‘I am going out to breakfast, but shall be at my lodgings by eleven, when I hope to read a single line under thy own hand, that thou art better, and wilt be glad to see thy Bramin.’ This Eliza was a Mrs. Draper, the wife of a judge in India, ‘much respected in that part of the world.’ We know little of Eliza, except that there is a stone in Bristol cathedral— SACRED TO THE MEMORY OF MRS. ELIZABETH DRAPER, IN WHOM GENIUS AND BENEVOLENCE WERE UNITED. SHE DIED AUGUST 3, 1778, AGED 35. Let us hope she possessed, in addition to genius and benevolence, the good sense to laugh at Sterne’s letters. In truth, much of the gloss and delicacy of Sterne’s pagan instinct had faded away by this time. He still retained his fine sensibility, his exquisite power of entering into and of delineating plain human nature. But the world had produced its inevitable effect on that soft and voluptuous disposition. It is not, as we have said, that he was guilty of grave offences or misdeeds; he made what he would have called a ‘splutter of vice,’ but he would seem to have committed very little. Yet, as with most minds which have exempted themselves from rigid principle, there was a diffused texture of general laxity. The fibre had become imperfect; the moral constitution was impaired; the high colour of rottenness had come at last out, and replaced the delicate bloom and softness of the early fruit. There is no need to write commonplace sermons on an ancient text. The beauty and charm of natural paganism will not endure the stress and destruction of this rough and complicated world. An instinctive purity will preserve men for a brief time, but hardly through a long and varied life of threescore and ten years.