Fitzgerald's considerably too indulgent judgment on it will lie,
it seems to me, decidedly nearer to the former than to the latter's
extreme. This episode of violently sentimental philandering with an
Indian "grass widow" was, in any case, an extremely unlovely passage
in Sterne's life. On the best and most charitable view of it, the
flirtation, pursued in the way it was, and to the lengths to which
it was carried, must be held to convict the elderly lover of the most
deplorable levity, vanity, indiscretion, and sickly sentimentalism. It
was, to say the least of it, most unbecoming in a man of Sterne's age
and profession; and when it is added that Yorick's attentions to Eliza
were paid in so open a fashion as to be brought by gossip to the ears
of his neglected wife, then living many hundred miles away from him,
its highly reprehensible character seems manifest enough in all ways.
No sooner, however, had the fascinating widow set sail, than the
sentimental lover began to feel so strongly the need of a female
consoler, that his heart seems to have softened, insensibly, even
towards his wife. "I am unhappy," he writes plaintively to Lydia
Sterne.
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