The first two volumes of Tristram Shandy were issued at York in 1759 and advertised in London on the 1st of January 1760, and at once made a sensation. York was scandalized at its clergyman's indecency, and indignant at his caricature as "Slop" of a local physician (Dr John Burton); London was charmed with his audacity, wit and graphic unconventional power. He went to London early in the year to enjoy his triumph, and found himself at once a personage in society, was called upon and invited out by lion-hunters, was taken to Windsor by Lord Rockingham, and had the honour of supping with the Duke of York.

For the last eight years of his life after this sudden leap out of obscurity we have a faithful record of Sterne's feelings and movements in letters to various persons, published in 1775 by his sole child and daughter, Lydia Sterne de Medalle, and in the Letters from Yorick to Eliza (1766-1767), also published in 1775.

At the end of the sermon in Tristram he had intimated that, if this sample of Yorick's pulpit eloquence was liked, "there are now in the possession of the Shandy family as many as will make a handsome volume, at the world's service, and much good may they do it." Accordingly, when a second edition of the first instalment of Tristram was called for in three months, two volumes of Sermons by Yorick were announced. Although they had little or none of the eccentricity of the history, they proved almost as popular. Sterne's clerical character was far from being universally injured by his indecorous freaks as a humorist: Lord Fauconberg presented the author of Tristram Shandy with the perpetual curacy of Coxwold. To this new residence he went in high spirits with his success, "fully determined to write as hard as could be," seeing no reason why he should not give the public two volumes of Shandyism every year and why this should not go on for forty years.

By the beginning of August 1760 he had another volume written, and was so "delighted with Uncle Toby's imaginary character that he was become an enthusiast." The author's delight in this wonderful creation was not misleading; it has been fully shared by every generation of readers since. For two years in succession Sterne kept his bargain with himself to provide two volumes a year. Vols. iii. and iv. appeared in 1761; vols. v. and vi. in January 1762. But his sanguine hopes of continuing at this rate were frustrated by ill- health. He was ordered to the south of France; it was two years and a half before he returned; and he came back with very little accession of strength. His reception by literary circles in France was very flattering. He was overjoyed with it. "'Tis comme a Londres," he wrote to Garrick from Paris; "I have just now a fortnight's dinners and suppers upon my hands."

Through all his pleasant experiences of French society, and through the fits of dangerous illness by which they were diversified, he continued to build up his history of the Shandy family, but the work did not progress as rapidly as it had done. Not till January 1765 was he ready with the fourth instalment of two volumes; and one of them, vol. vii., leaving the Shandy family for a time, gave a lively sketch of the writer's own travels to the south of France in search of health. This was a digression of a new kind, if anything can be called a digression in a work the plan of which is to fly off at a tangent whenever and wherever the writer's whim tempts him. In the first volume, anticipating an obvious complaint, he had protested against digressions that left the main work to stand still, and had boasted, not without justice in a Shandean sense, that he had reconciled digressive motion with progressive.