[Footnote 1: It is admitted, moreover, in the correspondence with Miss Fourmantelle that Sterne received something more substantial from the Bishop, in the shape of a purse of gold; and this strange present gave rise to a scandal on which something will be said hereafter.]

The year 1760, however, was to bring to Sterne more solid gains than that of mere celebrity, or even than the somewhat precarious money profits which depend on literary vogue. Only a few weeks after his arrival in town he was presented by Lord Falconberg with the curacy of Coxwold, "a sweet retirement," as he describes it, "in comparison of Sutton," at which he was in future to pass most of the time spent by him in Yorkshire. What obtained him this piece of preferment is unknown. It may be that Tristram Shandy drew the Yorkshire peer's attention to the fact that there was a Yorkshireman of genius living within a few miles of a then vacant benefice in his lordship's gift, and that this was enough for him. But Sterne himself says—in writing a year or so afterwards to a lady of his acquaintance—"I hope I have been of some service to his lordship, and he has sufficiently requited me;" and in the face of this plain assertion, confirmed as it is by the fact that Lord Falconberg was on terms of friendly intimacy with the Vicar of Coxwold at a much later date than this, we may dismiss idle tales about Sterne's having "black-mailed" the patron out of a presentation to a benefice worth no more, after all, than some 70L a year net.

There is somewhat more substance, however, in the scandal which got abroad with reference to a certain alleged transaction between Sterne and Warburton. Before Sterne had been many days in London, and while yet his person and doings were the natural subjects of the newest gossip, a story found its way into currency to the effect that the new-made Bishop of Gloucester had found it advisable to protect himself against the satiric humour of the author of the Tristram Shandy by a substantial present of money. Coming to Garrick's ears, it was repeated by him—whether seriously or in jest—to Sterne, from whom it evoked a curious letter, which in Madame de Medalle's collection has been studiously hidden away amongst the correspondence of seven years later. "'Twas for all the world," he began, "like a cut across my finger with a sharp pen-knife. I saw the blood—gave it a suck, wrapt it up, and thought no more about it.... The story you told me of Tristram's pretended tutor this morning"—(the scandal was, that Warburton had been threatened with caricature in the next volume of the novel, under the guise of the hero's tutor)—"this vile story, I say, though I then saw both how and where it wounded, I felt little from it at first, or, to speak more honestly (though it ruins my simile), I felt a great deal of pain from it, but affected an air, usual in such accidents, of feeling less than I had." And he goes on to repudiate, it will be observed, not so much the moral offence of corruption, in receiving money to spare Warburton, as the intellectual solecism of selecting him for ridicule. "What the devil!" he exclaims, "is there no one learned blockhead throughout the schools of misapplied science in the Christian world to make a tutor of for my Tristram—are we so run out of stock that there is no one lumber-headed, muddle-headed, mortar-headed, pudding-head chap amongst our doctors...but I must disable my judgment by choosing a Warburton?" Later on, in a letter to his friend, Mr. Croft, at Stillington, whom the scandal had reached through a "society journal" of the time, he asks whether people would suppose he would be "such a fool as to fall foul of Dr. Warburton, my best friend, by representing him so weak a man; or by telling such a lie of him as his giving me a purse to buy off the tutorship of Tristram—or that I should be fool enough to own that I had taken a purse for that purpose?" It will be remarked that Sterne does not here deny having received a purse from Warburton, but only his having received it by way of black-mail: and the most mysterious part of the affair is that Sterne did actually receive the strange present of a "purse of gold" from Warburton (whom at that time he did not know nor had ever seen); and that he admits as much in one of his letters to Miss Fourmantelle. "I had a purse of guineas given me yesterday by a Bishop," he writes, triumphantly, but without volunteering any explanation of this extraordinary gift. Sterne's letter to Garrick was forwarded, it would seem, to Warburton; and the Bishop thanks Garrick for having procured for him "the confutation of an impertinent story the first moment I heard of it." This, however, can hardly count for much. If Warburton had really wished Sterne to abstain from caricaturing him, he would be as anxious—and for much the same reasons—to conceal the fact as to suppress the caricature. He would naturally have the disclosure of it reported to Sterne for formal contradiction, as in fulfilment of a virtual term in the bargain between them. The epithet of "irrevocable scoundrel," which he afterwards applied to Sterne, is of less importance, as proceeding from Warburton, than it would have been had it come from any one not habitually employing Warburton's peculiar vocabulary; but it at least argues no very cordial feeling on the Bishop's side. And, on the whole, one regrets to feel, as I must honestly confess that I do feel, far less confident of the groundlessness of this rather unpleasant story than could be wished. It is impossible to forget, however, that while the ethics of this matter were undoubtedly less strict in those days than they are—or, at any rate, are recognized as being—in our own, there is nothing in Sterne's character to make us suppose him to have been at all in advance of the morality of his time.

The incumbent-designate did not go down at once to take possession of his temporalities. His London triumph had not yet run its course. The first edition of Vols. I. and II. of Tristram Shandy was exhausted in some three months. In April, Dodsley brought out a second; and, concurrently with the advertisement of its issue, there appeared—in somewhat incongruous companionship—the announcement, "Speedily will be published, The Sermons of Mr. Yorick." The judicious Dodsley, or possibly the judicious Sterne himself (acute enough in matters of this kind), had perceived that now was the time to publish a series of sermons by the very unclerical lion of the day. There would—they, no doubt, thought—be an undeniable piquancy, a distinct flavour of semi-scandalous incongruity in listening to the Word of Life from the lips of this loose-tongued droll; and the more staid and serious the sermon, the more effective the contrast. There need not have been much trouble in finding the kind of article required; and we may be tolerably sure that, even if Sterne did not perceive that fact for himself, his publisher hastened to inform him that "anything would do." Two of his pulpit discourses, the Assize Sermon and the Charity Sermon, had already been thought worthy of publication by their author in a separate form; and the latter of these found a place in the series; while the rest seem to have been simply the chance sweepings of the parson's sermon-drawer. The critics who find wit, eccentricity, flashes of Shandyism, and what not else of the same sort in these discourses, must be able—or so it seems to me—to discover these phenomena anywhere. To the best of my own judgment the Sermons are—with but few and partial exceptions—of the most commonplace character; platitudinous with the platitudes of a thousand pulpits, and insipid with the crambe repetita of a hundred thousand homilies. A single extract will fully suffice for a specimen of Sterne's pre-Shandian homiletic style; his post-Shandian manner was very different, as we shall see. The preacher is discoursing upon the well-worn subject of the inconsistencies of human character:

"If such a contrast was only observable in the different stages of a man's life, it would cease to be either a matter of wonder or of just reproach. Age, experience, and much reflection may naturally enough be supposed to alter a man's sense of things, and so entirely to transform him that, not only in outward appearance but in the very cast and turn of his mind, he may be as unlike and different from the man he was twenty or thirty years ago as he ever was from anything of his own species. This, I say, is naturally to be accounted for, and in some cases might be praiseworthy too; but the observation is to be made of men in the same period of their lives that in the same day, sometimes on the very same action, they are utterly inconsistent and irreconcilable with themselves. Look at the man in one light, and he shall seem wise, penetrating, discreet, and brave; behold him in another point of view, and you see a creature all over folly and indiscretion, weak and timorous as cowardice and indiscretion can make him. A man shall appear gentle, courteous, and benevolent to all mankind; follow him into his own house, maybe you see a tyrant morose and savage to all whose happiness depends upon his kindness. A third, in his general behaviour, is found to be generous, disinterested, humane, and friendly. Hear but the sad story of the friendless orphans too credulously trusting all their whole substance into his hands, and he shall appear more sordid, more pitiless and unjust than the injured themselves have bitterness to paint him. Another shall be charitable to the poor, uncharitable in his censures and opinions of all the rest of the world besides: temperate in his appetites, intemperate in his tongue; shall have too much conscience and religion to cheat the man who trusts him, and perhaps as far as the business of debtor and creditor extends shall be just and scrupulous to the uttermost mite; yet in matters of full or great concern, where he is to have the handling of the party's reputation and good name, the dearest, the tenderest property the man has, he will do him irreparable damage, and rob him there without measure or pity."—Sermon XI.—On Evil Speaking.

There is clearly nothing particularly striking in all that, even conveyed as it is in Sterne's effective, if loose and careless, style; and it is no unfair sample of the whole. The calculation, however, of the author and his shrewd publisher was that, whatever the intrinsic merits or demerits of these sermons, they would "take" on the strength of the author's name; nor, it would seem, was their calculation disappointed. The edition of this series of sermons now lying before me is numbered the sixth, and its date is 1764; which represents a demand for a new edition every nine months or so, over a space of four years. They may, perhaps, have succeeded, too, in partially reconciling a certain serious-minded portion of the public to the author. Sterne evidently hoped that they might; for we find him sending a copy to Warburton, in the month of June, immediately after the publication of the book, and receiving in return a letter of courteous thanks, and full of excellent advice as to the expediency of avoiding scandal by too hazardous a style of writing in the future. Sterne, in reply, protests that he would "willingly give no offence to mortal by anything which could look like the least violation of either decency or good manners;" but—and it is an important "but"—he cannot promise to "mutilate everything" in Tristram "down to the prudish humour of every particular" (individual), though he will do his best; but, in any case, "laugh, my Lord, I will, and as loudly as I can." And laugh he did, and in such Rabelaisian fashion that the Bishop (somewhat inconsistently for a critic who had welcomed Sterne on the appearance of the first two volumes expressly as the "English Rabelais") remarked of him afterwards with characteristic vigour, in a letter to a friend, that he fears the fellow is an "irrevocable scoundrel."

