added to her enormous circle of clever acquaintance, British and foreign. The letters of Garrick and his wife, later ones of Sterne and Dr. Johnson, Mrs. Vesey, Edmund Burke, Hannah More, and a host of other notabilities, belong to a different period. As it is, the compilation of this work has occupied me five years. One whole winter was devoted to arranging the correspondence in chronological order, as very few of the letters are dated.
APPENDICES.
“LONG” SIR THOMAS ROBINSON.
Sir Thomas was the eldest of the seven sons of William Robinson, of Rokeby, Yorkshire, by his wife, née Anne Walters. He was born and baptized at Rokeby in 1700. After his school-days he made the grand tour, as was the fashion of the day, and then entered the Army. At the death of his father in 1719, he succeeded to the family estates in Yorkshire. At the General Election of 1727 he became M.P. for Morpeth. On October 25, 1728, he was married at Belfreys, in Yorkshire, to Elizabeth, widow of Nicholas, Lord Lechmere, and daughter of Charles Howard, 3rd Earl of Carlisle. Between the years 1725 and 1730 he rebuilt the house at Rokeby, removed the church which stood behind the house and rebuilt it in another spot, he added a stone wall all round the park, made a bridge over the Greta river, and erected an obelisk to his mother’s memory in 1730. All these acts were recorded on two stone piers at the Greta entrance of the park. He planted many trees at Rokeby. He designed the west wing of Castle Howard for his brother-in-law, Lord Carlisle. In 1731 he was made a Baronet of England, with remainder to his brothers. His nickname of “Long” Sir Thomas Robinson was given to him from his great height, and to distinguish him from another Sir Thomas Robinson, a diplomat of note, afterwards created Lord Grantham. These two men were the reverse of each other in appearance, “Long” Sir Thomas being exceptionally tall, and the other very short and fat. One of Lady Townshend’s bon mots about the two was, “Why one should be preferred to the other I can’t imagine, there is but little difference, the one is as broad as the other is long;” and Lord Chesterfield, on being told “Long” Sir Thomas was reported to be “dying by inches,” said, then it would be some time before he was dead. On April 10, 1739, his wife, to whom he was tenderly attached, died at Bath, and was taken to Rokeby and buried under the new church he had erected. A monument was erected to her there. In accordance with Sir Thomas’s will, though he himself was buried at Merton Abbey, Surrey, a cenotaph was placed in Poets’ Corner, Westminster Abbey, to his and his wife’s memory, with medallion portraits of her and himself, and bearing the following inscription:—“To perpetuate his grateful sense of the pleasure he had in the conversation of an accomplished woman, a sincere friend, and an agreeable companion.” They had no children, so the English baronetcy went to his next brother, William.
Sir Thomas was greatly given to hospitality; too much so for his income. On October 22, 1741, he gave a great ball, as Horace Walpole relates, “to a little girl of the Duke of Richmond’s; there are already 200 invited, from miss in a bib and apron to my Lord Chancellor in bib and mace.” The ball began at 8 p.m., and ended at 4 a.m. A few days after Horace Walpole writes, “There were a 197 persons at Sir Thomas’s, and yet it was so well conducted that nobody felt a crowd. He had taken off all his doors, and so separated the old and the young that neither were inconvenienced by the other. The ball began at 8; each man danced one minuet with his partner, and then began country dances. There were four-and-twenty couple, divided into twelve and twelve; each set danced two dances, and then retired into another room, while the other set took their two, and so alternately.... We danced till 4, then had tea and coffee and came home.” A month later he writes about a second ball. What with his numerous entertainments and his building at Rokeby and elsewhere, he became impoverished, and accepted the Governorship of Barbadoes in January, 1742, from which he was recalled in 1747. In Barbadoes he married his second wife, a widow named Salmon, née Booth. She had a considerable fortune, but on her husband’s return to England, she refused to accompany him, preferring Barbadoes. Sir Thomas was intimate with Lord Chesterfield, who made an epigram on him, beginning—
“Unlike my subject will I make my song,