“As to matrimony I should be a beast to rail at it, for my wife is easy, but the world is not, and had I stayed from her a second longer it would have been a burning shame—­else she declares herself happier without me.  But not in anger is this declaration made (the most fatal point, of course, about it), but in pure, sober, good sense, built on sound experience.  She hopes you will be able to strike a bargain for me before this twelvemonth to lead a bear round Europe, and from this hope from you I verily believe it is that you are so high in her favour at present.  She swears you are a fellow of wit, though humorous;[2] a funny, jolly soul, though somewhat splenetic, and (hating the love of women) as honest as gold.  How do you like the simile?”

There is, perhaps, a touch of affected cynicism in the suggestion that Mrs. Sterne’s liking for one of her husband’s friends was wholly based upon the expectation that he would rid her of her husband; but mutual indifference must, it is clear, have reached a pretty advanced stage before such a remark could, even half in jest, be possible.  And with one more longing, lingering look at the scenes which he had quitted for a lot like that of the Duke of Buckingham’s dog, upon whom his master pronounced the maledictory wish that “he were married and lived in the country,” this characteristic letter concludes: 

“Oh, Lord! now are you going to Ranelagh to-night, and I am sitting sorrowful as the prophet was when the voice cried out to him and said, ‘What do’st thou here, Elijah?’ ’Tis well that the spirit does not make the same at Coxwold, for unless for the few sheep left me to take care of in the wilderness, I might as well, nay, better, be at Mecca.  When we find we can, by a shifting of places, run away from ourselves, what think you of a jaunt there before we finally pay a visit to the Vale of Jehoshaphat?  As ill a fame as we have, I trust I shall one day or other see you face to face, so tell the two colonels if they love good company to live righteously and soberly, as you do, and then they will have no doubts or dangers within or without them.  Present my best and warmest wishes to them, and advise the eldest to prop up his spirits, and get a rich dowager before the conclusion of the peace.  Why will not the advice suit both, par nobile fratrum?”

[Footnote 1:  It is curious to note, as a point in the chronology of language, how exclusive is Sterne’s employment of the words “humour,” “humourists,” in their older sense of “whimsicality,” “an eccentric.”  The later change in its meaning gives to the word “though” in the above passage an almost comic effect.]

In conclusion, he tells his friend that the next morning, if Heaven permit, he begins the fifth volume of Shandy, and adds, defiantly, that he “cares not a curse for the critics,” but “will load my vehicle with what goods He sends me, and they may take ’em off my hands or let ’em alone.”