different towns, I found her at last in Franche Comté. Poor woman!"
he adds, "she was very cordial, &c." The &c. is charming. But
her cordiality had evidently no tendency to deepen into any more
impassioned sentiment, for she "begged to stay another year or so."
As to "my Lydia"--the real cause, we must suspect, of Sterne's having
turned out of his road--she, he says, "pleases me much. I found her
greatly improved in everything I wished her." As to himself: "I am
most unaccountably well, and most accountably nonsensical. 'Tis at
least a proof of good spirits, which is a sign and token, in these
latter days, that I must take up my pen. In faith, I think I shall
die with it in my hand; but I shall live these ten years, my Antony,
notwithstanding the fears of my wife, whom I left most melancholy
on that account." The "fears" and the melancholy were, alas! to be
justified, rather than the "good spirits;" and the shears of Atropos
were to close, not in ten years, but in little more than twenty
months, upon that fragile thread of life.

[Footnote 1: It was on this tour that Sterne picked up the French
valet Lafleur, whom he introduced as a character into the _Sentimental
Journey_, but whose subsequently published recollections of the tour
(if, indeed, the veritable Lafleur was the author of the notes from
which Scott quotes so freely) appear, as Mr. Fitzgerald has pointed
out, from internal evidence to be mostly fictitious.]

By the end of June he was back again in his Yorkshire home, and very
soon after had settled down to work upon the ninth and last volume of
_Tristram Shandy_. He was writing, however, as it should seem,
under something more than the usual distractions of a man with two
establishments. Mrs. Sterne was just then ill at Marseilles, and her
husband--who, to do him justice, was always properly solicitous for