Does humility clothe and educate the unknown orphan?  Poverty, thou hast no genealogies.  See! is he not the father of the child?” In another sermon he launches out into quaintly contemptuous criticism of a religious movement which he was certainly the last person in the world to understand—­to wit, Methodism.  He asks whether, “when a poor, disconsolated, drooping creature is terrified from all enjoyment, prays without ceasing till his imagination is heated, fasts and mortifies and mopes till his body is in as bad a plight as his mind, it is a wonder that the mechanical disturbances and conflicts of an empty belly, interpreted by an empty head, should be mistook for workings of a different kind from what they are?” Other sermons reflect the singularly bitter anti-Catholic feeling which was characteristic even of indifferentism in those days—­at any rate amongst Whig divines.  But in most of them one is liable to come at any moment across one of those strange sallies to which Gray alluded, when he said of the effect of Sterne’s sermons upon a reader that “you often see him tottering on the verge of laughter, and ready to throw his periwig in the face of the audience.”

CHAPTER VII.

FRANCE AND ITALY.—­MEETING WITH WIFE AND DAUGHTER.—­RETURN TO ENGLAND.—­“TRISTRAM SHANDY,” VOL.  IX.—­“THE SENTIMENTAL JOURNEY.”

(1765-1768.)

In the first week of October, 1765, or a few days later, Sterne set out on what was afterwards to become famous as the “Sentimental Journey through France and Italy.”  Not, of course, that all the materials for that celebrated piece of literary travel were collected on this occasion.  From London as far as Lyons his way lay by a route which he had already traversed three years before, and there is reason to believe that at least some of the scenes in the Sentimental Journey were drawn from observation made on his former visit.  His stay in Paris was shorter this year than it had been on the previous occasion.  A month after leaving England he was at Pont Beauvoisin, and by the middle of November he had reached Turin.  From this city he writes, with his characteristic simplicity:  “I am very happy, and have found my way into a dozen houses already.  To-morrow I am to be presented to the King, and when that ceremony is over I shall have my hands full of engagements.”  From Turin he went on, by way of Milan, Parma, Piacenza, and Bologna, to Florence, where, after three days’ stay, “to dine with our Plenipo,” he continued his journey to Rome.  Here, and at Naples, he passed the winter of 1765-’66,[1] and prolonged his stay in Italy until the ensuing spring was well advanced.  In the month of May he was again on his way home, through France, and had had a meeting, after two years’ separation from them, with his wife and daughter.  His account of it to Hall Stevenson is curious:  “Never man,” he writes, “has been such a wild-goose chase