"
As to "my Lydia"--the real cause, we must suspect, of Sterne's having
turned out of his road--she, he says, "pleases me much. I found her
greatly improved 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.
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