originals in her possession. Her replies were not given. ‘Letters from Eliza to Yorick’ (1775, ‘printed for the editor’) and William Combe's ‘Letters, supposed to have been written by Yorick and Eliza’ (1779, 2 vols.), were forgeries, some of which were foisted on reprints of the genuine collection. That volume gave ‘Sterne's Eliza’ a reputation little less universal than Sterne's. But she did not long enjoy the equivocal distinction. Dying at Bristol on 3 Aug. 1778, before she had completed her thirty-fifth year, she was buried in the cloisters of the cathedral there on 6 Aug. A sculptured monument still stands there to her memory. Eliza's husband, who was the object of much sympathy both in India and England, attained the first place in the Bombay council, and finally returned to England on 10 Oct. 1782. His and Eliza's daughter, their only surviving child, married, on 10 Jan. 1785, one Thomas Nevill, esq. (Gent. Mag. 1785, i. 75). Draper died in St. James's Street in March 1805.
Eliza's fame died hard (cf. James Douglas, Bombay and West India). L'Abbé Raynal, who met her in India, gave it new vigour when, in the second edition of his ‘Histoire des Indes’ (1779), he rapturously and at great length apostrophised her in his account of Anjengo, her birthplace. In 1813 James Forbes, in his ‘Oriental Memoirs’ (i. 338–9), wrote of ‘Abbé Raynal's rhapsody of Anjengo’ that, ‘however insignificant the settlement may be in itself, it will be for ever celebrated as the birthplace of his and Sterne's Eliza, a lady with whom I had the pleasure of being acquainted at Bombay, whose refined taste and elegant accomplishments require no encomium from my pen.’ A tree at Masulipatam, where she stayed for a time with her uncle Whitehill, was known, until it was swept away in 1864, as ‘Eliza's Tree;’ and the house that she had occupied in Bombay was, until its demolition in 1874, regarded as a literary shrine. A picture of it formed in 1831 a scene in Burford's famous panorama in London (cf. Mirror of Literature, 1831, xviii. 17, with view of house and an apocryphal account of the later life of Sterne's Eliza).
The fine portrait of Sterne (two-thirds length) by Sir Joshua Reynolds belongs to the Marquis of Lansdowne. The expression is slyly humorous, but far less roguish than it appears in the numerous engravings that have been made from it. Sterne wears a clerical gown. A second portrait (half length), painted by Gainsborough at Bath in a single sitting in April 1765, formerly belonged to Thomas Turton, bishop of Ely (Fulcher, Life of Gainsborough, p. 223). It is now at the Peel Park Museum, Salford, to which it was presented by Mr. Thomas Agnew. The expression of countenance is far less distinctive than in Reynolds's portrait. Sterne holds an open illustrated volume in his right hand. It is not known to have been engraved. A watercolour drawing (full length) by Carmontelle is in the Duc d'Aumale's collection at Chantilly. A few copies were reproduced by Messrs. Colnaghi in 1890. Of the rough oil-painting in which Sterne was introduced by his friend Bridges as a mountebank, the original is lost; an engraving appears in Dibdin's ‘Bibliographical Tour,’ 1838 (i. 213). The bust by Nollekens, executed on Sterne's visit to Rome in 1766, passed to the Yarborough collection. A marble replica is at Skelton Castle in the possession of J. T. Wharton, esq. The bust is reckoned one of Nollekens's finest performances, and it is figured in Dance's portrait of the sculptor.
Sterne's reasoning faculty was incapable of controlling his constitutional sensitiveness to pain and pleasure. His deficiency in self-control induced a condition of moral apathy, and was the cause alike of the indecency and of the sentimentality which abound in ‘Tristram Shandy’ and the ‘Sentimental Journey.’ Both the indecency and the sentimentality faithfully and without artifice reflected Sterne's emotional nature. The indelicate innuendoes which he foists on sedate words and situations, and the tears that he represented himself as shedding over dead asses and caged starlings, had an equally spontaneous origin in what was in him the normal state of his nerves.
In itself—with the slightest possible reference to the exciting object—his sensibility evoked a pleasurable nervous excitement, and the fulness of the gratification that it generated in his own being discouraged him from seeking to translate its suggestions into act. The divorce of sensibility from practical benevolence will always justify charges of insincerity. All that can be pleaded in extenuation in Sterne's case is that he made no secret that his conduct was the sport of his emotional impulses, and, obeying no other promptings, was guided by no active moral sentiment. Gravity, he warned his readers, was foreign to his nature. Morality, which ordinarily checks the free play of feeling and passion by the exercise of virtuous reason, lay, he admitted, outside his sphere. Such infirmities signally unfitted him for the vocation of a teacher of religion, but his confessions remove hypocrisy from the list of his offences. His declared temperament renders it matter for surprise not that he so often disfigured his career as
