“I rejoice you are in London—­rest you there in peace; here ’tis the devil.  You were a good prophet.  I wish myself back again, as you told me I should, but not because a thin, death-doing, pestiferous north-east wind blows in a line directly from Crazy Castle turret fresh upon me in this cuckoldly retreat (for I value the north-east wind and all its powers not a straw), but the transition from rapid motion to absolute rest was too violent.  I should have walked about the streets of York ten days, as a proper medium to have passed through before I entered upon my rest; I stayed but a moment, and I have been here but a few, to satisfy me.  I have not managed my miseries like a wise man, and if God for my consolation had not poured forth the spirit of Shandyism unto me, which will not suffer me to think two moments upon any grave subject, I would else just now lay down and die.”

It is true he adds, in the next sentence, that in half an hour’s time “I’ll lay a guinea I shall be as merry as a monkey, and forget it all,” but such sudden revulsions of high spirits can hardly be allowed to count for much against the prevailing tone of discontented ennui which pervades this letter.

Apart, moreover, from Sterne’s regrets of London, his country home was becoming from other causes a less pleasant place of abode.  His relations with his wife were getting less and less cordial every year.  With a perversity sometimes noticeable in the wives of distinguished men, Mrs. Sterne had failed to accept with enthusiasm the role of distant and humbly admiring spectator of her brilliant husband’s triumphs.  Accept it, of course, she did, being unable, indeed, to help herself; but it is clear that when Sterne returned home after one of his six months’ revels in the gaieties of London, his wife, who had been vegetating the while in the retirement of Yorkshire, was not in the habit of welcoming him with effusion.  Perceiving so clearly that her husband preferred the world’s society to hers, she naturally, perhaps, refused to disguise her preference of her own society to his.  Their estrangement, in short, had grown apace, and had already brought them to that stage of mutual indifference which is at once so comfortable and so hopeless—­secure alike against the risk of “scenes” and the hope of reconciliation, shut fast in its exemption from amantium irae against all possibility of redintegratio amoris. To such perfection, indeed, had the feeling been cultivated on both sides, that Sterne, in the letter above quoted, can write of his conjugal relations in this philosophic strain: