The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (Penguin Classics)

by Laurence Sterne

  15. pencil: I.e. paintbrush in eighteenth-century usage.

  16. HOBBY-HORSE: Cf. Sterne’s letter of January 1760, defending TS: ‘The ruleing passion et les egarements du cœur [and the wanderings of the heart], are the very things which mark, and distinguish a man’s character;—in which I would as soon leave out a man’s head as his hobby-horse.’ Cf. his comments in sermon 9, on Herod, concerning the way to understand character: ‘distinguish… the principal and ruling passion which leads the character—and separate that, from the other parts of it… [W]e often think ourselves inconsistent creatures, when we are the furthest from it, and all the variety of shapes and contradictory appearances we put on, are in truth but so many different attempts to gratify the same governing appetite.’

  The classic eighteenth-century statement on the ruling passion is Pope’s in his Essay on Man, II. Whether Sterne’s hobby-horse and Pope’s ruling passion are the same remains, however, an open question.

  CHAPTER XXIV

  1. reality of motion: Thomas Stanley, The History of Philosophy, 4th edn. (1743), offers a version of this well-known rebuttal in his chapter on scepticism: ‘one of the Cynicks, an Argument being propounded to him to take away Motion, made no Answer, but rose up and walk’d, shewing by Action and Evidence, that there is Motion’. The argument originated with Zeno of Elea (c. 490– c. 430 bc), and the rebuttal is usually assigned to Diogenes of Sinope (c. 400–c.325 bc); Sterne’s suggestion that they are both in the same room is poetic licence.

  CHAPTER XXV

  1. oss pubis… oss illeum: Cf. Chambers, s.v. Coxæ, coxendicis: ‘In infants, each of these [hipbones] consists of three distinct bones, separated by cartilages; which, in adults, grow up, and constitute one firm, solid bone; whose parts, however, retain three distinct names… viz. the os ilium,… [the] os coxendicis, and the os pubis.’ Chambers’s anatomical chart makes clear that the wound site is as close as possible to the groin without a direct hit.

  2. The history… wound: Spectator 105 describes a military pedant who always talks about ‘storming Towns, making Lodgments, and fighting Battels’, and 371 alludes to one of those ‘dull Generation of Story-tellers’ who spends an entire day discussing the siege of Namur. This comic aspect of uncle Toby would seem to have been familiar ground to an eighteenth-century audience.

  VOLUME II

  CHAPTER I

  1. siege of Namur: The siege of Namur is described at length in Sterne’s probable source for much of his historical information, Paul Rapin de Thoyras, The History of England, trans. and continued by N. Tindal; Sterne’s extensive use of this work was first noted by Theodore Baird, ‘The Time-Scheme of Tristram Shandy and a Source’, PMLA 51 (1936).

  A sample of Tindal’s account will demonstrate Sterne’s use of his source:

  The English and Scots commanded by Major-general Ramsey and Brigadier Hamilton came out of the trenches to the right, and attacked the point of the foremost counterscarp, which inclosed the sluice or water-stop. The enemy received them with a furious discharge, which however did not hinder them from going on briskly… [T]he English [were] exposed to the shot of the counter-guard and demi-bastion of St. Roche, which they sustained and answered with incredible resolution… The Dutch lodged themselves upon the counter-guard; and thus both they and the English preserved the foremost covered-way before St. Nicholas’s gate from the Maese to the water-stop… [T]he French officers behaved themselves like men of true courage, exposing themselves on the glacis of the counterscarp… with their swords in their hands…

  Tindal includes a map of Namur, as does the Florida Notes. Although detailed newspaper reports of the battles of the Seven Years War (1757–63) provided Sterne with a contemporary audience more familiar with this jargon than modern readers, we still must suspect he was more interested in baffling and bemusing readers than allowing Toby’s delineations to enlighten them.

  King William’s wars began with his accession in November 1688 and ended with the Peace of Ryswick in 1697. Between 1689 and 1691 the arena was primarily Ireland, where William successfully defeated the Jacobite threat; the decisive Battle of the Boyne in July 1690 prepared the way for the fall of Limerick in 1691, a campaign in which Toby and Trim participated. William then turned to the continent, where France had taken the offensive in Flanders and captured Namur in 1692. William’s recapture of the citadel in 1695 was England’s major success in the war and also its turning-point.

  2. Hippocrates: Hippocrates (469–399 BC), the most famous of Greek physicians.

  3. Dr. James Mackenzie: James Mackenzie (c. 1680–1761), Scottish physician and author of History of Health, and the Art of Preserving It (1758), is quoted extensively by Sterne in V.xxxiv. Sterne may have had in mind Mackenzie’s advice that whoever wants good health ‘must previously learn to conquer his passions’, because ‘unhappy passions, if indulged to excess, will prevail over all his regularity, and prevent the good effects of his temperance…’

  4. digestion: Sterne puns on digestion’s now obsolete meaning, ‘the process of maturing an ulcer or wound’.

