where she has had many advantageous offers.”  Nevertheless “his heart bled,” as he wrote to Lee, when he thought of parting with his child. “’Twill be like the separation of soul and body, and equal to nothing but what passes at that tremendous moment; and like it in one respect, for she will be in one kingdom while I am in another.”  Thus was this matter settled, and by the 1st of January Sterne had arrived in London for the last time, with the two volumes of the Sentimental Journey.  He took up his quarters at the lodgings in Bond Street (No. 41), which he had occupied during his stay in town the previous year, and entered at once upon the arrangements for publication.  These occupied two full months, and on the 27th of February the last work, as it was destined to be, of the Rev. Mr. Yorick was issued to the world.

Its success would seem to have been immediate, and was certainly great and lasting.  In one sense, indeed, it was far greater than had been, or than has since been, attained by Tristram Shandy.  The compliments which courteous Frenchmen had paid the author upon his former work, and which his simple vanity had swallowed whole and unseasoned, without the much-needed grain of salt, might, no doubt, have been repeated to him with far greater sincerity as regards the Sentimental Journey, had he lived to receive them.  Had any Frenchman told him a year or two afterwards that the latter work was “almost as much known in Paris as in London, at least among men of condition and learning,” he would very likely have been telling him no more than the truth.  The Sentimental Journey certainly acquired what Tristram Shandy never did—­a European reputation.  It has been translated into Italian, German, Dutch, and even Polish; and into French again and again.  The French, indeed, have no doubt whatever of its being Sterne’s chef-d’oeuvre; and one has only to compare a French translation of it with a rendering of Tristram Shandy into the same language to understand, and from our neighbours’ point of view even to admit, the justice of their preference.  The charms of the Journey, its grace, wit, and urbanity, are thoroughly congenial to that most graceful of languages, and reproduce themselves readily enough therein; while, on the other hand, the fantastic digressions, the elaborate mystifications, the farcical interludes of the earlier work, appear intolerably awkward and bizzare in their French dress; and, what is much more strange, even the point of the double entendres is sometimes unaccountably lost.  Were it not that the genuine humour of Tristram Shandy in a great measure evaporates in translation, one would be forced to admit that the work which is the more catholic in its appeal to appreciation is the better of the two.  But, having regard to this disappearance of genuine and unquestionable excellences in the process of translation, I see no good reason why those Englishmen—­the