The volumes, however, which earned "the fellow" this Episcopal benediction were not given to the world till the next year. At the end of May or beginning of June, 1760, Sterne went to his new home at Coxwold, and his letters soon begin to show him to us at work upon further records of Mr. Shandy's philosophical theory-spinning and the simpler pursuits of his excellent brother. It is probable that this year, 1760, was, on the whole, the happiest year of Sterne's life. His health, though always feeble, had not yet finally given way; and though the "vile cough" which was to bring him more than once to death's door, and at last to force it open, was already troubling him, he had that within him which made it easy to bear up against all such physical ills. His spirits, in fact, were at their highest. His worldly affairs were going at least as smoothly as they ever went. He was basking in that sunshine of fame which was so delightful to a temperament differing from that of the average Englishman, as does the physique of the Southern races from that of the hardier children of the North; and lastly, he was exulting in a new-born sense of creative power which no doubt made the composition of the earlier volumes of Tristram a veritable labour of love.

But the witty division of literary spinners into silkworms and spiders—those who spin because they are full, and those who do so because they are empty—is not exhaustive. There are human silk-worms who become gradually transformed into spiders—men who begin writing in order to unburden a full imagination, and who, long after that process has been completely performed, continue writing in order to fill an empty belly; and though Sterne did not live long enough to "write himself out," there are certain indications that he would not have left off writing if and when he felt that this stage of exhaustion had arrived. His artistic impulses were curiously combined with a distinct admixture of the "potboiler" spirit; and it was with something of the complacency of an annuitant that he looked forward to giving the public a couple of volumes of Tristram Shandy every year as long as they would stand it. In these early days, however, there was no necessity even to discuss the probable period either of the writer's inspiration or of the reader's appetite. At present the public were as eager to consume more Shandyism as Sterne was ready to produce it: the demand was as active as the supply was easy. By the end of the year Vols. III. and IV. were in the press, and on January 27, 1761, they made their appearance. They had been disposed of in advance to Dodsley for 380l.—no bad terms of remuneration in those days; but it is still likely enough that the publisher made a profitable bargain. The new volumes sold freely, and the public laughed at them as heartily as their two predecessors. Their author's vogue in London, whither he went in December, 1760, to superintend publication, was as great during the next spring as it had been in the last. The tide of visitors again set in all its former force and volume towards the "genteel lodgings." His dinner list was once more full, and he was feasted and flattered by wits, beaux, courtiers, politicians, and titled-lady lion-hunters as sedulously as ever. His letters, especially those to his friends the Crofts, of Stillington, abound, as before, in touches of the same amusing vanity. With how delicious a sense of self-importance must he have written these words: "You made me and my friends very merry with the accounts current at York of my being forbad the Court, but they do not consider what a considerable person they make of me when they suppose either my going or not going there is a point that ever enters the K.'s head; and for those about him, I have the honour either to stand so personally well-known to them, or to be so well represented by those of the first rank, as to fear no accident of the kind." Amusing, too, is it to note the familiarity, as of an old habitue of Ministerial antechambers, with which this country parson discusses the political changes of that interesting year; though scarcely more amusing, perhaps, than the solemnity with which his daughter disguises the identity of the new Premier under the title B——e; and by a similar use of initials attempts to conceal the momentous state secret that the D. of R. had been removed from the place of Groom of the Chambers, and that Sir F.D. had succeeded T. as Chancellor of the Exchequer. Occasionally, however, the interest of his letters changes from personal to public, and we get a glimpse of scenes and personages that have become historical. He was present in the House of Commons at the first grand debate on the German war after the Great Commoner's retirement from office—"the pitched battle," as Sterne calls it, "wherein Mr. P. was to have entered and thrown down the gauntlet" in defence of his military policy. Thus he describes it:

"There never was so full a House—the gallery full to the top—I was there all the day; when lo! a political fit of the gout seized the great combatant—he entered not the lists. Beckford got up and begged the House, as he saw not his right honourable friend there, to put off the debate—it could not be done: so Beckford rose up and made a most long, passionate, incoherent speech in defence of the German war, but very severe upon the unfrugal manner it was carried on, in which he addressed himself principally to the C[hancellor] of the E[xchequer], and laid on him terribly.... Legge answered Beckford very rationally and coolly. Lord K. spoke long. Sir F. D[ashwood] maintained the German war was most pernicious.... Lord B[arrington] at last got up and spoke half an hour with great plainness and temper, explained many hidden things relating to these accounts in favour of the late K., and told two or three conversations which had passed between the K. and himself relative to these expenses, which cast great honour upon the K.'s character. This was with regard to the money the K. had secretly furnished out of his own pocket to lessen the account of the Hanover-score brought us to discharge. Beckford and Barrington abused all who fought for peace and joined in the cry for it, and Beckford added that the reasons of wishing a peace now were the same as at the Peace of Utrecht—that the people behind the curtain could not both maintain the war and their places too, so were for making another sacrifice of the nation to their own interests. After all, the cry for a peace is so general that it will certainly end in one."

And then the letter, recurring to personal matters towards the close, records the success of Vols. III. and IV.:

"One half of the town abuse my book as bitterly as the other half cry it up to the skies—the best is they abuse and buy it, and at such a rate that we are going on with a second edition as fast as possible." This was written only in the first week of March, so that the edition must have been exhausted in little more than a month. It was, indeed, another triumph; and all through this spring up to midsummer did Sterne remain in London to enjoy it. But, with three distinct flocks awaiting a renewal of his pastoral ministrations in Yorkshire, it would scarcely have done for him, even in those easy-going days of the Establishment, to take up his permanent abode at the capital; and early in July he returned to Coxwold.

From the middle of this year, 1761, the scene begins to darken, and from the beginning of the next year onward Sterne's life was little better than a truceless struggle with the disease to which he was destined, prematurely, to succumb. The wretched constitution which, in common with his short-lived brothers and sisters, he had inherited probably from his father, already began to show signs of breaking up. Invalid from the first, it had doubtless been weakened by the hardships of Sterne's early years, and yet further, perhaps, by the excitements and dissipations of his London life; nor was the change from the gaieties of the capital to hard literary labour in a country parsonage calculated to benefit him as much as it might others. Shandy Hall, as he christened his pretty parsonage at Coxwold, and as the house, still standing, is called to this day, soon became irksome to him. The very reaction begotten of unwonted quietude acted on his temperament with a dispiriting rather than a soothing effect. The change from his full and stimulating life in London to the dull round of clerical duties in a Yorkshire village might well have been depressing to a mind better balanced and ballasted than his. To him, with his light, pleasure-loving nature, it was as the return of the schoolboy from pantomimes and pony-riding to the more sober delights of Dr. Swishtail's; and, in a letter to Hall Stevenson, Sterne reveals his feelings with all the juvenile frankness of one of the Doctor's pupils:

"I rejoice you are in London—rest you there in peace; here 'tis the devil. You were a good prophet. I wish myself back again, as you told me I should, but not because a thin, death-doing, pestiferous north-east wind blows in a line directly from Crazy Castle turret fresh upon me in this cuckoldly retreat (for I value the north-east wind and all its powers not a straw), but the transition from rapid motion to absolute rest was too violent. I should have walked about the streets of York ten days, as a proper medium to have passed through before I entered upon my rest; I stayed but a moment, and I have been here but a few, to satisfy me. I have not managed my miseries like a wise man, and if God for my consolation had not poured forth the spirit of Shandyism unto me, which will not suffer me to think two moments upon any grave subject, I would else just now lay down and die."

It is true he adds, in the next sentence, that in half an hour's time "I'll lay a guinea I shall be as merry as a monkey, and forget it all," but such sudden revulsions of high spirits can hardly be allowed to count for much against the prevailing tone of discontented ennui which pervades this letter.

Apart, moreover, from Sterne's regrets of London, his country home was becoming from other causes a less pleasant place of abode. His relations with his wife were getting less and less cordial every year. With a perversity sometimes noticeable in the wives of distinguished men, Mrs. Sterne had failed to accept with enthusiasm the role of distant and humbly admiring spectator of her brilliant husband's triumphs. Accept it, of course, she did, being unable, indeed, to help herself; but it is clear that when Sterne returned home after one of his six months' revels in the gaieties of London, his wife, who had been vegetating the while in the retirement of Yorkshire, was not in the habit of welcoming him with effusion. Perceiving so clearly that her husband preferred the world's society to hers, she naturally, perhaps, refused to disguise her preference of her own society to his. Their estrangement, in short, had grown apace, and had already brought them to that stage of mutual indifference which is at once so comfortable and so hopeless—secure alike against the risk of "scenes" and the hope of reconciliation, shut fast in its exemption from amantium irae against all possibility of redintegratio amoris. To such perfection, indeed, had the feeling been cultivated on both sides, that Sterne, in the letter above quoted, can write of his conjugal relations in this philosophic strain:

"As to matrimony I should be a beast to rail at it, for my wife is easy, but the world is not, and had I stayed from her a second longer it would have been a burning shame—else she declares herself happier without me. But not in anger is this declaration made (the most fatal point, of course, about it), but in pure, sober, good sense, built on sound experience. She hopes you will be able to strike a bargain for me before this twelvemonth to lead a bear round Europe, and from this hope from you I verily believe it is that you are so high in her favour at present. She swears you are a fellow of wit, though humorous;[2] a funny, jolly soul, though somewhat splenetic, and (hating the love of women) as honest as gold. How do you like the simile?"

