Yorick, a very great favourite of the gentlemen.  One day”—­namely, on the aforesaid 18th of March—­“my master had company to dinner who were speaking about him—­the Duke of Roxburghe, the Earl of March, the Earl of Ossory, the Duke of Grafton, Mr. Garrick, Mr. Hume, and a Mr. James.”  Many, if not most, of the party, therefore, were personal friends of the man who lay dying in the street hard by, and naturally enough the conversation turned on his condition. “‘John,’ said my master,” the narrative continues, “’go and inquire how Mr. Sterne is to-day.’” Macdonald did so; and, in language which seems to bear the stamp of truth upon it, he thus records the grim story which he had to report to the assembled guests on his return:  “I went to Mr. Sterne’s lodgings; the mistress opened the door.  I enquired how he did; she told me to go up to the nurse.  I went into the room, and he was just a-dying.  I waited ten minutes; but in five he said, ‘Now it is come.’  He put up his hand as if to stop a blow, and died in a minute.  The gentlemen were all very sorry, and lamented him very much.”

Thus, supported by a hired nurse, and under the curious eyes of a stranger, Sterne breathed his last.  His wife and daughter were far away; the convivial associates “who were all very sorry and lamented him very much,” were for the moment represented only by “John;” and the shocking tradition goes that the alien hands by which the “dying eyes were closed,” and the “decent limbs composed,” remunerated themselves for the pious office by abstracting the gold sleeve-links from the dead man’s wrists.  One may hope, indeed, that this last circumstance is to be rejected as sensational legend, but even without it the story of Sterne’s death seems sad enough, no doubt.  Yet it is, after all, only by contrast with the excited gaiety of his daily life in London that his end appears so forlorn.  From many a “set of residential chambers,” from many of the old and silent inns of the lawyers, departures as lonely, or lonelier, are being made around us in London every year:  the departures of men not necessarily kinless or friendless, but living solitary lives, and dying before their friends or kindred can be summoned to their bedsides.  Such deaths, no doubt, are often contrasted in conventional pathos with that of the husband and father surrounded by a weeping wife and children; but the more sensible among us construct no tragedy out of a mode of exit which must have many times entered as at least a possibility into the previous contemplation of the dying man.  And except, as has been said, that Sterne associates himself in our minds with the perpetual excitements of lively companionship, there would be nothing particularly melancholy in his end.  This is subject, of course, to the assumption that the story of his landlady having stolen the gold sleeve-links from his dead body may be treated as mythical; and, rejecting this story, there seems no good reason for making much ado about