ich he was
destined, prematurely, to succumb. The wretched constitution which,
in common with his short-lived brothers and sisters, he had inherited
probably from his father, already began to show signs of breaking
up. Invalid from the first, it had doubtless been weakened by the
hardships of Sterne's early years, and yet further, perhaps, by the
excitements and dissipations of his London life; nor was the change
from the gaieties of the capital to hard literary labour in a country
parsonage calculated to benefit him as much as it might others. Shandy
Hall, as he christened his pretty parsonage at Coxwold, and as the
house, still standing, is called to this day, soon became irksome
to him. The very reaction begotten of unwonted quietude acted on his
temperament with a dispiriting rather than a soothing effect. The
change from his full and stimulating life in London to the dull
round of clerical duties in a Yorkshire village might well have been
depressing to a mind better balanced and ballasted than his. To him,
with his light, pleasure-loving nature, it was as the return of the
schoolboy from pantomimes and pony-riding to the more sober delights
of Dr. Swishtail's; and, in a letter to Hall Stevenson, Sterne reveals
his feelings with all the juvenile frankness of one of the Doctor's
pupils:

"I rejoice you are in London--rest you there in peace; here 'tis the
devil. You were a good prophet. I wish myself back again, as you
told me I should, but not because a thin, death-doing, pestiferous
north-east wind blows in a line directly from Crazy Castle turret
fresh upon me in this cuckoldly retreat (for I value the north-east
wind and all its powers not a straw), but the transition from rapid
motion to absolute rest was too violent. I should have walked about
the streets of York ten days, as a proper medium to have passed
through before I entered upon my rest; I stayed but a moment, and
I have been here but a few, to satisfy me. I have not managed my
miseries like a wise man, and if God for my consolation had not
poured forth the spirit of Shandyism unto me, which will not suffer
me to think two moments upon any grave subject, I would else just
now lay down and die."

It is true he adds, in the next sentence, that in half an hour's time
"I'll lay a guinea I shall be as merry as a monkey, and forget it
all," but such sudden revulsions of high spirits can hardly be allowed
to count for much agains