The allusions to foreign travel in this letter were made with, something more than a jesting intent.  Sterne had already begun to be seriously alarmed, and not without reason, about the condition of his health.  He shrank from facing another English winter, and meditated a southward flight so soon as he should have finished his fifth and sixth volumes, and seen them safe in the printer’s hands.  His publisher he had changed, for what reason is not known, and the firm of Becket & De Hondt had taken the place of Dodsley.  Sterne hoped by the end of the year to be free to depart from England, and already he had made all arrangements with his ecclesiastical superiors for the necessary leave of absence.  He seems to have been treated with all consideration in the matter.  His Archbishop, on being applied to, at once excused him from parochial work for a year, and promised, if it should be necessary, to double that term.  Fortified with this permission, Sterne bade farewell to his wife and daughter, and betook himself to London, with his now completed volumes, at the setting in of the winter.  On the 21st of December they made their appearance, and in about three weeks from that date their author left England, with the intention of wintering in the South of France.  There were difficulties, however, of more kinds than one which had first to be faced—­a pecuniary difficulty, which Garrick met by a loan of 20L., and a political difficulty, for the removal of which Sterne had to employ the good offices of new acquaintance later on.  He reached Paris about the 17th of January, 1762, and there met with a reception which interposed, as might have been expected, the most effectual of obstacles to his further progress southward.  He was received in Paris with open arms, and stepped at once within the charmed circle of the philosophic salons.  Again was the old intoxicating cup presented to his lips—­this time, too, with more dexterous than English hands—­and again did he drink deeply of it.  “My head is turned,” he writes to Garrick, “with what I see, and the unexpected honour I have met with here. Tristram was almost as much known here as in London, at least among your men of condition and learning, and has got me introduced into so many circles (’tis comme a Londres) I have just now a fortnight’s dinners and suppers on my hands.”  We may venture to doubt whether French politeness had not been in one respect taken somewhat too seriously by the flattered Englishman, and whether it was much more than the name and general reputation of Tristram, which was “almost as much known” in Paris as in London.  The dinners and suppers, however, were, at any rate, no figures of speech, but very liberal entertainments, at which Sterne appears to have disported himself with all his usual unclerical abandon.  “I Shandy it away,” he writes in his boyish fashion to Garrick, “fifty times more than I was ever wont, talk more nonsense than ever you heard me talk