John Sterling was born at Kaimes Castle,a kind of dilapidated baronial residence to which a small farm was then attached,rented by his Father,in the Isle of Bute,--on the 20th July,1806.Both his parents were Irish by birth,Scotch by extraction;and became,as he himself did,essentially English by long residence and habit.Of John himself Scotland has little or nothing to claim except the birth and genealogy,for he left it almost before the years of memory;and in his mature days regarded it,if with a little more recognition and intelligence,yet without more participation in any of its accents outward or inward,than others natives of Middlesex or Surrey,where the scene of his chief education lay.
The climate of Bute is rainy,soft of temperature;with skies of unusual depth and brilliancy,while the weather is fair.In that soft rainy climate,on that wild-wooded rocky coast,with its gnarled mountains and green silent valleys,with its seething rain-storms and many-sounding seas,was young Sterling ushered into his first schooling in this world.I remember one little anecdote his Father told me of those first years:One of the cows had calved;young John,still in petticoats,was permitted to go,holding by his father's hand,and look at the newly arrived calf;a mystery which he surveyed with open intent eyes,and the silent exercise of all the scientific faculties he had;--very strange mystery indeed,this new arrival,and fresh denizen of our Universe:"Wull't eat a-body?"said John in his first practical Scotch,inquiring into the tendencies this mystery might have to fall upon a little fellow and consume him as provision:
"Will it eat one,Father?"--Poor little open-eyed John:the family long bantered him with this anecdote;and we,in far other years,laughed heartily on hearing it.--Simple peasant laborers,ploughers,house-servants,occasional fisher-people too;and the sight of ships,and crops,and Nature's doings where Art has little meddled with her:this was the kind of schooling our young friend had,first of all;on this bench of the grand world-school did he sit,for the first four years of his life.
Edward Sterling his Father,a man who subsequently came to considerable notice in the world,was originally of Waterford in Munster;son of the Episcopalian Clergyman there;and chief representative of a family of some standing in those parts.Family founded,it appears,by a Colonel Robert Sterling,called also Sir Robert Sterling;a Scottish Gustavus-Adolphus soldier,whom the breaking out of the Civil War had recalled from his German campaignings,and had before long,though not till after some waverings on his part,attached firmly to the Duke of Ormond and to the King's Party in that quarrel.A little bit of genealogy,since it lies ready to my hand,gathered long ago out of wider studies,and pleasantly connects things individual and present with the dim universal crowd of things past,--may as well be inserted here as thrown away.
This Colonel Robert designates himself Sterling "of Glorat;"Ibelieve,a younger branch of the well-known Stirlings of Keir in Stirlingshire.It appears he prospered in his soldiering and other business,in those bad Ormond times;being a man of energy,ardor and intelligence,--probably prompt enough both with his word and with his stroke.There survives yet,in the Commons Journals,[2]dim notice of his controversies and adventures;especially of one controversy he had got into with certain victorious Parliamentary official parties,while his own party lay vanquished,during what was called the Ormond Cessation,or Temporary Peace made by Ormond with the Parliament in 1646:--in which controversy Colonel Robert,after repeated applications,journeyings to London,attendances upon committees,and such like,finds himself worsted,declared to be in the wrong;and so vanishes from the Commons Journals.
What became of him when Cromwell got to Ireland,and to Munster,Ihave not heard:his knighthood,dating from the very year of Cromwell's Invasion (1649),indicates a man expected to do his best on the occasion:--as in all probability he did;had not Tredah Storm proved ruinous,and the neck of this Irish War been broken at once.
Doubtless the Colonel Sir Robert followed or attended his Duke of Ormond into foreign parts,and gave up his management of Munster,while it was yet time:for after the Restoration we find him again,safe,and as was natural,flourishing with new splendor;gifted,recompensed with lands;--settled,in short,on fair revenues in those Munster regions.He appears to have had no children;but to have left his property to William,a younger brother who had followed him into Ireland.From this William descends the family which,in the years we treat of,had Edward Sterling,Father of our John,for its representative.And now enough of genealogy.
Of Edward Sterling,Captain Edward Sterling as his title was,who in the latter period of his life became well known in London political society,whom indeed all England,with a curious mixture of mockery and respect and even fear,knew well as "the Thunderer of the Times Newspaper,"there were much to be said,did the present task and its limits permit.As perhaps it might,on certain terms?What is indispensable let us not omit to say.The history of a man's childhood is the deion of his parents and environment:this is his inarticulate but highly important history,in those first times,while of articulate he has yet none.