y," he writes plaintively to Lydia
Sterne. "Thy mother and thyself at a distance from me--and what can
compensate for such a destitution? For God's sake persuade her to come
and fix in England! for life is too short to waste in separation;
and while she lives in one country and I in another, many people will
suppose it proceeds from choice"--a supposition, he seems to imply,
which even my scrupulously discreet conduct in her absence scarcely
suffices to refute. "Besides"--a word in which there is here almost
as much virtue as in an "if"--"I want thee near me, thou child and
darling of my heart. I am in a melancholy mood, and my Lydia's eyes
will smart with weeping when I tell her the cause that just now
affects me." And then his sensibilities brim over, and into his
daughter's ear he pours forth his lamentations over the loss of her
mother's rival. "I am apprehensive the dear friend I mentioned in my
last letter is going into a decline. I was with her two days ago, and
I never beheld a being so altered. She has a tender frame, and looks
like a drooping lily, for the roses are fled from her cheeks. I can
never see or talk to this 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 lar