There is, perhaps, a touch of affected cynicism in the suggestion that Mrs. Sterne's liking for one of her husband's friends was wholly based upon the expectation that he would rid her of her husband; but mutual indifference must, it is clear, have reached a pretty advanced stage before such a remark could, even half in jest, be possible. And with one more longing, lingering look at the scenes which he had quitted for a lot like that of the Duke of Buckingham's dog, upon whom his master pronounced the maledictory wish that "he were married and lived in the country," this characteristic letter concludes:

"Oh, Lord! now are you going to Ranelagh to-night, and I am sitting sorrowful as the prophet was when the voice cried out to him and said, 'What do'st thou here, Elijah?' 'Tis well that the spirit does not make the same at Coxwold, for unless for the few sheep left me to take care of in the wilderness, I might as well, nay, better, be at Mecca. When we find we can, by a shifting of places, run away from ourselves, what think you of a jaunt there before we finally pay a visit to the Vale of Jehoshaphat? As ill a fame as we have, I trust I shall one day or other see you face to face, so tell the two colonels if they love good company to live righteously and soberly, as you do, and then they will have no doubts or dangers within or without them. Present my best and warmest wishes to them, and advise the eldest to prop up his spirits, and get a rich dowager before the conclusion of the peace. Why will not the advice suit both, par nobile fratrum?"

[Footnote 1: It is curious to note, as a point in the chronology of language, how exclusive is Sterne's employment of the words "humour," "humourists," in their older sense of "whimsicality," "an eccentric." The later change in its meaning gives to the word "though" in the above passage an almost comic effect.]

In conclusion, he tells his friend that the next morning, if Heaven permit, he begins the fifth volume of Shandy, and adds, defiantly, that he "cares not a curse for the critics," but "will load my vehicle with what goods He sends me, and they may take 'em off my hands or let 'em alone."

The allusions to foreign travel in this letter were made with, something more than a jesting intent. Sterne had already begun to be seriously alarmed, and not without reason, about the condition of his health. He shrank from facing another English winter, and meditated a southward flight so soon as he should have finished his fifth and sixth volumes, and seen them safe in the printer's hands. His publisher he had changed, for what reason is not known, and the firm of Becket & De Hondt had taken the place of Dodsley. Sterne hoped by the end of the year to be free to depart from England, and already he had made all arrangements with his ecclesiastical superiors for the necessary leave of absence. He seems to have been treated with all consideration in the matter. His Archbishop, on being applied to, at once excused him from parochial work for a year, and promised, if it should be necessary, to double that term. Fortified with this permission, Sterne bade farewell to his wife and daughter, and betook himself to London, with his now completed volumes, at the setting in of the winter. On the 21st of December they made their appearance, and in about three weeks from that date their author left England, with the intention of wintering in the South of France. There were difficulties, however, of more kinds than one which had first to be faced—a pecuniary difficulty, which Garrick met by a loan of 20L., and a political difficulty, for the removal of which Sterne had to employ the good offices of new acquaintance later on. He reached Paris about the 17th of January, 1762, and there met with a reception which interposed, as might have been expected, the most effectual of obstacles to his further progress southward. He was received in Paris with open arms, and stepped at once within the charmed circle of the philosophic salons. Again was the old intoxicating cup presented to his lips—this time, too, with more dexterous than English hands—and again did he drink deeply of it. "My head is turned," he writes to Garrick, "with what I see, and the unexpected honour I have met with here. Tristram was almost as much known here as in London, at least among your men of condition and learning, and has got me introduced into so many circles ('tis comme a Londres) I have just now a fortnight's dinners and suppers on my hands." We may venture to doubt whether French politeness had not been in one respect taken somewhat too seriously by the flattered Englishman, and whether it was much more than the name and general reputation of Tristram, which was "almost as much known" in Paris as in London. The dinners and suppers, however, were, at any rate, no figures of speech, but very liberal entertainments, at which Sterne appears to have disported himself with all his usual unclerical abandon. "I Shandy it away," he writes in his boyish fashion to Garrick, "fifty times more than I was ever wont, talk more nonsense than ever you heard me talk in all your days, and to all sorts of people. 'Qui le diable est cet homme-la?' said Choiseul, t'other day, 'ce Chevalier Shandy?'" [We might be listening to one of Thackeray's Irish heroes.] "You'll think me as vain as a devil was I to tell you the rest of the dialogue." But there were distinguished Frenchmen who were ready to render to the English author more important services than that of offering him hospitality and flattery. Peace had not been formally concluded between France and England, and the passport with which Sterne had been graciously furnished by Pitt was not of force enough to dispense him from making special application to the French Government for permission to remain in the country. In this request he was influentially backed. "My application," he writes, "to the Count de Choiseul goes on swimmingly, for not only M. Pelletiere (who by-the-bye sends ten thousand civilities to you and Mrs. G.) has undertaken my affair, but the Count de Limbourg. The Baron d'Holbach has offered any security for the inoffensiveness of my behaviour in France—'tis more, you rogue! than you will do." And then the orthodox, or professedly orthodox, English divine, goes on to describe the character and habits of his strange new friend: "This Baron is one of the most learned noblemen here, the great protector of wits and of the savans who are no wits; keeps open house three days a week—his house is now, as yours was to me, my own—he lives at great expense." Equally communicative is he as to his other great acquaintances. Among these were the Count de Bissie, whom by an "odd incident" (as it seemed to his unsuspecting vanity) "I found reading Tristram when I was introduced to him, which I was," he adds (without perceiving the connexion between this fact and the "incident"), "at his desire;" Mr. Fox and Mr. Macartney (afterwards the Lord Macartney of Chinese celebrity), and the Duke of Orleans (not yet Egalite) himself, "who has suffered my portrait to be added to the number of some odd men in his collection, and has had it taken most expressively at full length by a gentleman who lives with him." Nor was it only in the delights of society that Sterne was now revelling. He was passionately fond of the theatre, and his letters to Garrick are full of eager criticism of the great French performers, intermingled with flatteries, sometimes rather full-bodied than delicate, of their famous English rival. Of Clairon, in Iphigenie, he says "she is extremely great. Would to God you had one or two like her. What a luxury to see you with one of such power in the same interesting scene! But 'tis too much." Again he writes: "The French comedy I seldom visit; they act scarce anything but tragedies; and the Clairon is great, and Mdlle. Dumesmil in some parts still greater than her. Yet I cannot bear preaching—I fancy I got a surfeit of it in my younger days." And in a later letter:

"After a vile suspension of three weeks, we are beginning with our comedies and operas. Yours I hear never flourished more; here the comic actors were never so low; the tragedians hold up their heads in all senses. I have known one little man support the theatrical world like a David Atlas upon his shoulders, but Preville can't do half as much here, though Mad. Clairon stands by him and sets her back to his. She is very great, however, and highly improved since you saw her. She also supports her dignity at table, and has her public day every Thursday, when she gives to eat (as they say here) to all that are hungry and dry. You are much talked of here, and much expected, as soon as the peace will let you. These two last days you have happened to engross the whole conversation at the great houses where I was at dinner. 'Tis the greatest problem in nature in this meridian that one and the same man should possess such tragic and comic powers, and in such an equilibrio as to divide the world for which of the two Nature intended him."

And while on this subject of the stage let us pause for a moment to glance at an incident which connects Sterne with one of the most famous of his French contemporaries. He has been asked "by a lady of talent," he tells Garrick, "to read a tragedy, and conjecture if it would do for you. 'Tis from the plan of Diderot; and, possibly, half a translation of it: The Natural Son, or the Triumph of Virtue, in five acts. It has too much sentiment in it (at least for me); the speeches too long, and savour too much of preaching. This may be a second reason it is not to my taste—'tis all love, love, love throughout, without much separation in the characters. So I fear it would not do for your stage, and perhaps for the very reason which recommends it to a French one." It is curious to see the "adaptator cerebrosuga" at work in those days as in these; though not, in this instance, as it seems, with as successful results. The Natural Son, or the Triumph of Virtue, is not known to have reached either English readers or English theatrical audiences. The French original, as we know, fared scarcely better. "It was not until 1771," says Diderot's latest English biographer, "that the directors of the French Comedy could be induced to place Le Fils Naturel on the stage. The actors detested their task, and, as we can well believe, went sulkily through parts which they had not taken the trouble to master. The public felt as little interest in the piece as the actors had done, and after one or two representations, it was put aside.[1]"

[Footnote 1: Morley: Diderot and the Encyclopaedists, ii. 305.]

Another, and it is to be guessed a too congenial, acquaintance formed by Sterne in Paris was that of Crebillon; and with him he concluded "a convention," unedifying enough, whether in jest or earnest: "As soon as I get to Toulouse he has agreed to write me an expostulatory letter upon the indecorums of T. Shandy, which is to be answered by recrimination upon the liberties in his own works. These are to be printed together—Crebillon against Sterne, Sterne against Crebillon—the copy to be sold, and the money equally divided. This is good Swiss-policy," he adds; and the idea (which was never carried out) had certainly the merit of ingenuity, if no other.

