proved in everything I wished her." As to himself: "I am
most unaccountably well, and most accountably nonsensical. 'Tis at
least a proof of good spirits, which is a sign and token, in these
latter days, that I must take up my pen. In faith, I think I shall
die with it in my hand; but I shall live these ten years, my Antony,
notwithstanding the fears of my wife, whom I left most melancholy
on that account." The "fears" and the melancholy were, alas! to be
justified, rather than the "good spirits;" and the shears of Atropos
were to close, not in ten years, but in little more than twenty
months, upon that fragile thread of life.

[Footnote 1: It was on this tour that Sterne picked up the French
valet Lafleur, whom he introduced as a character into the _Sentimental
Journey_, but whose subsequently published recollections of the tour
(if, indeed, the veritable Lafleur was the author of the notes from
which Scott quotes so freely) appear, as Mr. Fitzgerald has pointed
out, from internal evidence to be mostly fictitious.]

By the end of June he was back again in his Yorkshire home, and very
soon after had settled down to work upon the ninth and last volume of
_Tristram Shandy_. He was writing, however, as it should seem,
under something more than the usual distractions of a man with two
establishments. Mrs. Sterne was just then ill at Marseilles, and her
husband--who, to do him justice, was always properly solicitous for
her material comfort--was busy making provision for her to change her
quarters to Chalons. He writes to M. Panchaud, at Paris, sending fifty
pounds, and begging him to make her all further advances that might be
necessary. "I have," he says, "such entire confidence in my wife
that she spends as little as she can, though she is confined to no
particular sum ... and you may rely--in case she should draw for fifty
or a hundred pounds extraordinary--that it and every demand shall
be punctually paid, and with proper thanks; and for this the whole
Shandian family are ready to stand security." Later on, too, he writes
that "a young nobleman is now inaugurating a jaunt with me for six
weeks, about Christmas, to the Faubourg St. Germain;" and he adds--in
a tone the sincerity of which he would himself have probably found
a difficulty in gauging--"if my wife should grow worse (having had a
very poor account of her in my daughter's last), I cannot think of her
being without me; and, however expensive the journey would b