Nov: 1^{st.} All my dearest Eliza has turnd out more favourable than my hopes--M^{rs.} S.--& my dear Girl have been 2 Months with me and they have this day left me to go to spend the Winter at York, after having settled every thing to their hearts content--M^{rs.} Sterne retires into france, whence she purposes not to stir, till her death.--& never, has she vow'd, will give me another sorrowful or discontented hour--I have conquerd her, as I w^{d.} every one else, by humanity & Generosity--& she leaves me, more than half in Love w^{th.} me--She goes into the South of france, her health being insupportable in England--& her age, as she now confesses ten Years more, than I thought being on the edge of sixty--so God bless--& make the remainder of her Life happy--in order to w^{ch.} I am to remit her three hundred guineas a year--& give my dear Girl two thousand p^{ds.}--w^{th.} w^{ch.} all Joy, I agree to,--but tis to be sunk into an annuity in the french Loans-- --And now Eliza! Let me talk to thee--But What can I say, What can I write--But the Yearnings of heart wasted with looking & wishing for thy Return--Return--Return! my dear Eliza! May heaven smooth the Way for thee to send thee safely to us, & joy for Ever. So ends the famous _Journal_, which at last we are permitted to read with all its sins upon it. And I think the first observation that will occur to every reader is surprise that a master of style could write such slipshod, almost illiterate, English. The fact is a good many of the writers of the day were content to leave all minor matters of grammar and orthography to their printer, whom it was then the fashion to abuse. More than one page of stately English out of that formal age would look as queer as Sterne's hectic scribblings, could we see the original manuscript. But the ill taste of it all is quite as apparent, and unfortunately no printer could expunge that fault, along with his haphazard punctuation, from Sterne's published works. In another way his incongruous calling as a priest may be responsible for a note that particularly jars upon us to-day. Too often in the midst of very earthly sentiments he breaks forth with a bit of religious claptrap, as when in the _Journal_ he cries out, "Great God of Mercy! shorten the Space betwixt us--Shorten the space of our miseries!"--or as when, in that letter to Lady Percy which so disgusted Thackeray, he dandles his temptations, and in the same breath tells how he has repeated the Lord's Prayer for the sake of deliverance from them. Again, I say, it is a matter of taste, for there is no reason to believe that Yorick's religious feelings were not just as sincere, and as volatile, too, as his love-making. They sometimes came to him at an inopportune moment.