The words "as soon as I get to Toulouse," in a letter written from Paris on the 10th of April, might well have reminded Sterne of the strange way in which he had carried out his intention of "wintering in the South." He insists, however, upon the curative effects of his winter of gaiety in Paris. "I am recovered greatly," he says; "and if I could spend one whole winter at Toulouse, I should be fortified in my inner man beyond all danger of relapsing." There was another, too, for whom this change of climate had become imperatively necessary. For three winters past his daughter Lydia, now fourteen years old, had been suffering severely from asthma, and needed to try "the last remedy of a warmer and softer air." Her father, therefore, was about to solicit passports for his wife and daughter, with a view to their joining him at once in Paris, whence, after a month's stay, they were to depart together for the South. This application for passports he intended, he said, to make "this week:" and it would seem that the intention was carried out; but, for reasons explained in a letter which Mr. Fitzgerald was the first to publish, it was not till the middle of the next month that he was able to make preparation for their joining him. From this letter—written to his Archbishop, to request an extension of his leave—we learn that while applying for the passports he was attacked with a fever, "which has ended the worst way it could for me, in a defluxion (de) poitrine, as the French physicians call it. It is generally fatal to weak lungs, so that I have lost in ten days all I have gained since I came here; and from a relaxation of my lungs have lost my voice entirely, that 'twill be much if I ever quite recover it. This evil sends me directly to Toulouse, for which I set out from this place directly my family arrives." Evidently there was no time to be lost, and a week after the date of this letter we find him in communication with Mrs. and Miss Sterne, and making arrangements for what was, in those days, a somewhat formidable undertaking—the journey of two ladies from the North of England to the centre of France. The correspondence which ensued may be said to give us the last pleasant glimpse of Sterne's relations with his wife. One can hardly help suspecting, of course, that it was his solicitude for the safety and comfort of his much-loved daughter that mainly inspired the affectionate anxiety which pervades these letters to Mrs. Sterne; but their writer is, at the very least, entitled to credit for allowing no difference of tone to reveal itself in the terms in which he speaks of wife and child. And, whichever of the two he was mainly thinking of, there is something very engaging in the thoughtful minuteness of his instructions to the two women travellers, the earnestness of his attempts to inspire them with courage for their enterprise, and the sincere fervour of his many commendations of them to the Divine keeping. The mixture of "canny" counsel and pious invocation has frequently a droll effect: as when the advice to "give the custom-house officers what I told you, and at Calais more, if you have much Scotch snuff;" and "to drink small Rhenish to keep you cool, that is, if you like it," is rounded off by the ejaculation, "So God in Heaven prosper and go along with you!" Letter after letter did he send them, full of such reminders as that "they have bad pins and vile needles here," that it would be advisable to bring with them a strong bottle-screw, and a good stout copper tea-kettle; till at last, in the final words of preparation, his language assumes something of the solemnity of a general addressing his army on the eve of a well-nigh desperate enterprise: "Pluck up your spirits—trust in God, in me, and yourselves; with this, was you put to it, you would encounter all these difficulties ten times told. Write instantly, and tell me you triumph over all fears—tell me Lydia is better, and a help-mate to you. You say she grows like me: let her show me she does so in her contempt of small dangers, and fighting against the apprehensions of them, which is better still."

At last this anxiously awaited journey was taken; and, on Thursday, July 7, Mrs. Sterne and her daughter arrived in Paris. Their stay there was not long—not much extended, probably, beyond the proposed week. For Sterne's health had, some ten days before the arrival of his family, again given him warning to depart quickly. He had but a few weeks recovered from the fever of which he spoke in his letter to the Archbishop, when he again broke a blood-vessel in his lungs. It happened in the night, and "finding in the morning that I was likely to bleed to death, I sent immediately," he says, in a sentence which quaintly brings out the paradox of contemporary medical treatment, "for a surgeon to bleed me at both arms. This saved me"—i.e. did not kill me—"and, with lying speechless three days, I recovered upon my back in bed: the breach healed, and in a week after I got out." But the weakness which ensued, and the subsequent "hurrying about," no doubt as cicerone of Parisian sights to his wife and daughter, "made me think it high time to haste to Toulouse." Accordingly, about the 20th of the month, and "in the midst of such heats that the oldest Frenchman never remembers the like," the party set off by way of Lyons and Montpellier for their Pyrenean destination. Their journey seems to have been a journey of many mischances, extraordinary discomfort, and incredible length; and it is not till the second week in August that we again take up the broken thread of his correspondence. Writing to Mr. Foley, his banker in Paris, on the 14th of that month, he speaks of its having taken him three weeks to reach Toulouse; and adds that "in our journey we suffered so much from the heats, it gives me pain to remember it. I never saw a cloud from Paris to Nismes half as broad as a twenty-four sols piece. Good God! we were toasted, roasted, grilled, stewed, carbonaded, on one side or other, all the way: and being all done through (assez cuits) in the day, we were eat up at night by bugs and other unswept-out vermin, the legal inhabitants, if length of possession give right, at every inn on the way." A few miles from Beaucaire he broke a hind wheel of his carriage, and was obliged in consequence "to sit five hours on a gravelly road without one drop of water, or possibility of getting any;" and here, to mend the matter, he was cursed with "two dough-hearted fools" for postilions, who "fell a-crying 'nothing was to be done!'" and could only be recalled to a worthier and more helpful mood by Sterne's "pulling off his coat and waistcoat," and "threatening to thrash them both within an inch of their lives."

The longest journey, however, must come to an end; and the party found much to console them at Toulouse for the miseries of travel. They were fortunate enough to secure one of those large, old comfortable houses which were and, here and there, perhaps, still are to be hired on the outskirts of provincial towns, at a rent which would now be thought absurdly small; and Sterne writes in terms of high complacency of his temporary abode. "Excellent," "well furnished," "elegant beyond anything I ever looked for," are some of the expressions of praise which it draws from him. He observes with pride that the "very great salle a compagnie is as large as Baron d'Holbach's;" and he records with great satisfaction—as well he might—that for the use of this and a country house two miles out of town, "besides the enjoyment of gardens, which the landlord engaged to keep in order," he was to pay no more than thirty pounds a year. "All things," he adds, "are cheap in proportion: so we shall live here for a very, very little."

And this, no doubt, was to Sterne a matter of some moment at this time. The expenses of his long and tedious journey must have been heavy; and the gold-yielding vein of literary popularity, which he had for three years been working, had already begun to show signs of exhaustion. Tristram Shandy had lost its first vogue; and the fifth and sixth volumes, the copyright of which he does not seem to have disposed of, were "going off" but slowly.



CHAPTER VI.

LIFE IN THE SOUTH.—RETURN TO ENGLAND.—VOLS. VII. AND VIII.—SECOND SET OF SERMONS.

(1762-1765.)

The diminished appetite of the public for the humours of Mr. Shandy and his brother is, perhaps, not very difficult to understand. Time was simply doing its usual wholesome work in sifting the false from the true—in ridding Sterne's audience of its contingent of sham admirers. This is not to say, of course, that there might not have been other and better grounds for a partial withdrawal of popular favour. A writer who systematically employs Sterne's peculiar methods must lay his account with undeserved loss as well as with unmerited gain. The fifth and sixth volumes deal quite largely enough in mere eccentricity to justify the distaste of any reader upon whom mere eccentricity had begun to pall. But if this were the sole explanation of the book's declining popularity, we should have to admit that the adverse judgment of the public had been delayed too long for justice, and had passed over the worst to light upon the less heinous offences. For the third volume, though its earlier pages contain some good touches, drifts away into mere dull, uncleanly equivoque in its concluding chapters; and the fifth and sixth volumes may, at any rate, quite safely challenge favourable comparison with the fourth—the poorest, I venture to think, of the whole series. There is nothing in these two later volumes to compare, for instance, with that most wearisome exercise in double entendre, Slawkenbergius's Tale; nothing to match that painfully elaborate piece of low comedy, the consultation of philosophers and its episode of Phutatorius's mishap with the hot chestnut; no such persistent resort, in short, to those mechanical methods of mirth-making upon which Sterne, throughout a great part of the fourth volume, almost exclusively relies. The humour of the fifth is, to a far larger extent, of the creative and dramatic order; the ever-delightful collision of intellectual incongruities in the persons of the two brothers Shandy gives animation to the volume almost from beginning to end. The arrival of the news of Bobby Shandy's death, and the contrast of its reception by the philosophic father and the simple-minded uncle, form a scene of inimitable absurdity, and the "Tristrapaedia," with its ingenious project for opening up innumerable "tracks of inquiry" before the mind of the pupil by sheer skill in the manipulation of the auxiliary verbs, is in the author's happiest vein. The sixth volume, again, which contains the irresistible dialogue between Mr. and Mrs. Shandy on the great question of the "breeching of Tristram," and the much-admired, if not wholly admirable, episode of Le Fevre's death, is fully entitled to rank beside its predecessors. On the whole, therefore, it must be said that the colder reception accorded to this instalment of the novel, as compared with the previous one, can hardly be justified on sound critical grounds. But that literary shortcomings were not, in fact, the cause of Tristram's declining popularity may be confidently inferred from the fact that the seventh volume, with its admirably vivid and spirited scenes of Continental travel, and the eighth and ninth, with their charming narrative of Captain Shandy's love affair, were but slightly more successful. The readers whom this, the third instalment of the novel, had begun to repel, were mainly, I imagine, those who had never felt any intelligent admiration for the former; who had been caught by the writer's eccentricity, without appreciating his insight into character and his graphic power, and who had seen no other aspects of his humour than those buffooneries and puerilities which, after first amusing, had begun, in the natural course of things, to weary them.

Meanwhile, however, and with spirits restored by the Southern warmth to that buoyancy which never long deserted them, Sterne had begun to set to work upon a new volume. His letters show that this was not the seventh but the eighth; and Mr. Fitzgerald's conjecture, that the materials ultimately given to the world in the former volume were originally designed for another work, appears exceedingly probable. But for some time after his arrival at Toulouse he was unable, it would seem, to resume his literary labours in any form. Ever liable, through his weakly constitution, to whatever local maladies might anywhere prevail, he had fallen ill, he writes to Hall Stevenson, "of an epidemic vile fever which killed hundreds about me. The physicians here," he adds, "are the arrantest charlatans in Europe, or the most ignorant of all pretending fools. I withdrew what was left of me out of their hands, and recommended my affairs entirely to Dame Nature. She (dear goddess) has saved me in fifty different pinching bouts, and I begin to have a kind of enthusiasm now in her favour and my own, so that one or two more escapes will make me believe I shall leave you all at last by translation, and not by fair death." Having now become "stout and foolish again as a man can wish to be, I am," he says, "busy playing the fool with my Uncle Toby, whom I have got soused over head and ears in love." Now, it is not till the eighth volume that the Widow Wadman begins to weave her spells around Captain Shandy's ingenuous heart; while the seventh volume is mainly composed of that series of travel-pictures in which Sterne has manifestly recorded his own impressions of Northern France in the person of the youthful Tristram. It is scarcely doubtful, therefore, that it is these sketches, and the use which he then proposed to make of them, that he refers to, when speaking in this letter of "hints and projects for other works." Originally intended to form a part of the volume afterwards published as the Sentimental Journey, it was found necessary—under pressure, it is to be supposed, of insufficient matter—to work them up instead into an interpolated seventh volume of Tristram Shandy. At the moment, however, he no doubt as little foresaw this as he did the delay which was to take place before any continuation of the novel appeared. He clearly contemplated no very long absence from England. "When I have reaped the benefit of the winter at Toulouse, I cannot see I have anything more to do with it. Therefore, after having gone with my wife and girl to Bagneres, I shall return from whence I came." Already, however, one can perceive signs of his having too presumptuously marked out his future. "My wife wants to stay another year, to save money; and this opposition of wishes, though it will not be as sour as lemon, yet 'twill not be as sweet as sugar." And again: "If the snows will suffer me, I propose to spend two or three months at Barege or Bagneres; but my dear wife is against all schemes of additional expense, which wicked propensity (though not of despotic power) yet I cannot suffer—though, by-the-bye, laudable enough. But she may talk; I will go my own way, and she will acquiesce without a word of debate on the subject. Who can say so much in praise of his wife? Few, I trow." The tone of contemptuous amiability shows pretty clearly that the relations between husband and wife had in nowise improved. But wives do not always lose all their influence over husbands' wills along with the power over their affections; and it will be seen that Sterne did not make his projected winter trip to Bagneres, and that he did remain at Toulouse for a considerable part of the second year for which Mrs. Sterne desired to prolong their stay. The place, however, was not to his taste; and he was not the first traveller in France who, delighted with the gaiety of Paris, has been disappointed at finding that French provincial towns can be as dull as dulness itself could require. It is in the somewhat unjust mood which is commonly begotten of disillusion that Sterne discovers the cause of his ennui in "the eternal platitude of the French character," with its "little variety and no originality at all." "They are very civil," he admits, "but civility itself so thus uniform wearies and bothers me to death. If I do not mind I shall grow most stupid and sententious." With such apprehensions it is not surprising that he should have eagerly welcomed any distraction that chance might offer, and in December we find him joyfully informing his chief correspondent of the period, Mr. Foley—who to his services as Sterne's banker seems to have added those of a most helpful and trusted friend—that "there are a company of English strollers arrived here who are to act comedies all the Christmas, and are now busy in making dresses and preparing some of our best comedies." These so-called strollers were, in fact, certain members of the English colony in Toulouse, and their performances were among the first of those "amateur theatrical" entertainments which now-a-days may be said to rival the famous "morning drum-beat" of Daniel Webster's oration, in marking the ubiquity of British boredom, as the reveil does that of British power over all the terrestrial globe. "The next week," writes Sterne, "with a grand orchestra, we play The Busybody, and the Journey to London the week after; but I have some thought of adapting it to our situation, and making it the Journey to Toulouse, which, with the change of half-a-dozen scenes, may be easily done. Thus, my dear Foley, for want of something better we have recourse to ourselves, and strike out the best amusements we can from such materials." "Recourse to ourselves," however, means, in strict accuracy, "recourse to each other;" and when the amateur players had played themselves out, and exhausted their powers of contributing to each others' amusement, it is probable that "recourse to ourselves," in the exact sense of the phrase, was found ineffective—in Sterne's case, at any rate—to stave off ennui. To him, with his copiously if somewhat oddly furnished mind, and his natural activity of imagination, one could hardly apply the line of Persius,

"Tecum habita et noris quam sit tibi curta supellex;"

but it is yet evident enough that Sterne's was one of that numerous order of intellects which are the convivial associates, rather than the fireside companions, of their owners, and which, when deprived of the stimulus of external excitement, are apt to become very dull company indeed. Nor does he seem to have obtained much diversion of mind from his literary work—a form of intellectual enjoyment which, indeed, more often presupposes than begets good spirits in such temperaments as his. He declares, it is true, that he "sports much with my Uncle Toby" in the volume which he is now "fabricating for the laughing part of the world;" but if so he must have sported only after a very desultory and dilatory fashion. On the whole one cannot escape a very strong impression that Sterne was heartily bored by his sojourn in Toulouse, and that he eagerly longed for the day of his return to "the dalliance and the wit, the flattery and the strife," which he had left behind him in the two great capitals in which he had shone.

His stay, however, was destined to be very prolonged. The winter of 1762 went by, and the succeeding year had run nearly half its course, before he changed his quarters. "The first week in June," he writes in April to Mr. Foley, "I decamp like a patriarch, with all my household, to pitch our tents for three months at the foot of the Pyrenean hills at Bagneres, where I expect much health and much amusement from all corners of the earth." He talked too at this time of spending the winter at Florence, and, after a visit to Leghorn, returning home the following April by way of Paris; "but this," he adds, "is a sketch only," and it remained only a sketch. Toulouse, however, he was in any case resolved to quit. He should not, he said, be tempted to spend another winter there. It did not suit his health, as he had hoped: he complained that it was too moist, and that he could not keep clear of ague. In June, 1763, he quitted it finally for Bagneres; whence after a short, and, as we subsequently learn, a disappointed, sojourn, he passed on to Marseilles, and later to Aix, for both of which places he expressed dislike; and by October he had gone again into winter quarters at Montpellier, where "my wife and daughter," he writes, "purpose to stay at least a year behind me." His own intention was to set out in February for England, "where my heart has been fled these six months." Here again, however, there are traces of that periodic, or rather, perhaps, that chronic conflict of inclination between himself and Mrs. Sterne, of which he speaks with such a tell-tale affectation of philosophy. "My wife," he writes in January, "returns to Toulouse, and proposes to spend the summer at Bagneres. I, on the contrary, go to visit my wife the church in Yorkshire. We all live the longer, at least the happier, for having things our own way. This is my conjugal maxim. I own 'tis not the best of maxims, but I maintain 'tis not the worst." It was natural enough that Sterne, at any rate, should wish to turn his back on Montpellier. Again had the unlucky invalid been attacked by a dangerous illness; the "sharp air" of the place disagreed with him, and his physicians, after having him under their hands more than a month, informed him coolly that if he stayed any longer in Montpellier it would be fatal to him. How soon after that somewhat late warning he took his departure there is no record to show; but it is not till the middle of May that we find him writing from Paris to his daughter. And since he there announces his intention of leaving for England in a few days, it is a probable conjecture that he had arrived at the French capital some fortnight or so before.

His short stay in Paris was marked by two incidents—trifling in themselves, but too characteristic of the man to be omitted. Lord Hertford, the British Ambassador, had just taken a magnificent hotel in Paris, and Sterne was asked to preach the first sermon in its chapel. The message was brought him, he writes, "when I was playing a sober game of whist with Mr. Thornhill; and whether I was called abruptly from my afternoon amusement to prepare myself for the business on the next day, or from what other cause, I do not pretend to determine; but that unlucky kind of fit seized me which you know I am never able to resist, and a very unlucky text did come into my head." The text referred to was 2 Kings XX. 15—Hezekiah's admission of that ostentatious display of the treasures of his palace to the ambassadors of Babylon for which Isaiah rebuked him by prophesying the Babylonian captivity of Judah. Nothing, indeed, as Sterne protests, could have been more innocent than the discourse which he founded upon the mal-a-propos text; but still it was unquestionably a fair subject for "chaff," and the preacher was rallied upon it by no less a person than David Hume. Gossip having magnified this into a dispute between the parson and the philosopher, Sterne disposes of the idle story in a passage deriving an additional interest from its tribute to that sweet disposition which had an equal charm for two men so utterly unlike as the author of Tristram Shandy and the author of the Wealth of Nations. "I should," he writes, "be exceedingly surprised to hear that David ever had an unpleasant contention with any man; and if I should ever be made to believe that such an event had happened, nothing would persuade me that his opponent was not in the wrong, for in my life did I never meet with a being of a more placid and gentle nature; and it is this amiable turn of his character which has given more consequence and force to his scepticism than all the arguments of his sophistry." The real truth of the matter was that, meeting Sterne at Lord Hertford's table on the day when he had preached at the Embassy Chapel, "David was disposed to make a little merry with the parson, and in return the parson was equally disposed to make a little merry with the infidel. We laughed at one another, and the company laughed with us both." It would be absurd, of course, to identify Sterne's latitudinarian bonhomie with the higher order of tolerance; but many a more confirmed and notorious Gallio than the clerical humourist would have assumed prudish airs of orthodoxy in such a presence, and the incident, if it does not raise one's estimate of Sterne's dignity, displays him to us as laudably free from hypocrisy.

But the long holiday of somewhat dull travel, with its short last act of social gaiety, was drawing to a close. In the third or fourth week of May Sterne quitted Paris; and after a stay of a few weeks in London he returned to the Yorkshire parsonage, from which he had been absent some thirty months.

Unusually long as was the interval which had elapsed since the publication of the last instalment of Tristram Shandy, the new one was far from ready; and even in the "sweet retirement" of Coxwold he seems to have made but slow progress with it. Indeed, the "sweet retirement" itself became soon a little tedious to him. The month of September found him already bored with work and solitude; and the fine autumn weather of 1764 set him longing for a few days' pleasure-making at what was even then the fashionable Yorkshire watering-place. "I do not think," he writes, with characteristic incoherence, to Hall Stevenson—"I do not think a week or ten days' playing the good fellow (at this very time) so abominable a thing; but if a man could get there cleverly, and every soul in his house in the mind to try what could be done in furtherance thereof, I have no one to consult in these affairs. Therefore, as a man may do worse things, the plain English of all which is, that I am going to leave a few poor sheep in the wilderness for fourteen days, and from pride and naughtiness of heart to go see what is doing at Scarborough, steadfully meaning afterwards to lead a new life and strengthen my faith. Now, some folks say there is much company there, and some say not; and I believe there is neither the one nor the other, but will be both if the world will have patience for a month or so." Of his work he has not much to say: "I go on not rapidly but well enough with my Uncle Toby's amours. There is no sitting and cudgelling one's brains whilst the sun shines bright. 'Twill be all over in six or seven weeks; and there are dismal weeks enow after to endure suffocation by a brimstone fireside." He was anxious that his boon companion should join him at Scarborough; but that additional pleasure was denied him, and he had to content himself with the usual gay society of the place. Three weeks, it seems, were passed by him in this most doubtfully judicious form of bodily and mental relaxation—weeks which he spent, he afterwards writes, in "drinking the waters, and receiving from them marvellous strength, had I not debilitated it as fast as I got it by playing the good fellow with Lord Granby and Co. too much." By the end of the month he was back again at Coxwold, "returned to my Philosophical Hut to finish Tristram, which I calculate will be ready for the world about Christmas, at which time I decamp from hence and fix my headquarters at London for the winter, unless my cough pushes me forward to your metropolis" (he is writing to Foley, in Paris), "or that I can persuade some gros milord to make a trip to you." Again, too, in this letter we get another glimpse at that thoroughly desentimentalized "domestic interior" which the sentimentalist's household had long presented to the view. Writing to request a remittance of money to Mrs. Sterne at Montauban—a duty which, to do him justice, he seems to have very watchfully observed—Sterne adds his solicitation to Mr. Foley to "do something equally essential to rectify a mistake in the mind of your correspondent there, who, it seems, gave her a hint not long ago 'that she was separated from me for life.' Now, as this is not true, in the first place, and may fix a disadvantageous impression of her to those she lives amongst, 'twould be unmerciful to let her or my daughter suffer by it. So do be so good as to undeceive him; for in a year or two she purposes (and I expect it with impatience from her) to rejoin me."

Early in November the two new volumes of Shandy began to approach completion; for by this time Sterne had already made up his mind to interpolate these notes of his French travels, which now do duty as Vol. VII. "You will read," he tells Foley, "as odd a tour through France as was ever projected or executed by traveller or travel-writer since the world began. 'Tis a laughing, good-tempered satire upon travelling—as puppies travel." By the 16th of the month he had "finished my two volumes of Tristram," and looked to be in London at Christmas, "whence I have some thoughts of going to Italy this year. At least I shall not defer it above another." On the 26th of January, 1765, the two new volumes were given to the world.

Shorter in length than any of the preceding instalments, and filled out as it was, even so, by a process of what would now be called "book-making," this issue will yet bear comparison, I think, with the best of its predecessors. Its sketches of travel, though destined to be surpassed in vigour and freedom of draftsmanship by the Sentimental Journey, are yet excellent, and their very obvious want of connexion with the story—if story it can be called—is so little felt that we almost resent the head-and-ears introduction of Mr. Shandy and his brother, and the Corporal, in apparent concession to the popular prejudice in favour of some sort of coherence between the various parts of a narrative. The first seventeen chapters are, perhaps, as freshly delightful reading as anything in Sterne. They are literally filled and brimming over with the exhilaration of travel: written, or at least prepared for writing, we can clearly see, under the full intoxicant effect which a bewildering succession of new sights and sounds will produce, in a certain measure, upon the coolest of us, and which would set a head like Sterne's in an absolute whirl. The contagion of his high spirits is, however, irresistible; and, putting aside all other and more solid qualities in them, these chapters are, for mere fun—for that kind of clever nonsense which only wins by perfect spontaneity, and which so promptly makes ashamed the moment spontaneity fails—unsurpassed by anything of the same kind from the same hand. How strange, then, that, with so keen an eye for the humorous, so sound and true a judgment in the highest qualities of humour, Sterne should think it possible for any one who has outgrown what may be called the dirty stage of boyhood to smile at the story which begins a few chapters afterwards—that of the Abbess and Novice of the Convent of Andouillets! The adult male person is not so much shocked at the coarseness of this story as astounded at the bathos of its introduction. It is as though some matchless connoisseur in wine, after having a hundred times demonstrated the unerring discrimination of his palate for the finest brands, should then produce some vile and loaded compound, and invite us to drink it with all the relish with which he seems to be swallowing it himself. This story of the Abbess and Novice almost impels us to turn back to certain earlier chapters, or former volumes, and re-examine some of the subtler passages of humour to be found there—in downright apprehension lest we should turn out to have read these "good things," not "in," but "into," our author. The bad wine is so very bad, that we catch ourselves wondering whether the finer brands were genuine, when we see the same palate equally satisfied with both. But one should, of course, add that it is only in respect of its supposed humour that this story shakes its readers' faith in the gifts of the narrator. As a mere piece of story-telling, and even as a study in landscape and figure-painting, it is quite perversely skilful. There is something almost irritating, as a waste of powers on unworthy material, in the prettiness of the picture which Sterne draws of the preparations for the departure of the two religieuses—the stir in the simple village, the co-operating labours of the gardener and the tailor, the carpenter and the smith, and all those other little details which bring the whole scene before the eye so vividly that Sterne may, perhaps, in all seriousness, and not merely as a piece of his characteristic persiflage, have thrown in the exclamation, "I declare I am interested in this story, and wish I had been there." Nothing, again, could be better done than the sketch of the little good-natured, "broad-set" gardener, who acted as the ladies' muleteer, and the recital of the indiscretions by which he was betrayed into temporary desertion of his duties. The whole scene is Chaucerian in its sharpness of outline and translucency of atmosphere: though there, unfortunately, the resemblance ends. Sterne's manner of saying what we now leave unsaid is as unlike Chaucer's, and as unlike for the worse, as it can possibly be.

Still, a certain amount of this element of the non nominandum must be compounded for, one regrets to say, in nearly every chapter that Sterne ever wrote; and there is certainly less than the average amount of it in the seventh volume. Then, again, this volume contains the famous scene with the ass—the live and genuinely touching, and not the dead and fictitiously pathetic, animal; and that perfect piece of comic dialogue—the interview between the puzzled English traveller and the French commissary of the posts. To have suggested this scene is, perhaps, the sole claim of the absurd fiscal system of the Ancien regime upon the grateful remembrance of the world. A scheme of taxation which exacted posting-charges from a traveller who proposed to continue his journey by water, possesses a natural ingredient of drollery infused into its mere vexatiousness; but a whole volume of satire could hardly put its essential absurdity in a stronger light than is thrown upon it in the short conversation between the astonished Tristram and the officer of the fisc, who had just handed him a little bill for six livres four sous:

"'Upon what account?' said I.

"''Tis upon the part of the King,' said the commissary, heaving up his shoulders.

"'My good friend,' quoth I, 'as sure as I am I, and you are you—'

"'And who are you?' he said.

"'Don't puzzle me,' said I. 'But it is an indubitable verity,' I continued, addressing myself to the commissary, changing only the form of my asseveration,' that I owe the King of France nothing but my good-will, for he is a very honest man, and I wish him all the health and pastime in the world.'

"'Pardonnez-moi,' replied the commissary. 'You are indebted to him six livres four sous for the next post from hence to St. Fons, on your route to Avignon, which being a post royal, you pay double for the horses and postilion, otherwise 'twould have amounted to no more than three livres two sous.'

"'But I don't go by land,' said I.

"'You may if you please,' replied the commissary.

"'Your most obedient servant,' said I, making him a low bow.

"The commissary, with all the sincerity of grave good-breeding, made me one as low again. I never was more disconcerted by a bow in my life. 'The devil take the serious character of these people,' said I, aside; 'they understand no more of irony than this.' The comparison was standing close by with her panniers, but something sealed up my lips. I could not pronounce the name.

"'Sir,' said I, collecting myself, 'it is not my intention to take post.'

"'But you may,' said he, persisting in his first reply. 'You may if you choose.'

"'And I may take salt to my pickled herring if I choose.[1] But I do not choose.'

"'But you must pay for it, whether you do or no.'

"'Ay, for the salt,' said I, 'I know.'

"'And for the post, too,' added he.

"'Defend me!' cried I. 'I travel by water. I am going down the Rhone this very afternoon; my baggage is in the boat, and I have actually paid nine livres for my passage.'

"'C'est tout egal—'tis all one,' said he.

"'Bon Dieu! What! pay for the way I go and for the way I do not go?'

"'C'est tout egal,' replied the commissary.

"'The devil it is!' said I. 'But I will go to ten thousand Bastilles first. O, England! England! thou land of liberty and climate of good-sense! thou tenderest of mothers and gentlest of nurses!' cried I, kneeling upon one knee as I was beginning my apostrophe—when the director of Madame L. Blanc's conscience coming in at that instant, and seeing a person in black, with a face as pale as ashes, at his devotions, asked if I stood in want of the aids of the Church.

"'I go by water,' said I, 'and here's another will be for making me pay for going by oil.'"

[Footnote 1: It is the penalty—I suppose the just penalty—paid by habitually extravagant humourists, that meaning not being always expected of them, it is not always sought by their readers with sufficient care. Anyhow, it may be suspected that this retort of Tristram's is too often passed over as a mere random absurdity designed for his interlocutor's mystification, and that its extremely felicitous pertinence to the question in dispute is thus overlooked. The point of it, of course, is that the business in which the commissary was then engaged was precisely analogous to that of exacting salt dues from perverse persons who were impoverishing the revenue by possessing herrings already pickled.]

The commissary, of course, remains obdurate, and Tristram protests that the treatment to which he is being subjected is "contrary to the law of nature, contrary to reason, contrary to the Gospel:"

"'But not to this,' said he, putting a printed paper into my hand.

"'De par le Roi.' ''Tis a pithy prolegomenon,' quoth I, and so read on.... 'By all which it appears,' quoth I, having read it over a little too rapidly, 'that if a man sets out in a post-chaise for Paris, he must go on travelling in one all the days of his life, or pay for it.'

"'Excuse me,' said the commissary, 'the spirit of the ordinance is this, that if you set out with an intention of running post from Paris to Avignon, &c., you shall not change that intention or mode of travelling without first satisfying the fermiers for two posts further than the place you repent at; and 'tis founded,' continued he, 'upon this, that the revenues are not to fall short through your fickleness.'

"'O, by heavens!' cried I, 'if fickleness is taxable in France, we have nothing to do but to make the best peace we can.'

"And so the peace was made."

And the volume ends with the dance of villagers on "the road between Nismes and Lunel, where is the best Muscatto wine in all France"—that charming little idyll which won the unwilling admiration of the least friendly of Sterne's critics.[1]

With the close of this volume the shadowy Tristram disappears altogether from the scene; and even the clearly-sketched figures of Mr. and Mrs. Shandy recede somewhat into the background. The courtship of my Uncle Toby forms the whole motif and indeed almost the entire substance, of the next volume. Of this famous episode in the novel a great deal has been said and written, and much of the praise bestowed upon it is certainly deserved. The artful coquetries of the fascinating widow, and the gradual capitulation of the Captain, are studied with admirable power of humorous insight, and described with infinite grace and skill. But there is, perhaps, no episode in the novel which brings out what may be called the perversity of Sterne's animalism in a more exasperating way. It is not so much the amount of this element as the time, place, and manner in which it makes its presence felt. The senses must, of course, play their part in all love affairs, except those of the angels—or the triangles; and such writers as Byron, for instance, are quite free from the charge of over-spiritualizing their description of the passion. Yet one might safely say that there is far less to repel a healthy mind in the poet's account of the amour of Juan and Haidee than is to be found in many a passage in this volume. It is not merely that one is the poetry and the other the prose of the sexual passion: the distinction goes deeper, and points to a fundamental difference of attitude towards their subject in the two writers' minds.

The success of this instalment of Tristram Shandy appears to have been slightly greater than that of the preceding one. Writing from London, where he was once more basking in the sunshine of social popularity, to Garrick, then in Paris, he says (March 16, 1765): "I have had a lucrative campaign here. Shandy sells well," and "I am taxing the public with two more volumes of sermons, which will more than double the gains of Shandy. It goes into the world with a prancing list de toute la noblesse, which will bring me in three hundred pounds, exclusive of the sale of the copy." The list was, indeed, extensive and distinguished enough to justify the curious epithet which he applies to it; but the cavalcade of noble names continued to "prance" for some considerable time without advancing. Yet he had good reasons, according to his own account, for wishing to push on their publication. His parsonage-house at Button had just been burnt down through the carelessness of one of his curate's household, with a loss to Sterne of some 350l. "As soon as I can," he says, "I must rebuild it, but I lack the means at present." Nevertheless, the new sermons continued to hang fire. Again, in April he describes the subscription list as "the most splendid list which ever pranced before a book since subscription came into fashion;" but though the volumes which it was to usher into the world were then spoken of as about to be printed "very soon," he has again in July to write of them only as "forthcoming in September, though I fear not in time to bring them with me" to Paris. And, as a matter of fact, they do not seem to have made their appearance until after Sterne had quitted England on his second and last Continental journey. The full subscription list may have had the effect of relaxing his energies; but the subscribers had no reason to complain when, in 1766, the volumes at last appeared.

The reception given to the first batch of sermons which Sterne had published was quite favourable enough to encourage a repetition of the experiment. He was shrewd enough, however, to perceive that on this second occasion a somewhat different sort of article would be required. In the first flush of Tristram Shandy's success, and in the first piquancy of the contrast between the grave profession of the writer and the unbounded license of the book, he could safely reckon on as large and curious a public for any sermons whatever from the pen of Mr. Yorick. There was no need that the humourist in his pulpit should at all resemble the humourist at his desk, or, indeed, that he should be in any way an impressive or commanding figure. The great desire of the world was to know what he did resemble in this new and incongruous position. Men wished to see what the queer, sly face looked like over a velvet cushion, in the assurance that the sight would be a strange and interesting one, at any rate. Five years afterwards, however, the case was different. The public then had already had one set of sermons, and had discovered that the humorous Mr. Sterne was not a very different man in the pulpit from the dullest and most decorous of his brethren. Such discoveries as these are instructive to make, but not attractive to dwell upon; and Sterne was fully alive to the probability that there would be no great demand for a volume of sermons which should only illustrate for the second time the fact that he could be as commonplace as his neighbour. He saw that in future the Rev. Mr. Yorick must a little more resemble the author of Tristram Shandy, and it is not improbable that from 1760 onwards he composed his parochial sermons with especial attention to this mode of qualifying them for republication. There is, at any rate, no slight critical difficulty in believing that the bulk of the sermons of 1766 can be assigned to the same literary period as the sermons of 1761. The one set seems as manifestly to belong to the post-Shandian as the other does to the pre-Shandian era; and in some, indeed, of the apparently later productions the daring quaintness of style and illustration is carried so far that, except for the fact that Sterne had no time to spare for the composition of sermons not intended for professional use, one would have been disposed to believe that they neither were nor were meant to be delivered from the pulpit at all.[1] Throughout all of them, however, Sterne's new-found literary power displays itself in a vigour of expression and vivacity of illustration which at least serve to make the sermons of 1766 considerably more entertaining reading than those of 1761. In the first of the latter series, for instance—the sermon on Shimei—a discourse in which there are no very noticeable sallies of unclerical humour, the quality of liveliness is very conspicuously present. The preacher's view of the character of Shimei, and of his behaviour to David, is hardly that, perhaps, of a competent historical critic, and in treating of the Benjamite's insults to the King of Israel he appears to take no account of the blood-feud between the house of David and the clan to which the railer belonged; just as in commenting on Shimei's subsequent and most abject submission to the victorious monarch, Sterne lays altogether too much stress upon conduct which is indicative, not so much of any exceptional meanness of disposition, as of the ordinary suppleness of the Oriental put in fear of his life. However, it makes a more piquant and dramatic picture to represent Shimei as a type of the wretch of insolence and servility compact, with a tongue ever ready to be loosed against the unfortunate, and a knee ever ready to be bent to the strong. And thus he moralizes on his conception:

[Footnote 1: Mr. Fitzgerald, indeed, asserts as a fact that some at least of these sermons were actually composed in the capacity of litterateur and not of divine—for the press and not for the pulpit.]

"There is not a character in the world which has so bad an influence upon it as this of Shimei. While power meets with honest checks, and the evils of life with honest refuge, the world will never be undone; but thou, Shimei, hast sapped it at both extremes: for thou corruptest prosperity, and 'tis thou who hast broken the heart of poverty. And so long as worthless spirits can be ambitious ones 'tis a character we never shall want. Oh! it infests the court, the camp, the cabinet; it infests the Church. Go where you will, in every quarter, in every profession, you see a Shimei following the wheels of the fortunate through thick mire and clay. Haste, Shimei, haste! or thou wilt be undone forever. Shimei girdeth up his loins and speedeth after him. Behold the hand which governs everything takes the wheel from his chariot, so that he who driveth, driveth on heavily. Shimei doubles his speed; but 'tis the contrary way: he flies like the wind over a sandy desert.... Stay, Shimei! 'tis your patron, your friend, your benefactor, the man who has saved you from the dunghill. 'Tis all one to Shimei. Shimei is the barometer of every man's fortune; marks the rise and fall of it, with all the variations from scorching hot to freezing cold upon his countenance that the simile will admit of.[1] Is a cloud upon thy affairs? See, it hangs over Shimei's brow! Hast thou been spoken for to the king or the captain of the host without success? Look not into the Court Calendar, the vacancy is filled in Shimei's face. Art thou in debt, though not to Shimei? No matter. The worst officer of the law shall not be more insolent. What, then, Shimei, is the fault of poverty so black? is it of so general concern that thou and all thy family must rise up as one man to reproach it? When it lost everything, did it lose the right to pity too? Or did he who maketh poor as well as maketh rich strip it of its natural powers to mollify the heart and supple the temper of your race? Trust me you have much to answer for. It is this treatment which it has ever met with from spirits like yours which has gradually taught the world to look upon it as the greatest of evils, and shun it as the worst disgrace. And what is it, I beseech you—what is it that men will not do to keep clear of so sore an imputation and punishment? Is it not to fly from this that he rises early, late takes rest, and eats the bread of carefulness? that he plots, contrives, swears, lies, shuffles, puts on all shapes, tries all garments, wears them with this or that side outward, just as it may favour his escape?"

