and shall, if I recover, be a long while of gaining
strength. Before I have gone through half the letter I must stop to
rest my weak hand a dozen times. Mr. James was so good as to call
upon me yesterday. I felt emotions not to be described at the sight
of him, and he overjoyed me by talking a great deal of you. Do,
dear Mrs. James, entreat him to come to-morrow or next day, for perhaps
I have not many days or hours to live. I want to ask a favour
of him, if I find myself worse, that I shall beg of you if in this
wrestling I come off conqueror. My spirits are fled. It is a bad omen;
do not weep, my dear lady. Your tears are too precious to be shed
for me. Bottle them up, and may the cork never be drawn. Dearest,
kindest, gentlest, and best of women! may health, peace, and happiness
prove your handmaids. If I die, cherish the remembrance of
me, and forget the follies which you so often condemned, which my
heart, not my head, betrayed me into. Should my child, my Lydia,
want a mother, may I hope you will (if she is left parentless) take her
to your bosom? You are the only woman on earth I can depend
upon for such a benevolent action. I wrote to her a fortnight ago,
and told her what, I trust, she will find in you. Mr. James will be a
father to her.... Commend me to him, as I now commend you to
that Being who takes under his care the good and kind part of the
world. Adieu, all grateful thanks to you and Mr. James.

"From your affectionate friend, L. STERNE."

This pathetic death-bed letter is superscribed "Tuesday." It seems to
have been written on Tuesday, the 15th of March, and three days later
the writer breathed his last. But two persons, strangers both, were
present at his deathbed, and it is by a singularly fortunate chance,
therefore, that one of these--and he not belonging to the class of
people who usually leave behind them published records of the events
of their lives--should have preserved for us an account of the closing
scene. This, however, is to be found in the Memoirs of John Macdonald,
"a cadet of the house of Keppoch," at that time footman to Mr.
Crawford, a fashionable friend of Sterne's. His master had taken a
house in Clifford Street in the spring of 1768; and "about this time,"
he writes, "Mr. Sterne, the celebrated author, was taken ill at the
silk-bag shop in Old Bond Street. He was sometimes called Tristram
Shandy and sometimes Yor