It has long been suspected that Sterne, as a young
clergy. man in York, began his literary career by writing for a York newspaper. But Mr. Lewis Perry Curtis, in The Politicks of Laurence Sterne (Oxford University Press, 10s.), is the first to identify the journal and to explain the importance of this phase of the novelist's life. Sterne, it appears, wrote political articles for the York Gazetteer, a Whig organ, at the time of the hotly contested election of 1741. He did this to please his uncle, the wealthy Precentor of York ; and when later he tired of the Whigs and publicly disowned them, his uncle never forgave him. Sterne vainly awaited preferment after this, but there are echoes of his youthful electioneering in Tristram Shandy. Mr. Curtis has made a really valuable addition to Sterne's biography.
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