SAGA-BOOK - Viking Society Web Publications

86 Saga-Book of the Viking Society
quote from either, both being similar in style to the
stanzas already cited from "Ode from the Hervarar
Saga".
Joseph Sterling was an Irish Protestant, a scholar of
Trinity College Dublin who took his B.A. in 1769 but did
not proceed to a higher degree. There is reason to believe
that he was near of kin to (perhaps a younger brother of)
the Rev. Anthony Sterling who between 1762 and 1799
held curacies and benefices in the dioceses of Waterford
and Lismore. Anthony was the father of Edward Sterling
of The Times, and so the grandfather of Sir Anthony
Sterling, K.C.B., and of Carlyle's John Sterling. Joseph
Sterling was in holy orders by 1781 at latest but I cannot
trace that he was ever beneficed either in Ireland or in
England despite his dedications and sonnets to promising
patrons. His six volumes were published between 1768
and 1794, and he spent some time in England in the
seventeen-eighties and -nineties. Not much is known of
his career in England apart from letters written by him to
Bishop Percy of the Reliques and printed in the 1858
volume of John Nichols's Illustrations of the Literary
History of the Eighteenth Century. Those of 1791 show
that he was a buyer of books, with a special interest in
romances, and that he dined in good society, as with the
6th Earl of Granard, who had married the sister of the znd
Earl of :Yloira mentioned above (Nichols, viii, 284-5).
Those of 1794 solicit help for Mr J ohnes in the elucidation
of Froissart, and ask that letters may be directed to the
writer at Mr Payne's, Mews Gate, the publisher of his
Odes (Nichols, viii, 302-3). That is the latest information
I have of him, unless by any chance he was the father of
Paul Ivy Sterling (1804-79), who was called to the Bar
and eventually became Puisne Judge of the Supreme Court
of Ceylon (1855-63); when Paul Sterling entered T.C.D. in
1821 he was described as the eldest son of Joseph, clericus,
of Queen's County.
Sterling was a keen medievalist whose interests were