estion of the "breeching of Tristram," and the much-admired, if not
wholly admirable, episode of Le Fevre's death, is fully entitled to
rank beside its predecessors. On the whole, therefore, it must be said
that the colder reception accorded to this instalment of the novel,
as compared with the previous one, can hardly be justified on sound
critical grounds. But that literary shortcomings were not, in fact,
the cause of _Tristram's_ declining popularity may be confidently
inferred from the fact that the seventh volume, with its admirably
vivid and spirited scenes of Continental travel, and the eighth and
ninth, with their charming narrative of Captain Shandy's love affair,
were but slightly more successful. The readers whom this, the third
instalment of the novel, had begun to repel, were mainly, I imagine,
those who had never felt any intelligent admiration for the former;
who had been caught by the writer's eccentricity, without appreciating
his insight into character and his graphic power, and who had seen no
other aspects of his humour than those buffooneries and puerilities
which, after first amusing, had begun, in the natural course of
things, to weary them.

Meanwhile, however, and with spirits restored by the Southern warmth
to that buoyancy which never long deserted them, Sterne had begun to
set to work upon a new volume. His letters show that this was not
the seventh but the eighth; and Mr. Fitzgerald's conjecture, that
the materials ultimately given to the world in the former volume were
originally designed for another work, appears exceedingly probable.
But for some time after his arrival at Toulouse he was unable, it
would seem, to resume his literary labours in any form. Ever liable,
through his weakly constitution, to whatever local maladies might
anywhere prevail, he had fallen ill, he writes to Hall Stevenson, "of
an epidemic vile fever which killed hundreds about me. The physicians
here," he adds, "are the arrantest charlatans in Europe, or the most
ignorant of all pretending fools. I withdrew what was left of me out
of their hands, and recommended my affairs entirely to Dame Nature.
She (dear goddess) has saved me in fifty different pinching bouts, and
I begin to have a kind of enthusiasm now in her favour and my own, so
that one or two more escapes will make me believe I shall leave you
all at last by translation, and not by fair death." Having now become
"stout and foolish again as a man can wish to