did not suit his health, as he had hoped:  he complained that it was too moist, and that he could not keep clear of ague.  In June, 1763, he quitted it finally for Bagneres; whence after a short, and, as we subsequently learn, a disappointed, sojourn, he passed on to Marseilles, and later to Aix, for both of which places he expressed dislike; and by October he had gone again into winter quarters at Montpellier, where “my wife and daughter,” he writes, “purpose to stay at least a year behind me.”  His own intention was to set out in February for England, “where my heart has been fled these six months.”  Here again, however, there are traces of that periodic, or rather, perhaps, that chronic conflict of inclination between himself and Mrs. Sterne, of which he speaks with such a tell-tale affectation of philosophy.  “My wife,” he writes in January, “returns to Toulouse, and proposes to spend the summer at Bagneres.  I, on the contrary, go to visit my wife the church in Yorkshire.  We all live the longer, at least the happier, for having things our own way.  This is my conjugal maxim.  I own ’tis not the best of maxims, but I maintain ’tis not the worst.”  It was natural enough that Sterne, at any rate, should wish to turn his back on Montpellier.  Again had the unlucky invalid been attacked by a dangerous illness; the “sharp air” of the place disagreed with him, and his physicians, after having him under their hands more than a month, informed him coolly that if he stayed any longer in Montpellier it would be fatal to him.  How soon after that somewhat late warning he took his departure there is no record to show; but it is not till the middle of May that we find him writing from Paris to his daughter.  And since he there announces his intention of leaving for England in a few days, it is a probable conjecture that he had arrived at the French capital some fortnight or so before.

His short stay in Paris was marked by two incidents—­trifling in themselves, but too characteristic of the man to be omitted.  Lord Hertford, the British Ambassador, had just taken a magnificent hotel in Paris, and Sterne was asked to preach the first sermon in its chapel.  The message was brought him, he writes, “when I was playing a sober game of whist with Mr. Thornhill; and whether I was called abruptly from my afternoon amusement to prepare myself for the business on the next day, or from what other cause, I do not pretend to determine; but that unlucky kind of fit seized me which you know I am never able to resist, and a very unlucky text did come into my head.”  The text referred to was 2 Kings XX. 15—­Hezekiah’s admission of that ostentatious display of the treasures of his palace to the ambassadors of Babylon for which Isaiah rebuked him by prophesying the Babylonian captivity of Judah.  Nothing, indeed, as Sterne protests, could have been more innocent than the discourse which he founded upon the mal-a-propos text; but still it was unquestionably a fair subject for “chaff,”