As was usual with him, however, he postponed commencing it until he
should have returned to Coxwold; and, as was equally usual with
him, he found it difficult to tear himself away from the delights
of London. Moreover, there was in the present instance a special
difficulty, arising out of an affair upon which, as it has relations
with the history of Sterne's literary work, it would be impossible,
even in the most strictly critical and least general of biographies,
to observe complete silence. I refer, of course, to the famous and
furious flirtation with Mrs. Draper--the Eliza of the Yorick and Eliza
Letters. Of the affair itself but little need be said. I have already
stated my own views on the general subject of Sterne's love affairs;
and I feel no inducement to discuss the question of their innocence
or otherwise in relation to this particular amourette. I will only
say that were it technically as innocent as you please, the mean
which must be found between Thackeray's somewhat too harsh and Mr.
Fitzgerald's considerably too indulgent judgment on it will lie,
it seems to me, decidedly nearer to the former than to the latter's
extreme. This episode of violently sentimental philandering with an
Indian "grass widow" was, in any case, an extremely unlovely passage
in Sterne's life. On the best and most charitable view of it, the
flirtation, pursued in the way it was, and to the lengths to which
it was carried, must be held to convict the elderly lover of the most
deplorable levity, vanity, indiscretion, and sickly sentimentalism. It
was, to say the least of it, most unbecoming in a man of Sterne's age
and profession; and when it is added that Yorick's attentions to Eliza
were paid in so open a fashion as to be brought by gossip to the ears
of his neglected wife, then living many hundred miles away from him,
its highly reprehensible character seems manifest enough in all ways.

No sooner, however, had the fascinating widow set sail, than the