least of it, doubtful whether Sterne suffered at all on this ground
from the wounded feelings of the _mari incompris_, while it is next to
certain that it does not need the sting of any such disappointment
to account for his alienation. He must have had plenty of time and
opportunity to discover Miss Lumley's intellectual limitations during
the two years of his courtship; and it is not likely that, even if
they were as well marked as Mrs. Shandy's own, they would have
done much of themselves to estrange the couple. Sympathy is not the
necessity to the humourist which the poet finds, or imagines, it to be
to himself: the humourist, indeed, will sometimes contrive to extract
from the very absence of sympathy in those about him a keener relish
for his reflections. With sentiment, indeed, and still more with
sentimentalism, the case would of course be different; but as for Mr.
Sterne's demands for sympathy in that department of his life and art,
one may say without the least hesitation that they would have been
beyond the power of any one woman, however distinguished a disciple of
the "Laura Matilda" school, to satisfy. "I must ever," he frankly
says in one of the "Yorick to Eliza" letters, "I must ever have some
Dulcinea in my head: it harmonizes the soul;" and he might have added
that he found it impossible to sustain the harmony without frequently
changing the Dulcinea. One may suspect that Mrs. Sterne soon had cause
for jealousy, and it is at least certain that several years before
Sterne's emergence into notoriety their estrangement was complete. One
daughter was born to them in 1745, but lived scarcely mare than long
enough to be rescued from the _limbus infantium_ by the prompt
rites of the Church. The child was christened Lydia, and died on the
following day. Its place was filled in 1747 by a second daughter, also
christened Lydia, who lived to become the wife of M. de Medalle, and
the not very judicious editress of the posthumous "Letters." For
her as she grew up Sterne conceived a genuine and truly fatherly