The physicians
here," he adds, "are the arrantest charlatans in Europe, or the most
ignorant of all pretending fools. I withdrew what was left of me out
of their hands, and recommended my affairs entirely to Dame Nature.
She (dear goddess) has saved me in fifty different pinching bouts, and
I begin to have a kind of enthusiasm now in her favour and my own, so
that one or two more escapes will make me believe I shall leave you
all at last by translation, and not by fair death." Having now become
"stout and foolish again as a man can wish to be, I am," he says,
"busy playing the fool with my Uncle Toby, whom I have got soused over
head and ears in love." Now, it is not till the eighth volume that
the Widow Wadman begins to weave her spells around Captain Shandy's
ingenuous heart; while the seventh volume is mainly composed of that
series of travel-pictures in which Sterne has manifestly recorded
his own impressions of Northern France in the person of the youthful
Tristram. It is scarcely doubtful, therefore, that it is these
sketches, and the use which he then proposed to make of them, that
he refers to, when speaking in this letter of "hints and projects
for other works.
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