PORTRAIT OF STERNE.
(To the Editor.)
As many of the pages of your extensively-circulated little work have preserved memorials of Laurence Sterne, I hope you can spare room for the underwritten extract, from a letter of his to Mr. Garrick, dated Paris, March, 1762, and which may be seen in Vol I. of Mrs. Medalle's "Letters of the late L. Sterne."
My object in thus troubling you is, in the hope (perhaps you will say an almost forlorn, or distant one) that possibly some one of your readers, either here or abroad, maybe able to suggest where it is likely the under-mentioned whole-length portrait may now be of that once very distinguished man.
A CONSTANT READER.
"I shandy it away fifty times more than I was ever wont, talk more nonsense than ever you heard me talk in your days—and to all sorts of people. Qui le diable est cet homme là ... said Choiseul, t'other day. You'll think me as vain as a devil, was I to tell you the rest of the dialogue.... The Duke of Orleans has suffered my portrait to be added to the number of some odd men in his collection; and a gentleman who lives with him has taken it most expressively, at full length. I purpose to obtain an etching of it, and to send it to you."