critical grounds.  But that literary shortcomings were not, in fact, the cause of Tristram’s declining popularity may be confidently inferred from the fact that the seventh volume, with its admirably vivid and spirited scenes of Continental travel, and the eighth and ninth, with their charming narrative of Captain Shandy’s love affair, were but slightly more successful.  The readers whom this, the third instalment of the novel, had begun to repel, were mainly, I imagine, those who had never felt any intelligent admiration for the former; who had been caught by the writer’s eccentricity, without appreciating his insight into character and his graphic power, and who had seen no other aspects of his humour than those buffooneries and puerilities which, after first amusing, had begun, in the natural course of things, to weary them.

Meanwhile, however, and with spirits restored by the Southern warmth to that buoyancy which never long deserted them, Sterne had begun to set to work upon a new volume.  His letters show that this was not the seventh but the eighth; and Mr. Fitzgerald’s conjecture, that the materials ultimately given to the world in the former volume were originally designed for another work, appears exceedingly probable.  But for some time after his arrival at Toulouse he was unable, it would seem, to resume his literary labours in any form.  Ever liable, through his weakly constitution, to whatever local maladies might anywhere prevail, he had fallen ill, he writes to Hall Stevenson, “of an epidemic vile fever which killed hundreds about me.  The physicians here,” he adds, “are the arrantest charlatans in Europe, or the most ignorant of all pretending fools.  I withdrew what was left of me out of their hands, and recommended my affairs entirely to Dame Nature.  She (dear goddess) has saved me in fifty different pinching bouts, and I begin to have a kind of enthusiasm now in her favour and my own, so that one or two more escapes will make me believe I shall leave you all at last by translation, and not by fair death.”  Having now become “stout and foolish again as a man can wish to be, I am,” he says, “busy playing the fool with my Uncle Toby, whom I have got soused over head and ears in love.”  Now, it is not till the eighth volume that the Widow Wadman begins to weave her spells around Captain Shandy’s ingenuous heart; while the seventh volume is mainly composed of that series of travel-pictures in which Sterne has manifestly recorded his own impressions of Northern France in the person of the youthful Tristram.  It is scarcely doubtful, therefore, that it is these sketches, and the use which he then proposed to make of them, that he refers to, when speaking in this letter of “hints and projects for other works.”  Originally intended to form a part of the volume afterwards published as the Sentimental Journey, it was found necessary—­under pressure, it is to be supposed, of insufficient matter—­to work them up instead into an interpolated seventh volume