"One half of the town abuse my book as bitterly as the other half cry
it up to the skies--the best is they abuse and buy it, and at such a
rate that we are going on with a second edition as fast as possible."
This was written only in the first week of March, so that the edition
must have been exhausted in little more than a month. It was, indeed,
another triumph; and all through this spring up to midsummer did
Sterne remain in London to enjoy it. But, with three distinct flocks
awaiting a renewal of his pastoral ministrations in Yorkshire, it
would scarcely have done for him, even in those easy-going days of
the Establishment, to take up his permanent abode at the capital; and
early in July he returned to Coxwold.

From the middle of this year, 1761, the scene begins to darken, and
from the beginning of the next year onward Sterne's life was little
better than a truceless struggle with the disease to which he was
destined, prematurely, to succumb. The wretched constitution which,
in common with his short-lived brothers and sisters, he had inherited
probably from his father, already began to show signs of breaking
up. Invalid from the first, it had doubtless been weakened by the
hardships of Sterne's early years, and yet further, perhaps, by the
excitements and dissipations of his London life; nor was the change
from the gaieties of the capital to hard literary labour in a country
parsonage calculated to benefit him as much as it might others. Shandy
Hall, as he christened his pretty parsonage at Coxwold, and as the
house, still standing, is called to this day, soon became irksome
to him. The very reaction begotten of unwonted quietude acted on his
temperament with a dispiriting rather than a soothing effect. The
change from his full and stimulating life in London to the dull
round of clerical duties in a Yorkshire village might well have been