dance, and sing, and say his prayers, and go to Heaven with this nut-brown maid ?"- Both scenes, described in Sterne's very best style, announced the peculiar humor and sentiment that the world now associates with A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy.

The tour that resulted in this book was the last that Yorick was to take abroad. He set out in October of 1765, following in part the steps of Mr. Tristram Shandy from Calais to southern France. Thence he crossed over into Italy and went south to Rome and Naples. Returning to Coxwold in the summer of 1766, he wrote the last Shandy volume, and planned the Sentimental Journey. It was to be in four volumes, two for France and two for Italy. The French part was written in the summer and fall of 1767, while Sterne was in a miserable state of mind and body. He had just come down into Yorkshire, worn out by London dissipations and unnerved by the loss of Eliza,

his one genuine passion- who had gone back to India. Sterne, however, recovered sufficiently to go up to London in the following winter. The Sentimental Journey appeared on February 26, 1768; and within a month "the ingenious and Reverend Mr. Sterne"-so was

phrased an obituary lay dead in his London lodging. According to his plan, the Sentimental Journey, would have been completed the next year, and then Shandy would have been resumed.

An admirer of Yorick's went over the Sterne route in 1825, and described what he saw in two most interesting sketches contributed to the London Magazine* for that year; and more recently Mr. Percy Fitzgerald has written of Yorick's stopping-places, in his charming life of the humorist. The traveller of 1825 found the inn at Calais still in possession of the Dessein family. A grandson of Yorick's host conducted him to "the very room" Sterne had occupied there, and pointed out the place where the celebrated remise had once stood. To the left, as one entered the court-yard, rested, after finishing its career of Europe, the old désobligeante in which Sterne wrote the preface to his Journey; and on the opposite side of the court, took place the conversation between the poor Franciscan and the beautiful lady in distress. Famous for a century, Dessein's hostelry, Mr. Fitzgerald writes to

*Articles are signed P. (i. e., John Poole, the wit and dramatist).

me," has gone long since, but I talked lately to one of the family - Madame Dessein. Everything in Calais is gone." Not so, however, at Montreuil. The Hôtel de la Cour de France, where Yorick stayed, is still standing,-"looking exactly," Mr. Fitzgerald goes on to say in his letter, "as it did in Sterne's time, — a charming old place with an archway and courtyard at the entrance to the town." There the innkeeper's daughter, the beautiful Janatone, set Yorick right on the distinction between tant pis and tant mieux, and there he discovered La Fleur, the faithful valet for the rest of the tour. It was some distance out of Montreuil that they came upon the famous dead donkey that La Fleur's pony would not pass, and "the poor fellow was kick'd out of his jack-boots." "The journey from Nampont to Amiens," says the tourist of 1825, "affords occasion for a description of French travelling, so fresh, so true, so strictly accurate in all its points, that it might have been written yesterday. La Fleur's jack-boots- the frequent derangement of the tackle the perversity of the postillion- the hallooing and screaming - the jumbling upon the pavé - the 'clattering like a thousand devils' all these circumstances

VOL. I. - -b

xvii

are still applicable." About Amiens, where occurred the amusing incident of the transformed letter, Sterne has little to say, and he passes over entirely Chantilly and all other places on the road to Paris. The Hôtel de Modene, where Sterne put up in Paris, - the scene of the starling and "the temptation," that masterpiece in equivoque was situated in the Rue Jacob, not far from the PontNeuf. The Opéra Comique, properly the Comédie Italienne, to which Yorick inquired the way from the charming grisette, "stood in the Rue Mauconseil, which is near the Rue de la Vielle Friperie, where La Fleur bought his gay scarlet livery."

There is also a more or less real background of incident and character for the imaginative details of the Sentimental Journey. La Fleur, so perfectly tempered, "faithful" and "affectionate," long survived his master, it is said, and served other English travellers on the grand tour. The Count de BYorick found reading Shakespeare the finest scenes in the Journeycourse the Comte de Bissy. And Madame de V the coquette, who was persuaded by the art and pleasant wit of Yorick to

whom

one of

was of

66

'put off the epocha of Deism for two years," is said to have been Madame de Vence, a descendant of Madame de Sévigné. The dead donkey, the grisette at the glove-shop, and poor Maria-highly idealized, it is trueseem yet to have been not wholly fictitious. "The case of delicacy" with which the Journey ends, though not an incident of Sterne's tour, was an adventure that befell his friend John Crawford of Errol while staying at an inn near Aix-la-Chapelle. But Sterne would not be Sterne without some borrowing. The story of the poor dwarf and the tall German at the theatre was lifted from Scarron.*

It is to be lamented that Sterne did not live to write the Italian part of his Journey, which John Hall-Stevenson and others undertook to do for him after his death. At Turin he " spent a joyous fortnight * * * and met with all kinds of honours," including a presentation to the king. Another fortnight brought him by easy stages through Milan, Parma, Placenza, and Bologna to Florence, "with weather,' though it was December, "as delicious as a kindly April in England." In another week he was to "tread the Vatican and be intro

* Le Roman Comique, seconde partie, ch. xvii.