lyanthus
blow in December?--Some friendly wall has sheltered it from the biting
wind--no planetary influence shall reach us, but that which presides and
cherishes the sweetest flowers. The gloomy family of care and distrust
shall be banished from our dwelling, guarded by thy kind and tutelar
deity--we will sing our choral songs of gratitude and rejoice to the end of
our pilgrimage. Adieu, my L. Return to one who languishes for thy
society!--As I take up my pen, my poor pulse quickens, my pale face glows,
and tears are trickling down on my paper as I trace the word L."

And it is about this woman, with whom he finds no fault, but that she
bores him, that our philanthropist writes, "Sum fatigatus et
aegrotus"--_Sum mortaliter in amore_ with somebody else! That fine flower
of love, that polyanthus over which Sterne snivelled so many tears, could
not last for a quarter of a century!

Or rather it could not be expected that a gentleman with such a fountain
at command, should keep it to _arroser_ one homely old lady, when a score
of younger and prettier people might be refreshed from the same gushing
source.(163)

It was in December, 1767, that the Rev. Laurence Sterne, the famous
Shandean, the charming Yorick, the delight of the fashionable world, the
delicious divine, for whose sermons the whole polite world was
subscribing,(164) the occupier of Rabelais's easy chair, only fresh
stuffed and more elegant than when in possession of the cynical old curate
of Meudon(165)--the more than rival of the Dean of St. Patrick's, wrote the
above-quoted respectable letter to his friend in London: and it was in
April of the same year, that he was pouring out his fond heart to Mrs.
Elizabeth Draper, wife of "Daniel Draper, Esq., Counsellor of Bombay, and,
in 1775, chief of the factory of Surat--a gentleman very much respected in
that quarter of the globe".

"I got thy letter last night, Eliza," Sterne writes, "on my return from
Lord Bathurst's, where I dined" (the letter has this merit in it that it
contains a pleasant reminiscence of better men than Sterne, and introduces
us to a portrait of a kind old gentleman)--"I got thy letter last night,
Eliza, on my return from Lord Bathurst's; and where I was heard--as I
talked of thee an hour without intermission--with so much pleasure and
attention, that the good old lord toasted your health three different
times; and now he is in his 85th year, says he hopes to live long enough
to be introd