I have a thousand obligations to her, and I love her more than
her whole sex, if not all the world put together. She has a delicacy,"
&c., &c. And after reciting a frigid epitaph which he had written,
"expressive of her modest worth," he winds up with--"Say all that is
kind of me to thy mother; and believe me, my Lydia, that I love
thee most truly." My excuse for quoting thus fully from this most
characteristic letter, and, indeed, for dwelling at all upon these
closing incidents of the Yorick and Eliza episode, is, that in their
striking illustration of the soft, weak, spiritually self-indulgent
nature of the man, they assist us, far more than many pages of
criticism would do, to understand one particular aspect of his
literary idiosyncrasy. The sentimentalist of real life explains the
sentimentalist in art.
In the early days of May Sterne managed at last to tear himself away
from London and its joys, and with painful slowness, for he was now in
a wretched state of health, to make his way back to Yorkshire. "I have
got conveyed," he says in a distressing letter from Newark to Hall
Stevenson--"I have got conveyed thus far like a bale of cadaverous
goods consigned to Pluto and Company, lying in the bottom of my chaise
most of the route, upon a large pillow which I had the _prevoyance_ to
purchase before I set out.
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