“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 affection, and it is in writing to her and of her that we see him at his best; or rather one might say it is almost only then that we can distinguish the true notes of the heart through that habitual falsetto of sentimentalism which distinguishes most of Sterne’s communications with the other sex.  There was no subsequent issue of the marriage, and, from one of the letters most indiscreetly included in Madame de Medalle’s collection, it is to be ascertained that some four years or so after Lydia’s birth the relations between Sterne and Mrs. Sterne ceased to be conjugal, and never again resumed that character.

It is, however, probable, upon the husband’s own confessions, that he had given his wife earlier cause for jealousy, and certainly from the time when he begins to reveal himself in correspondence there seems to be hardly a moment when some such cause was not in existence—­in the person of this, that, or the other lackadaisical damsel or coquettish matron.  From Miss Fourmantelle, the “dear, dear Kitty,” to whom Sterne was making violent love in 1759, the year of the York publication of Tristram Shandy, down to Mrs. Draper, the heroine of the famous “Yorick to Eliza” letters, the list of ladies who seem to have kindled flames in that susceptible breast is almost as long and more real than the roll of mistresses immortalized by Horace.  How Mrs. Sterne at first bore herself under her husband’s ostentatious neglect there is no direct evidence to show.  That she ultimately took refuge in indifference we can perceive, but it is to be feared that she was not always able to maintain the attitude of contemptuous composure.  So, at least, we may suspect from the evidence of that Frenchman who met “le bon et agreable Tristram,” and his wife, at Montpellier, and who, characteristically sympathizing with the inconstant husband, declared that his wife’s incessant pursuit of him made him pass “d’assez mauvais moments,” which he bore “with the patience of an angel.”  But, on the whole, Mrs. Sterne’s conduct seems by her husband’s own admissions to have been not wanting in dignity.