incomparable woman without bursting into tears.  I have a thousand obligations to her, and I love her more than her whole sex, if not all the world put together.  She has a delicacy,” &c., &c.  And after reciting a frigid epitaph which he had written, “expressive of her modest worth,” he winds up with—­“Say all that is kind of me to thy mother; and believe me, my Lydia, that I love thee most truly.”  My excuse for quoting thus fully from this most characteristic letter, and, indeed, for dwelling at all upon these closing incidents of the Yorick and Eliza episode, is, that in their striking illustration of the soft, weak, spiritually self-indulgent nature of the man, they assist us, far more than many pages of criticism would do, to understand one particular aspect of his literary idiosyncrasy.  The sentimentalist of real life explains the sentimentalist in art.

In the early days of May Sterne managed at last to tear himself away from London and its joys, and with painful slowness, for he was now in a wretched state of health, to make his way back to Yorkshire.  “I have got conveyed,” he says in a distressing letter from Newark to Hall Stevenson—­“I have got conveyed thus far like a bale of cadaverous goods consigned to Pluto and Company, lying in the bottom of my chaise most of the route, upon a large pillow which I had the prevoyance to purchase before I set out.  I am worn out, but pass on to Barnby Moor to-night, and if possible to York the next.  I know not what is the matter with me, but some derangement presses hard upon this machine.  Still, I think it will not be overset this bout”—­another of those utterances of a cheerful courage under the prostration of pain which reveal to us the manliest side of Sterne’s nature.  On reaching Coxwold his health appears to have temporarily mended, and in June we find him giving a far better account of himself to another of his friends.  The fresh Yorkshire air seems to have temporarily revived him, and to his friend, Arthur Lee, a young American, he writes thus:  “I am as happy as a prince at Coxwold, and I wish you could see in how princely a manner I live.  ’Tis a land of plenty.  I sit down alone to dinner—­fish and wild-fowl, or a couple of fowls or ducks, with cream and all the simple plenty which a rich valley under Hamilton Hills can produce, with a clean cloth on my table, and a bottle of wine on my right hand to drink your health.  I have a hundred hens and chickens about my yard; and not a parishioner catches a hare, a rabbit, or a trout but he brings it as an offering to me.”  Another of his correspondents at this period was the Mrs. H. of his letters, whose identity I have been unable to trace, but who is addressed in a manner which seems to show Sterne’s anxiety to expel the old flame of Eliza’s kindling by a new one.  There is little, indeed, of the sentimentalizing strain in which he was wont to sigh at the feet of Mrs. Draper, but in its place there is a freedom of a very prominent,