The success of this instalment of Tristram Shandy appears to have been slightly greater than that of the preceding one.  Writing from London, where he was once more basking in the sunshine of social popularity, to Garrick, then in Paris, he says (March 16, 1765):  “I have had a lucrative campaign here. Shandy sells well,” and “I am taxing the public with two more volumes of sermons, which will more than double the gains of Shandy.  It goes into the world with a prancing list de toute la noblesse, which will bring me in three hundred pounds, exclusive of the sale of the copy.”  The list was, indeed, extensive and distinguished enough to justify the curious epithet which he applies to it; but the cavalcade of noble names continued to “prance” for some considerable time without advancing.  Yet he had good reasons, according to his own account, for wishing to push on their publication.  His parsonage-house at Button had just been burnt down through the carelessness of one of his curate’s household, with a loss to Sterne of some 350_l._ “As soon as I can,” he says, “I must rebuild it, but I lack the means at present.”  Nevertheless, the new sermons continued to hang fire.  Again, in April he describes the subscription list as “the most splendid list which ever pranced before a book since subscription came into fashion;” but though the volumes which it was to usher into the world were then spoken of as about to be printed “very soon,” he has again in July to write of them only as “forthcoming in September, though I fear not in time to bring them with me” to Paris.  And, as a matter of fact, they do not seem to have made their appearance until after Sterne had quitted England on his second and last Continental journey.  The full subscription list may have had the effect of relaxing his energies; but the subscribers had no reason to complain when, in 1766, the volumes at last appeared.

The reception given to the first batch of sermons which Sterne had published was quite favourable enough to encourage a repetition of the experiment.  He was shrewd enough, however, to perceive that on this second occasion a somewhat different sort of article would be required.  In the first flush of Tristram Shandy’s success, and in the first piquancy of the contrast between the grave profession of the writer and the unbounded license of the book, he could safely reckon on as large and curious a public for any sermons whatever from the pen of Mr. Yorick.  There was no need that the humourist in his pulpit should at all resemble the humourist at his desk, or, indeed, that he should be in any way an impressive or commanding figure.  The great desire of the world was to know what he did resemble in this new and incongruous position.  Men wished to see what the queer, sly face looked like over a velvet cushion, in the assurance that the sight would be a strange and interesting one, at any rate.  Five years afterwards, however, the case was different.