feel himself, or his reader will not” (how mistaken a devotion Sterne showed to this Horatian canon will be noted hereafter), “but I have torn my whole frame into pieces by my feelings.  I believe the brain stands as much in need of recruiting as the body; therefore I shall set out for town the 20th of next month, after having recruited myself at York.”  Then he adds the strange observation, “I might, indeed, solace myself with my wife (who is come from France), but, in fact, I have long been a sentimental being, whatever your Lordship may think to the contrary.  The world has imagined because I wrote Tristram Shandy that I was myself more Shandian than I really ever was.  ’Tis a good-natured world we live in, and we are often painted in divers colours, according to the ideas each one frames in his head.”  It would, perhaps, have been scarcely possible for Sterne to state his essentially unhealthy philosophy of life so concisely as in this naive passage.  The connubial affections are here, in all seriousness and good faith apparently, opposed to the sentimental emotions—­as the lower to the higher.  To indulge the former is to be “Shandian,” that is to say, coarse and carnal; to devote oneself to the latter, or, in other words, to spend one’s days in semi-erotic languishings over the whole female sex indiscriminately, is to show spirituality and taste.

Meanwhile, however, that fragile abode of sentimentalism—­that frame which had just been “torn to pieces” by the feelings—­was becoming weaker than its owner supposed.  Much of the exhaustion which Sterne had attributed to the violence of his literary emotions was no doubt due to the rapid decline of bodily powers which, unknown to him, were already within a few months of their final collapse.  He did not set out for London on the 20th of December, as he had promised himself, for on that day he was only just recovering from “an attack of fever and bleeding at the lungs,” which had confined him to his room for nearly three weeks.  “I am worn down to a shadow,” he writes on the 23rd, “but as my fever has left me, I set off the latter end of next week with my friend, Mr. Hall, for town.”  His home affairs had already been settled.  Early in December it had been arranged that his wife and daughter should only remain at York during the winter, and should return to the Continent in the spring.  “Mrs. Sterne’s health,” he writes, “is insupportable in England.  She must return to France, and justice and humanity forbid me to oppose it.”  But separation from his wife meant separation from his daughter; it was this, of course, which was the really painful parting, and it is to the credit of Sterne’s disinterestedness of affection for Lydia, that in his then state of health he brought himself to consent to her leaving him.  But he recognized that it was for the advantage of her prospect of settling herself in life that she should go with her mother, who seemed “inclined to establish her in France,