Sterne’s case was undoubtedly wanting—­a superabundance of unoccupied time.  We have little reason, it is true, to suppose that this light-minded and valetudinarian Yorkshire parson was at any period of his life an industrious “parish priest;” but it is probable, nevertheless, that time never hung very heavily upon his hands.  In addition to the favourite amusements which he enumerates in the Memoir, he was all his days addicted to one which is, perhaps, the most absorbing of all—­flirtation.  Philandering, and especially philandering of the Platonic and ultra-sentimental order, is almost the one human pastime of which its votaries never seem to tire; and its constant ministrations to human vanity may serve, perhaps, to account for their unwearied absorption in its pursuit.  Sterne’s first love affair—­an affair of which, unfortunately, the consequences were more lasting than the passion—­took place immediately upon his leaving Cambridge.  To relate it as he relates it to his daughter:  “At York I became acquainted with your mother, and courted her for two years.  She owned she liked me, but thought herself not rich enough or me too poor to be joined together.  She went to her sister’s in Staffordshire, and I wrote to her often.  I believe then she was partly determined to have me, but would not say so.  At her return she fell into a consumption, and one evening that I was sitting by her, with an almost broken heart to see her so ill, she said:  ’My dear Laury, I never can be yours, for I verily believe I have not long to live!  But I have left you every shilling of my fortune.’  Upon that she showed me her will.  This generosity overpowered me.  It pleased God that she recovered, and we were married in 1741.”  The name of this lady was Elizabeth Lumley, and it was to her that Sterne addressed those earliest letters which his daughter included in the collection published by her some eight years after her father’s death.  They were added, the preface tells us, “in justice to Mr. Sterne’s delicate feelings;” and in our modern usage of the word “delicate,” as equivalent to infirm of health and probably short of life, they no doubt do full justice to the passion which they are supposed to express.  It would be unfair, of course, to judge any love-letters of that period by the standard of sincerity applied in our own less artificial age.  All such compositions seem frigid and formal enough to us of to-day; yet in most cases of genuine attachment we usually find at least a sentence here and there in which the natural accents of the heart make themselves heard above the affected modulations of the style.  But the letters of Sterne’s courtship maintain the pseudo-poetic, shepherd-and-shepherdess strain throughout; or, if the lover ever abandons it, it is only to make somewhat maudlin record of those “tears” which flowed a little too easily at all times throughout his life.  These letters, however, have a certain critical interest in their bearing upon those sensibilities which Sterne afterwards learned to cultivate in a forcing-frame, with a view to the application of their produce to the purposes of an art of pathetic writing which simulates nature with such admirable fidelity at its best, and descends to such singular bathos at its worst.