Pluto and company,’ and stayed with the archbishop of York before reaching Coxwold. There his health improved, and he began in earnest his ‘Sentimental Journey;’ but a letter on 2 June from Lydia and her mother confirmed an earlier threat that they were about to pay him a visit. Mrs. Sterne demanded a new financial settlement, and Sterne's equanimity completely failed him. But with characteristic inconsistency he was distressed to learn that some recent letters to his wife had miscarried. The mishap wore, he lamented, the aspect of unkindness, which his wife by no means merited from him. The threatened meeting threw him, as the appointed date approached, into paroxysms of hysteria. In July visits to Skelton Castle and Harrogate raised his drooping spirits, and friends sympathised with him in his twofold grief—the home-coming of Mrs. Sterne and his vain passion for Eliza. The bishop of Cork and Ross (Jemmet Brown) offered him preferment in Ireland, and there was talk of his exchanging his York livings for a benefice in Surrey worth 350l. a year.
At the end of August his wife and ‘dear girl’ arrived. Lydia had developed into an elegant and unprincipled coquette, but her father thanked Heaven for her brilliant endowments. Mrs. Sterne kept her temper. After a stay of two months she and Lydia left Coxwold on 1 Nov. to winter in a hired house at York. It was then formally agreed that in the ensuing spring Mrs. Sterne was to return to the south of France with an annual allowance of three hundred guineas, and not to stir again till death. She was well satisfied. The climate of England made life insupportable to her, she said, and she vowed, if her husband would only maintain her at a distance from him, never to give him another sorrowful or discontented hour. ‘She leaves me,’ Sterne wrote to Eliza, ‘more than half in love with me.’ To his daughter he gave 2,000l., which his wife, despite his objection, insisted on investing in the French funds. But he assented to permanent separation from Lydia in genuine sorrow. ‘This dear part of me must be torn from my arms,’ he lamented, ‘to follow her mother.’ ‘My heart bleeds,’ he wrote to his friend Lee, ‘when I think of parting with my child; 'twill be like the separation of body and soul.’
In November the ‘Sentimental Journey’ was resumed, and relieved its author's feelings. He designed ‘it to teach us to love the world and our fellow-creatures better than we do,’ and he enjoyed dwelling on ‘those gentler passions and affections which and so much to’ general goodwill. Many references to Eliza—to the little portrait of her that he wore round his neck, and to his vows of eternal fidelity—figured in the ‘Sentimental Journey’ (pp. 48, 85, 113, 129). His wife's return had compelled the abandonment of the ‘Journal to Eliza,’ and it was not resumed. Nevertheless Sterne continued to pen sprightly billets-doux to other ladies of his acquaintance in London, and one at least was despatched while his wife was under his roof.
By December 1767 two books of the ‘Sentimental Journey’ were completed, and, taking leave of his family in the hired house in York, Sterne set out with his friend Hall-Stevenson for London to superintend the publication. It proved his last journey. His lodgings in Bond Street were soon filled with visitors, and hospitalities were offered him in profusion. His weak health depressed him, but he was gratified by the receipt of a curiously carved walking-stick from Dr. Eustace, an American admirer, who was personally a stranger to him. He saw much of Mr. and Mrs. James in Gerrard Street, and strained all his social influence to procure for Mrs. James a ticket of admission to Mrs. Cornelys's fashionable entertainments in Soho Square, to which he had omitted to take out a subscription. On 27 Feb. the ‘Sentimental Journey’ was published in two 12mo volumes, and added greatly to his reputation. Even Horace Walpole, who could never get through three volumes of the ‘tiresome’ ‘Shandy,’ admitted that the new book was ‘very pleasing though too much dilated,’ and was marked by ‘great good-nature and strokes of delicacy’ (Letters, ed. Cunningham, v. 91). In March Sterne wrote to his daughter that a vile influenza was bowing him down, but he hoped to get the better of it. He repudiated with much heat a rumour which Lydia had brought to his notice, that he intended to bequeath her as a legacy to Mrs. Draper. ‘I wish I had thee to nurse me,’ he concludes; ‘but I am denied that. Write to me twice a week at least. God bless thee, my child, and believe me ever, ever, thy affectionate father.’ He rapidly grew worse; pleurisy set in; he was bled and blistered, and his strength waned. On 15 March he took up his pen for the last time, and wrote a touching note to Mrs. James, confiding his daughter to her care in case he should be vanquished in ‘this wrestling.’ ‘My spirits are fled,’ he wrote; ‘'tis a bad omen.’ Four days later, at four o'clock in the afternoon of Friday, 18 March, he died. At the moment of his death his friend John Crawford of Errol was entertaining a distinguished party, including many of Sterne's acquaintances, at his house
