the party set off by way of Lyons and Montpellier for their Pyrenean destination.  Their journey seems to have been a journey of many mischances, extraordinary discomfort, and incredible length; and it is not till the second week in August that we again take up the broken thread of his correspondence.  Writing to Mr. Foley, his banker in Paris, on the 14th of that month, he speaks of its having taken him three weeks to reach Toulouse; and adds that “in our journey we suffered so much from the heats, it gives me pain to remember it.  I never saw a cloud from Paris to Nismes half as broad as a twenty-four sols piece.  Good God! we were toasted, roasted, grilled, stewed, carbonaded, on one side or other, all the way:  and being all done through (assez cuits) in the day, we were eat up at night by bugs and other unswept-out vermin, the legal inhabitants, if length of possession give right, at every inn on the way.”  A few miles from Beaucaire he broke a hind wheel of his carriage, and was obliged in consequence “to sit five hours on a gravelly road without one drop of water, or possibility of getting any;” and here, to mend the matter, he was cursed with “two dough-hearted fools” for postilions, who “fell a-crying ‘nothing was to be done!’” and could only be recalled to a worthier and more helpful mood by Sterne’s “pulling off his coat and waistcoat,” and “threatening to thrash them both within an inch of their lives.”

The longest journey, however, must come to an end; and the party found much to console them at Toulouse for the miseries of travel.  They were fortunate enough to secure one of those large, old comfortable houses which were and, here and there, perhaps, still are to be hired on the outskirts of provincial towns, at a rent which would now be thought absurdly small; and Sterne writes in terms of high complacency of his temporary abode.  “Excellent,” “well furnished,” “elegant beyond anything I ever looked for,” are some of the expressions of praise which it draws from him.  He observes with pride that the “very great salle a compagnie is as large as Baron d’Holbach’s;” and he records with great satisfaction—­as well he might—­that for the use of this and a country house two miles out of town, “besides the enjoyment of gardens, which the landlord engaged to keep in order,” he was to pay no more than thirty pounds a year.  “All things,” he adds, “are cheap in proportion:  so we shall live here for a very, very little.”

And this, no doubt, was to Sterne a matter of some moment at this time.  The expenses of his long and tedious journey must have been heavy; and the gold-yielding vein of literary popularity, which he had for three years been working, had already begun to show signs of exhaustion. Tristram Shandy had lost its first vogue; and the fifth and sixth volumes, the copyright of which he does not seem to have disposed of, were “going off” but slowly.

CHAPTER VI.