And though the sermon ends in orthodox fashion, with an assurance that, in spite of the Shimeis by whom we are surrounded, it is in our power to "lay the foundation of our peace (where it ought to be) within our own hearts," yet the preacher can, in the midst of his earlier reflections, permit himself the quaintly pessimistic outburst: "O Shimei! would to Heaven, when thou wast slain, that all thy family had been slain with thee, and not one of thy resemblance left! But ye have multiplied exceedingly, and replenished the earth; and if I prophesy rightly, ye will in the end subdue it."

[Footnote 1: Which are not many in the case of a barometer.]

Nowhere, however, does the man of the world reveal himself with more strangely comical effect under the gown of the divine than in the sermon on "The Prodigal Son." The repentant spendthrift has returned to his father's house, and is about to confess his follies. But—

"Alas! How shall he tell his story?

"Ye who have trod this round, tell me in what words he shall give in to his father the sad items of his extravagance and folly: the feasts and banquets which he gave to whole cities in the East; the costs of Asiatic rarities, and of Asiatic cooks to dress them; the expenses of singing men and singing women; the flute, the harp, the sackbut, and all kinds of music; the dress of the Persian Court how magnificent! their slaves how numerous! their chariots, their homes, their pictures, their furniture, what immense sums they had devoured! what expectations from strangers of condition! what exactions! How shall the youth make his father comprehend that he was cheated at Damascus by one of the best men in the world; that he had lent a part of his substance to a friend at Nineveh, who had fled off with it to the Ganges; that a whore of Babylon had swallowed his best pearl, and anointed the whole city with his balm of Gilead; that he had been sold by a man of honour for twenty shekels of silver to a worker in graven images; that the images he had purchased produced him nothing, that they could not be transported across the wilderness, and had been burnt with fire at Shusan; that the apes and peacocks which he had sent for from Tharsis lay dead upon his hands; that the mummies had not been dead long enough which he had brought from Egypt; that all had gone wrong from the day he forsook his father's house?"

All this, it must be admitted, is pretty lively for a sermon. But hear the reverend gentleman once more, in the same discourse, and observe the characteristic coolness with which he touches, only to drop, what may be called the "professional" moral of the parable, and glides off into a train of interesting, but thoroughly mundane, reflections, suggested—or rather, supposed in courtesy to have been suggested—by the text. "I know not," he says, "whether it would be a subject of much edification to convince you here that our Saviour, by the Prodigal Son, particularly pointed out those who were sinners of the Gentiles, and were recovered by divine grace to repentance; and that by the elder brother he intended manifestly the more forward of the Jews," &c. But, whether it would edify you or not, he goes on, in effect, to say, I do not propose to provide you with edification in that kind. "These uses have been so ably set forth in so many good sermons upon the Prodigal Son that I shall turn aside from them at present, and content myself with some reflections upon that fatal passion which led him—and so many thousands after the example—to gather all he had together and take his journey into a far country." In other words, "I propose to make the parable a peg whereon to hang a few observations on (what does the reader suppose?) the practice of sending young men upon the Grand Tour, accompanied by a 'bear-leader,' and herein of the various kinds of bear-leaders, and the services which they do, and do not, render to their charges; with a few words on society in Continental cities, and a true view of 'letters of introduction.'" That is literally the substance of the remainder of the sermon. And thus pleasantly does the preacher play with his curious subject:

"But you will send an able pilot with your son—a scholar. If wisdom can speak in no other tongue but Greek or Latin, you do well; or if mathematics will make a man a gentleman, or natural philosophy but teach him to make a bow, he may be of some service in introducing your son into good societies, and supporting him in them when he had done. But the upshot will be generally this, that on the most pressing occasions of addresses, if he is not a mere man of reading, the unhappy youth will have the tutor to carry, and not the tutor to carry him. But (let us say) you will avoid this extreme; he shall be escorted by one who knows the world, not only from books but from his own experience; a man who has been employed on such services, and thrice 'made the tour of Europe with success'—that is, without breaking his own or his pupil's neck; for if he is such as my eyes have seen, some broken Swiss valet de chambre, some general undertaker, who will perform the journey in so many months, 'if God permit,' much knowledge will not accrue. Some profit, at least: he will learn the amount to a halfpenny of every stage from Calais to Rome; he will be carried to the best inns, instructed where there is the best wine, and sup a livre cheaper than if the youth had been left to make the tour and the bargain himself. Look at our governor, I beseech you! See, he is an inch taller as he relates the advantages. And here endeth his pride, his knowledge, and his use. But when your son gets abroad he will be taken out of his hand by his society with men of rank and letters, with whom he will pass the greatest part of his time."

So much for the bear-leader; and now a remark or two on the young man's chances of getting into good foreign society; and then—the benediction:

"Let me observe, in the first place, that company which is really good is very rare and very shy. But you have surmounted this difficulty, and procured him the best letters of recommendation to the most eminent and respectable in every capital. And I answer that he will obtain all by them which courtesy strictly stands obliged to pay on such occasions, but no more. There is nothing in which we are so much deceived as in the advantages proposed from our connexions and discourse with the literati, &c., in foreign parts, especially if the experiment is made before we are matured by years or study. Conversation is a traffic; and if you enter it without some stock of knowledge to balance the account perpetually betwixt you, the trade drops at once; and this is the reason, however it may be boasted to the contrary, why travellers have so little (especially good) conversation with the natives, owing to their suspicion, or perhaps conviction, that there is nothing to be extracted from the conversation of young itinerants worth the trouble of their bad language, or the interruption of their visits."

Very true, no doubt, and excellently well put; but we seem to have got some distance, in spirit at any rate, from Luke xv. 13; and it is with somewhat too visible effect, perhaps, that Sterne forces his way back into the orthodox routes of pulpit disquisition. The youth, disappointed with his reception by "the literati," &c., seeks "an easier society; and as bad company is always ready, and ever lying in wait, the career is soon finished, and the poor prodigal returns—the same object of pity with the prodigal in the Gospel." Hardly a good enough "tag," perhaps, to reconcile the ear to the "And now to," &c., as a fitting close to this pointed little essay in the style of the Chesterfield Letters. There is much internal evidence to show that this so-called sermon was written either after Sterne's visit to or during his stay in France; and there is strong reason, I think, to suppose that it was in reality neither intended for a sermon nor actually delivered from the pulpit.

No other of his sermons has quite so much vivacity as this. But in the famous discourse upon an unlucky text—the sermon preached at the chapel of the English Embassy, in Paris—there are touches of unclerical raillery not a few. Thus: "What a noise," he exclaims, "among the simulants of the various virtues!... Behold Humility, become so out of mere pride; Chastity, never once in harm's way; and Courage, like a Spanish soldier upon an Italian stage—a bladder full of wind. Hush! the sound of that trumpet! Let not my soldier run!' tis some good Christian giving alms. O Pity, thou gentlest of human passions! soft and tender are thy notes, and ill accord they with so loud an instrument."

Here, again, is a somewhat bold saying for a divine: "But, to avoid all commonplace cant as much as I can on this head, I will forbear to say, because I do not think, that 'tis a breach of Christian charity to think or speak ill of our neighbour. We cannot avoid it: our opinion must follow the evidence," &c. And a little later on, commenting on the insinuation conveyed in Satan's question, "Does Job serve God for nought?" he says: "It is a bad picture, and done by a terrible master; and yet we are always copying it. Does a man from real conviction of heart forsake his vices? The position is not to be allowed. No; his vices have forsaken him. Does a pure virgin fear God, and say her prayers? She is in her climacteric? Does humility clothe and educate the unknown orphan? Poverty, thou hast no genealogies. See! is he not the father of the child?" In another sermon he launches out into quaintly contemptuous criticism of a religious movement which he was certainly the last person in the world to understand—to wit, Methodism. He asks whether, "when a poor, disconsolated, drooping creature is terrified from all enjoyment, prays without ceasing till his imagination is heated, fasts and mortifies and mopes till his body is in as bad a plight as his mind, it is a wonder that the mechanical disturbances and conflicts of an empty belly, interpreted by an empty head, should be mistook for workings of a different kind from what they are?" Other sermons reflect the singularly bitter anti-Catholic feeling which was characteristic even of indifferentism in those days—at any rate amongst Whig divines. But in most of them one is liable to come at any moment across one of those strange sallies to which Gray alluded, when he said of the effect of Sterne's sermons upon a reader that "you often see him tottering on the verge of laughter, and ready to throw his periwig in the face of the audience."