previous contemplation of the dying man. And except, as has been
said, that Sterne associates himself in our minds with the perpetual
excitements of lively companionship, there would be nothing
particularly melancholy in his end. This is subject, of course, to
the assumption that the story of his landlady having stolen the gold
sleeve-links from his dead body may be treated as mythical; and,
rejecting this story, there seems no good reason for making much ado
about the manner of his death. Of friends, as distinguished from mere
dinner-table acquaintances, he seems to have had but few in London:
with the exception of the Jameses, one knows not with certainty
of any; and the Jameses do not appear to have neglected him in the
illness which neither they nor he suspected to be his last. Mr. James
had paid him a visit but a day or two before the end came; and it may
very likely have been upon his report of his friend's condition that
the message of inquiry was sent from the dinner table at which he was
a guest. No doubt Sterne's flourish in _Tristram Shandy_ about his
preferring to die at an inn, untroubled by the spectacle of "the
concern of my friends, and the last services of wiping my brows
and smoothing my pillow," was a mere piece of bravado; and the more
probably so because the reflection is appropriated almost bodily from
Bishop Burnet, who quotes it as a frequent observation of Archbishop
Leighton. But, considering that Sterne was in the habit of passing
nearly half of each year alone in London lodgings, the realization of
his wish does not strike me, I confess, as so dramatically impressive
a coincidence as it is sometimes represented.

According, however, to one strange story the dramatic element gives
place after Sterne's very burial to melodrama of the darkest kind. The
funeral, which pointed, after all, a far sadder moral than the death,
took place on Tuesday, March 22, attended by only two mourners, one of