for fourteen days, and from pride and naughtiness of heart to go see what is doing at Scarborough, steadfully meaning afterwards to lead a new life and strengthen my faith.  Now, some folks say there is much company there, and some say not; and I believe there is neither the one nor the other, but will be both if the world will have patience for a month or so.”  Of his work he has not much to say:  “I go on not rapidly but well enough with my Uncle Toby’s amours.  There is no sitting and cudgelling one’s brains whilst the sun shines bright.  ’Twill be all over in six or seven weeks; and there are dismal weeks enow after to endure suffocation by a brimstone fireside.”  He was anxious that his boon companion should join him at Scarborough; but that additional pleasure was denied him, and he had to content himself with the usual gay society of the place.  Three weeks, it seems, were passed by him in this most doubtfully judicious form of bodily and mental relaxation—­weeks which he spent, he afterwards writes, in “drinking the waters, and receiving from them marvellous strength, had I not debilitated it as fast as I got it by playing the good fellow with Lord Granby and Co. too much.”  By the end of the month he was back again at Coxwold, “returned to my Philosophical Hut to finish Tristram, which I calculate will be ready for the world about Christmas, at which time I decamp from hence and fix my headquarters at London for the winter, unless my cough pushes me forward to your metropolis” (he is writing to Foley, in Paris), “or that I can persuade some gros milord to make a trip to you.”  Again, too, in this letter we get another glimpse at that thoroughly desentimentalized “domestic interior” which the sentimentalist’s household had long presented to the view.  Writing to request a remittance of money to Mrs. Sterne at Montauban—­a duty which, to do him justice, he seems to have very watchfully observed—­Sterne adds his solicitation to Mr. Foley to “do something equally essential to rectify a mistake in the mind of your correspondent there, who, it seems, gave her a hint not long ago ’that she was separated from me for life.’  Now, as this is not true, in the first place, and may fix a disadvantageous impression of her to those she lives amongst, ’twould be unmerciful to let her or my daughter suffer by it.  So do be so good as to undeceive him; for in a year or two she purposes (and I expect it with impatience from her) to rejoin me.”

Early in November the two new volumes of Shandy began to approach completion; for by this time Sterne had already made up his mind to interpolate these notes of his French travels, which now do duty as Vol.  VII.  “You will read,” he tells Foley, “as odd a tour through France as was ever projected or executed by traveller or travel-writer since the world began.  ’Tis a laughing, good-tempered satire upon travelling—­as puppies travel.”  By the 16th of the month he had “finished my two volumes of Tristram,” and looked to be in London at Christmas, “whence I have some thoughts of going to Italy this year.  At least I shall not defer it above another.”  On the 26th of January, 1765, the two new volumes were given to the world.