Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 54.djvu/219

 (Elizabeth or Betsy) in October 1761. In 1765 Mrs. Draper and her husband paid a visit to England with a view to placing their children at school. Draper soon returned alone to his post at Bombay, and left his wife to follow him later.

Mrs. Draper, when Sterne met her, was no more than a coquettish schoolgirl, who had read widely, and aped the ethical theories of the blue-stocking school. She chattered of ‘the rights of women’ in matters of education and marriage. But there was no doubt of the reality of her conviction that a wrong had been done her by yoking her in immature years to a husband of formal manner and illiterate tastes, who rendered conjugal life detestable to her. Sterne was not slow in winning her confidence. The sympathy of a distinguished man of letters flattered her vanity. She knew him as the ‘mild, generous, and good Yorick,’ and became a whole-hearted ‘idolater of his worth.’ He opened a correspondence with her in his customary vein, calling her his ‘Bramine,’ in allusion to her Indian connections. He cursed fate that both were married already, sent her his books, and having had her portrait painted, wore it round his neck. But within a month or two of their first meeting Draper summoned his wife home. Eliza fell ill at the thought of leaving her children and relatives. Sterne assigned her melancholy to the coming separation from him. On 3 April 1767 Eliza sailed from Deal for Bombay in the Earl of Chatham, East Indiaman. Sterne and she never met again. Her health and spirits recovered on the voyage. New admirers were forthcoming, and most of the impression Sterne had made on her passed away.

But Sterne had no wish to close the episode hastily. He recognised in Eliza a young woman of intellectual capacity and emotional temperament not unlike his own, and he determined to maintain relations with her in her absence after the manner in which Swift had maintained relations with Stella. He was to keep a journal addressed to Eliza while she was in India. In the fifth of his extant letters written to Mrs. Draper while she was in England he told her ‘the journal is as it should be all but its contents.’ ‘I began a new journal this morning,’ he writes in his next letter; ‘you shall see it, for if I live not till your return to England I will leave it you as a legacy; 'tis a sorrowful page, but I will write cheerful ones.’ On the day they parted Eliza agreed to keep a journal too. At the moment of her sailing Sterne forwarded to her all that he had yet written. Of that effort of Sterne nothing is known. On 9 April, six days after the Earl of Chatham set sail, he wrote in desperation to his daughter (Letter xci.) of his loneliness now that his ‘dear friend’ had left him and his family was at a distance. ‘For God's sake, persuade [thy mother],’ he added, ‘to come and fix in England … I want thee near me, thou child and darling of my heart.’ On 13 April Sterne sought relief from his melancholy by applying himself to a continuation of his ‘Journal to Eliza.’ He carried it on regularly till 2 Aug. A fragmentary entry dated 1 Nov. brings it to a conclusion. The whole still survives in manuscript at the British Museum (Addit. MS. 34527), and has not been printed. Sterne called it ‘The Bramine's Journal,’ and described it as ‘a diary of the miserable feelings of a person separated from a lady for whose society he languished.’ It is mainly a mawkish record of his yearning for Eliza's society, of his vague hope of making her his wife, of his antipathy to Mrs. Sterne, of his declining health, and of his social diversions in London and Coxwold. Signs are apparent throughout of the decay of physical strength. One curious feature of the ‘Journal’ is its frequent plagiarism of his own letters which are extant elsewhere. The sense of desolation with which Eliza's departure fills him is expressed in almost the same language that is applied in his published correspondence to the grief caused by his wife's absence in their courting days, twenty-seven years before. It is just possible that his daughter, who recklessly edited his correspondence, foisted some passages from the ‘Journal’ on her mother's love-letters. It is barely credible that the close resemblance should be due to an accidental freak of memory on Sterne's part, or that he should have copied his old letters, even in the improbable case that he had access to them. The accounts he gives in the ‘Journal’ of his illness in London in April, and of the rural charms of life at Coxwold in July, both figure with little verbal change in letters that he sent at the time to other friends. But this accorded with his common epistolary practice.

For the first five weeks after Eliza's departure (13 April–22 May) Sterne lay seriously ill in his lodgings in New Bond Street. But as soon as he was convalescent the old routine of gaiety recommenced. He imprudently ventured on visits by night to Ranelagh or to Madame Cornelys's concerts in Soho Square. He breakfasted or dined with Lord and Lady Spencer, and flirted with female admirers in Hyde Park. At the end of May he travelled down to Coxwold ‘like a bale of cadaverous goods consigned to