But the long holiday of somewhat dull travel, with its short last act
of social gaiety, was drawing to a close. In the third or fourth week
of May Sterne quitted Paris; and after a stay of a few weeks in London
he returned to the Yorkshire parsonage, from which he had been absent
some thirty months.
Unusually long as was the interval which had elapsed since the
publication of the last instalment of _Tristram Shandy_, the new one
was far from ready; and even in the "sweet retirement" of Coxwold
he seems to have made but slow progress with it. Indeed, the "sweet
retirement" itself became soon a little tedious to him. The month of
September found him already bored with work and solitude; and the fine
autumn weather of 1764 set him longing for a few days' pleasure-making
at what was even then the fashionable Yorkshire watering-place. "I
do not think," he writes, with characteristic incoherence, to Hall
Stevenson--"I do not think a week or ten days' playing the good fellow
(at this very time) so abominable a thing; but if a man could get
there cleverly, and every soul in his house in the mind to try what
could be done in furtherance thereof, I have no one to consult in
these affairs.
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