difficulty, arising out of an affair upon which, as it has relations with the history of Sterne’s literary work, it would be impossible, even in the most strictly critical and least general of biographies, to observe complete silence.  I refer, of course, to the famous and furious flirtation with Mrs. Draper—­the Eliza of the Yorick and Eliza Letters.  Of the affair itself but little need be said.  I have already stated my own views on the general subject of Sterne’s love affairs; and I feel no inducement to discuss the question of their innocence or otherwise in relation to this particular amourette.  I will only say that were it technically as innocent as you please, the mean which must be found between Thackeray’s somewhat too harsh and Mr. Fitzgerald’s considerably too indulgent judgment on it will lie, it seems to me, decidedly nearer to the former than to the latter’s extreme.  This episode of violently sentimental philandering with an Indian “grass widow” was, in any case, an extremely unlovely passage in Sterne’s life.  On the best and most charitable view of it, the flirtation, pursued in the way it was, and to the lengths to which it was carried, must be held to convict the elderly lover of the most deplorable levity, vanity, indiscretion, and sickly sentimentalism.  It was, to say the least of it, most unbecoming in a man of Sterne’s age and profession; and when it is added that Yorick’s attentions to Eliza were paid in so open a fashion as to be brought by gossip to the ears of his neglected wife, then living many hundred miles away from him, its highly reprehensible character seems manifest enough in all ways.

No sooner, however, had the fascinating widow set sail, than the sentimental lover began to feel so strongly the need of a female consoler, that his heart seems to have softened, insensibly, even towards his wife.  “I am unhappy,” he writes plaintively to Lydia Sterne.  “Thy mother and thyself at a distance from me—­and what can compensate for such a destitution?  For God’s sake persuade her to come and fix in England! for life is too short to waste in separation; and while she lives in one country and I in another, many people will suppose it proceeds from choice”—­a supposition, he seems to imply, which even my scrupulously discreet conduct in her absence scarcely suffices to refute.  “Besides”—­a word in which there is here almost as much virtue as in an “if”—­“I want thee near me, thou child and darling of my heart.  I am in a melancholy mood, and my Lydia’s eyes will smart with weeping when I tell her the cause that just now affects me.”  And then his sensibilities brim over, and into his daughter’s ear he pours forth his lamentations over the loss of her mother’s rival.  “I am apprehensive the dear friend I mentioned in my last letter is going into a decline.  I was with her two days ago, and I never beheld a being so altered.  She has a tender frame, and looks like a drooping lily, for the roses are fled from her cheeks.  I can never see or talk to this