A Sentimental Journey opens with Yorick's voyage across the English Channel to Calais, France. After he arrives, Yorick toasts the King of France and reflects on his new surroundings—England may be at war with France (Sterne sets the novel during the Seven Years' War), but Yorick finds the French quite mild. This sequence is an introduction to Yorick's sentimentality, a tendency towards over-the-top emotion that he demonstrates, throughout the novel, by way of hyperbole. In this passage, he reveals as much—as he turns his inner monologue toward a consideration of human nature:
When man is at peace with man, how much lighter than a feather is the heaviest of metals in his hand! he pulls out his purse, and holding it airily and uncompress’d, looks round him, as if he sought for an object to share it with[.]
As Yorick considers the genial disposition of the French, this hyperbole conveys Yorick's understanding of human behavior at large—worldly, pressing concerns like money feel entirely weightless ("lighter than a feather") when one is at peace with oneself. The observation is hyperbolic because it is overblown to the point of nonsense—a purse will be no lighter no matter how unconcerned its wielder—but nevertheless this passage proves to be indicative of Yorick's general melodramatic and romanticized way of seeing the world.
In Volume 2, Yorick is riding through the countryside when he finds the young "madwoman" Maria weeping under a tree. He leaps out of his carriage to console her, only to find himself overcome with emotion as well. Sterne takes this opportunity to share Yorick's emotional state through both hyperbole and pathos:
I sat down close by her; and Maria let me wipe them away as they fell with my handkerchief.—I then steep’d it in my own—and then in hers—and then in mine—and then I wip’d hers again—and as I did it, I felt such undescribable emotions within me, as I am sure could not be accounted for from any combinations of matter and motion.
The emphasis on the tears and the repetitive motion of wiping them away with the handkerchief—itself a major symbol of Yorick's sentimentality—playfully builds the pathos of the passage, which further descends into emotional hyperbole as Yorick pronounces to himself that no combination "of matter and motion" could possibly explain his depth of feeling.
Such a melodramatic use of pathos rightly feels satirical, and, indeed, the passage is a wonderful example of Yorick's sentimentality running away from him to the extent that he pulls all attention away from the bereaved and genuinely grieving Maria and onto himself. That his handkerchief should appear, which usually happens in A Sentimental Journey when Yorick's emotions get the best of him (to the point of self-indulgence), only confirms as much.
