criticism would do, to understand one particular aspect of his
literary idiosyncrasy. The sentimentalist of real life explains the
sentimentalist in art.

In the early days of May Sterne managed at last to tear himself away
from London and its joys, and with painful slowness, for he was now in
a wretched state of health, to make his way back to Yorkshire. "I have
got conveyed," he says in a distressing letter from Newark to Hall
Stevenson--"I have got conveyed thus far like a bale of cadaverous
goods consigned to Pluto and Company, lying in the bottom of my chaise
most of the route, upon a large pillow which I had the _prévoyance_ to
purchase before I set out. I am worn out, but pass on to Barnby Moor
to-night, and if possible to York the next. I know not what is the
matter with me, but some derangement presses hard upon this machine.
Still, I think it will not be overset this bout"--another of those
utterances of a cheerful courage under the prostration of pain which
reveal to us the manliest side of Sterne's nature. On reaching Coxwold
his health appears to have temporarily mended, and in June we find him
giving a far better account of himself to another of his friends. The
fresh Yorkshire air seems to have temporarily revived him, and to his
friend, Arthur Lee, a young American, he writes thus: "I am as happy
as a prince at Coxwold, and I wish you could see in how princely a
manner I live. 'Tis a land of plenty. I sit down alone to dinner--fish
and wild-fowl, or a couple of fowls or ducks, with cream and all the
simple plenty which a rich valley under Hamilton Hills can produce,
with a clean cloth on my table, and a bottle of wine on my right hand
to drink your health. I have a hundred hens and chickens about my
yard; and not a parishioner catches a hare, a rabbit, or a trout but
he brings it as an offering to me." Another of his correspondents at
this period was the Mrs. H. of his letters, whose identity I have been