Webster’s oration, in marking the ubiquity of British boredom, as the reveil does that of British power over all the terrestrial globe.  “The next week,” writes Sterne, “with a grand orchestra, we play The Busybody, and the Journey to London the week after; but I have some thought of adapting it to our situation, and making it the Journey to Toulouse, which, with the change of half-a-dozen scenes, may be easily done.  Thus, my dear Foley, for want of something better we have recourse to ourselves, and strike out the best amusements we can from such materials.”  “Recourse to ourselves,” however, means, in strict accuracy, “recourse to each other;” and when the amateur players had played themselves out, and exhausted their powers of contributing to each others’ amusement, it is probable that “recourse to ourselves,” in the exact sense of the phrase, was found ineffective—­in Sterne’s case, at any rate—­to stave off ennui.  To him, with his copiously if somewhat oddly furnished mind, and his natural activity of imagination, one could hardly apply the line of Persius,

  “Tecum habita et noris quam sit tibi curta supellex;”

but it is yet evident enough that Sterne’s was one of that numerous order of intellects which are the convivial associates, rather than the fireside companions, of their owners, and which, when deprived of the stimulus of external excitement, are apt to become very dull company indeed.  Nor does he seem to have obtained much diversion of mind from his literary work—­a form of intellectual enjoyment which, indeed, more often presupposes than begets good spirits in such temperaments as his.  He declares, it is true, that he “sports much with my Uncle Toby” in the volume which he is now “fabricating for the laughing part of the world;” but if so he must have sported only after a very desultory and dilatory fashion.  On the whole one cannot escape a very strong impression that Sterne was heartily bored by his sojourn in Toulouse, and that he eagerly longed for the day of his return to “the dalliance and the wit, the flattery and the strife,” which he had left behind him in the two great capitals in which he had shone.

His stay, however, was destined to be very prolonged.  The winter of 1762 went by, and the succeeding year had run nearly half its course, before he changed his quarters.  “The first week in June,” he writes in April to Mr. Foley, “I decamp like a patriarch, with all my household, to pitch our tents for three months at the foot of the Pyrenean hills at Bagneres, where I expect much health and much amusement from all corners of the earth.”  He talked too at this time of spending the winter at Florence, and, after a visit to Leghorn, returning home the following April by way of Paris; “but this,” he adds, “is a sketch only,” and it remained only a sketch.  Toulouse, however, he was in any case resolved to quit.  He should not, he said, be tempted to spend another winter there.  It