and comfort of his much-loved daughter that mainly inspired the affectionate anxiety which pervades these letters to Mrs. Sterne; but their writer is, at the very least, entitled to credit for allowing no difference of tone to reveal itself in the terms in which he speaks of wife and child.  And, whichever of the two he was mainly thinking of, there is something very engaging in the thoughtful minuteness of his instructions to the two women travellers, the earnestness of his attempts to inspire them with courage for their enterprise, and the sincere fervour of his many commendations of them to the Divine keeping.  The mixture of “canny” counsel and pious invocation has frequently a droll effect:  as when the advice to “give the custom-house officers what I told you, and at Calais more, if you have much Scotch snuff;” and “to drink small Rhenish to keep you cool, that is, if you like it,” is rounded off by the ejaculation, “So God in Heaven prosper and go along with you!” Letter after letter did he send them, full of such reminders as that “they have bad pins and vile needles here,” that it would be advisable to bring with them a strong bottle-screw, and a good stout copper tea-kettle; till at last, in the final words of preparation, his language assumes something of the solemnity of a general addressing his army on the eve of a well-nigh desperate enterprise:  “Pluck up your spirits—­trust in God, in me, and yourselves; with this, was you put to it, you would encounter all these difficulties ten times told.  Write instantly, and tell me you triumph over all fears—­tell me Lydia is better, and a help-mate to you.  You say she grows like me:  let her show me she does so in her contempt of small dangers, and fighting against the apprehensions of them, which is better still.”

At last this anxiously awaited journey was taken; and, on Thursday, July 7, Mrs. Sterne and her daughter arrived in Paris.  Their stay there was not long—­not much extended, probably, beyond the proposed week.  For Sterne’s health had, some ten days before the arrival of his family, again given him warning to depart quickly.  He had but a few weeks recovered from the fever of which he spoke in his letter to the Archbishop, when he again broke a blood-vessel in his lungs.  It happened in the night, and “finding in the morning that I was likely to bleed to death, I sent immediately,” he says, in a sentence which quaintly brings out the paradox of contemporary medical treatment, “for a surgeon to bleed me at both arms.  This saved me”—­i.e. did not kill me—­“and, with lying speechless three days, I recovered upon my back in bed:  the breach healed, and in a week after I got out.”  But the weakness which ensued, and the subsequent “hurrying about,” no doubt as cicerone of Parisian sights to his wife and daughter, “made me think it high time to haste to Toulouse.”  Accordingly, about the 20th of the month, and “in the midst of such heats that the oldest Frenchman never remembers the like,”