temperaments as his. He declares, it is true, that he "sports much
with my Uncle Toby" in the volume which he is now "fabricating for the
laughing part of the world;" but if so he must have sported only after
a very desultory and dilatory fashion. On the whole one cannot escape
a very strong impression that Sterne was heartily bored by his sojourn
in Toulouse, and that he eagerly longed for the day of his return to
"the dalliance and the wit, the flattery and the strife," which he had
left behind him in the two great capitals in which he had shone.

His stay, however, was destined to be very prolonged. The winter of
1762 went by, and the succeeding year had run nearly half its course,
before he changed his quarters. "The first week in June," he writes in
April to Mr. Foley, "I decamp like a patriarch, with all my household,
to pitch our tents for three months at the foot of the Pyrenean hills
at Bagnères, where I expect much health and much amusement from all
corners of the earth." He talked too at this time of spending the
winter at Florence, and, after a visit to Leghorn, returning home the
following April by way of Paris; "but this," he adds, "is a sketch
only," and it remained only a sketch. Toulouse, however, he was in
any case resolved to quit. He should not, he said, be tempted to spend
another winter there. It did not suit his health, as he had hoped: he
complained that it was too moist, and that he could not keep clear of
ague. In June, 1763, he quitted it finally for Bagnères; whence after
a short, and, as we subsequently learn, a disappointed, sojourn, he
passed on to Marseilles, and later to Aix, for both of which places
he expressed dislike; and by October he had gone again into winter
quarters at Montpellier, where "my wife and daughter," he writes,
"purpose to stay at least a year behind me." His own intention was to
set out in February for England, "where my heart has been fled these
six months." Here again, however, there are traces of that periodic,