to these expenses, which cast great honour upon the K.’s character.  This was with regard to the money the K. had secretly furnished out of his own pocket to lessen the account of the Hanover-score brought us to discharge.  Beckford and Barrington abused all who fought for peace and joined in the cry for it, and Beckford added that the reasons of wishing a peace now were the same as at the Peace of Utrecht—­that the people behind the curtain could not both maintain the war and their places too, so were for making another sacrifice of the nation to their own interests.  After all, the cry for a peace is so general that it will certainly end in one.”

And then the letter, recurring to personal matters towards the close, records the success of Vols.  III. and IV.: 

“One half of the town abuse my book as bitterly as the other half cry it up to the skies—­the best is they abuse and buy it, and at such a rate that we are going on with a second edition as fast as possible.”  This was written only in the first week of March, so that the edition must have been exhausted in little more than a month.  It was, indeed, another triumph; and all through this spring up to midsummer did Sterne remain in London to enjoy it.  But, with three distinct flocks awaiting a renewal of his pastoral ministrations in Yorkshire, it would scarcely have done for him, even in those easy-going days of the Establishment, to take up his permanent abode at the capital; and early in July he returned to Coxwold.

From the middle of this year, 1761, the scene begins to darken, and from the beginning of the next year onward Sterne’s life was little better than a truceless struggle with the disease to which he was destined, prematurely, to succumb.  The wretched constitution which, in common with his short-lived brothers and sisters, he had inherited probably from his father, already began to show signs of breaking up.  Invalid from the first, it had doubtless been weakened by the hardships of Sterne’s early years, and yet further, perhaps, by the excitements and dissipations of his London life; nor was the change from the gaieties of the capital to hard literary labour in a country parsonage calculated to benefit him as much as it might others.  Shandy Hall, as he christened his pretty parsonage at Coxwold, and as the house, still standing, is called to this day, soon became irksome to him.  The very reaction begotten of unwonted quietude acted on his temperament with a dispiriting rather than a soothing effect.  The change from his full and stimulating life in London to the dull round of clerical duties in a Yorkshire village might well have been depressing to a mind better balanced and ballasted than his.  To him, with his light, pleasure-loving nature, it was as the return of the schoolboy from pantomimes and pony-riding to the more sober delights of Dr. Swishtail’s; and, in a letter to Hall Stevenson, Sterne reveals his feelings with all the juvenile frankness of one of the Doctor’s pupils: