The despondent tone of this letter was to be only too soon justified.  The “vile influenza” proved to be or became a pleurisy.  On Thursday, March 10, he was bled three times, and blistered on the day after.  And on the Tuesday following, in evident consciousness that his end was near, he penned that cry “for pity and pardon,” as Thackeray calls it—­the first as well as the last, and which sounds almost as strange as it does piteous from those mocking lips: 

“The physician says I am better....  God knows, for I feel myself sadly wrong, and shall, if I recover, be a long while of gaining strength.  Before I have gone through half the letter I must stop to rest my weak hand a dozen times.  Mr. James was so good as to call upon me yesterday.  I felt emotions not to be described at the sight of him, and he overjoyed me by talking a great deal of you.  Do, dear Mrs. James, entreat him to come to-morrow or next day, for perhaps I have not many days or hours to live.  I want to ask a favour of him, if I find myself worse, that I shall beg of you if in this wrestling I come off conqueror.  My spirits are fled.  It is a bad omen; do not weep, my dear lady.  Your tears are too precious to be shed for me.  Bottle them up, and may the cork never be drawn.  Dearest, kindest, gentlest, and best of women! may health, peace, and happiness prove your handmaids.  If I die, cherish the remembrance of me, and forget the follies which you so often condemned, which my heart, not my head, betrayed me into.  Should my child, my Lydia, want a mother, may I hope you will (if she is left parentless) take her to your bosom?  You are the only woman on earth I can depend upon for such a benevolent action.  I wrote to her a fortnight ago, and told her what, I trust, she will find in you.  Mr. James will be a father to her....  Commend me to him, as I now commend you to that Being who takes under his care the good and kind part of the world.  Adieu, all grateful thanks to you and Mr. James.

  “From your affectionate friend, L. STERNE.”

This pathetic death-bed letter is superscribed “Tuesday.”  It seems to have been written on Tuesday, the 15th of March, and three days later the writer breathed his last.  But two persons, strangers both, were present at his deathbed, and it is by a singularly fortunate chance, therefore, that one of these—­and he not belonging to the class of people who usually leave behind them published records of the events of their lives—­should have preserved for us an account of the closing scene.  This, however, is to be found in the Memoirs of John Macdonald, “a cadet of the house of Keppoch,” at that time footman to Mr. Crawford, a fashionable friend of Sterne’s.  His master had taken a house in Clifford Street in the spring of 1768; and “about this time,” he writes, “Mr. Sterne, the celebrated author, was taken ill at the silk-bag shop in Old Bond Street.  He was sometimes called Tristram Shandy and sometimes