of their hands, and recommended my affairs entirely to Dame Nature.
She (dear goddess) has saved me in fifty different pinching bouts, and
I begin to have a kind of enthusiasm now in her favour and my own, so
that one or two more escapes will make me believe I shall leave you
all at last by translation, and not by fair death." Having now become
"stout and foolish again as a man can wish to be, I am," he says,
"busy playing the fool with my Uncle Toby, whom I have got soused over
head and ears in love." Now, it is not till the eighth volume that
the Widow Wadman begins to weave her spells around Captain Shandy's
ingenuous heart; while the seventh volume is mainly composed of that
series of travel-pictures in which Sterne has manifestly recorded
his own impressions of Northern France in the person of the youthful
Tristram. It is scarcely doubtful, therefore, that it is these
sketches, and the use which he then proposed to make of them, that
he refers to, when speaking in this letter of "hints and projects
for other works." Originally intended to form a part of the volume
afterwards published as the _Sentimental Journey_, it was found
necessary--under pressure, it is to be supposed, of insufficient
matter--to work them up instead into an interpolated seventh volume
of _Tristram Shandy_. At the moment, however, he no doubt as little
foresaw this as he did the delay which was to take place before any
continuation of the novel appeared. He clearly contemplated no very
long absence from England. "When I have reaped the benefit of the
winter at Toulouse, I cannot see I have anything more to do with it.
Therefore, after having gone with my wife and girl to Bagnères, I
shall return from whence I came." Already, however, one can perceive
signs of his having too presumptuously marked out his future. "My
wife wants to stay another year, to save money; and this opposition of
wishes, though it will not be as sour as lemon, yet 'twill not be as
sweet as sugar." And again: "If the snows will suffer me, I propose to