  CHAPTER II

  1. Locke’s Essay… Understanding: In the ensuing discussion, Sterne paraphrases the Essay, II.29.3:

  The cause of Obscurity in simple Ideas, seems to be either dull Organs; or very slight and transient Impressions made by the Objects; or else a weakness in the Memory, not able to retain them as received… If the Organs, or Faculties of Perception, like Wax over-hardned with Cold, will not receive the Impression of the Seal, from the usual impulse wont to imprint it; or, like Wax of a temper too soft, will not hold it well, when well imprinted; or else supposing the Wax of a temper fit, but the Seal not applied with a sufficient force, to make a clear Impression: In any of these cases, the print left by the Seal, will be obscure.

  2. Malbranch: Sterne’s invocation of Nicolas Malebranche (1638–1715) perhaps alludes to his De la recherche de la vérité (1674–5), translated by T. Taylor in 1694 as Father Malebranche’s treatiseconcerning the search after truth.

  3. brass-jack: Not recorded in OED, but probably a reference to a counterfeit coin.

  4. Arthur’s: Well-known London club.

  5. ’yclept: I.e. called, named; Sterne’s use of archaisms (see above, ‘eke [i.e. also] the thimble’) is worth noting.

  6. Gentle critick… space: Sterne continues to borrow from Locke’s Essay: ‘When it is considered, what a pudder is made about Essences, and how much all sorts of Knowledge, Discourse, and Conversation, are pester’d and disorder’d by the careless, and confused Use and Application of Words, it will, perhaps, be thought worth while th[o]roughly to lay [the subject] open’ (III.5.16; see also III.3.9 and III.10.2). Sterne’s Greek may be translated interchangeably as ‘essence’ or ‘substance’, a distinction much debated among scholastic metaphysicians.

  CHAPTER III

  1. feet of the elephant: W. E. Buckley, N&Q 6th ser. 5 (1882), suggests that the title of Toby’s map was adorned with a cartouche, ‘among the ornaments of which an elephant was introduced’, a common decoration in the eighteenth century.

  2. Gobesius’s: Perhaps, as suggested by C. Deedes, N&Q 10th ser. 5 (1906), an allusion to Leonhard Gorecius (fl. c. 1577), author of Descriptio Belli Ivoniæ (Account of the War in Spain); or Sterne may have invented the name, since the other ‘experts’ mentioned are found in Chambers. Pyroballogy is the ‘study of the art of casting fire’, i.e. of artillery.

  3. Maes… Salsines: Cf. Tindal: ‘the Elector of Bavaria… passed [the Sambre] amidst the enemy’s continual fire, and possessed himself of the abbey of Salsines, a post of great importance, and which favoured the attack of Vauban’s line…’ For Vauban, see n. 6 to this chapter.

  4. assimulation: Cf. pp. 134 and 547 for similar misspelling; Sterne may have found the error useful, embodying ‘assimilation’ and ‘stimulation’ in one word.

  5. incumbition: OED cites this passage as its sole illustration of figurative use: ‘the action of lying or pressing upon’.
/>
  6. Ramelli… Blondel: Toby’s list of military authorities is culled from Chambers, s.v. Fortification, as first noted by Sir Edward Bensly, ‘A Debt of Sterne’s’, TLS (1 November 1928). Sterne’s entire knowledge of fortification could have come from Chambers, Tindal and the daily gazettes; there is no reason to believe, based on the discussions in TS, that he read the experts he mentions – which is, of course, his joke.

  Baron Menno van Coehoorn (1641–1704), Dutch engineer, and Sébastien le Prestre de Vauban (1633–1707), Marshal of France and the most celebrated of military engineers, were the designers of the fortifications of Namur.

  7. invaded his library: See Don Quixote, I.I.6: ‘There they found above a hundred large Volumes neatly bound, and a good Number of small ones…’

  8. the third year: Sterne’s chronology is confused. Since Toby was wounded in late July 1695, August 1699 would be the beginning of the fifth year, unless it took Toby two years to reach London from Namur.

  9. N. Tartaglia: Again a borrowing from Chambers, this time from entries under Projectile and Gunnery: e.g. ‘N. Tartaglia was the first who perceived the mistake, and maintained the path of the bullet to be a crooked line…’; and again, ‘there are certain rules, founded on geometry, for all these things: most of which we owe to Gallileo… and his disciple Torricellius’.

  10. latus rectum: Straight line; Sterne found the term in Chambers.

  11. mases: I.e. mazes. For an excellent study of mazes and labyrinths in TS, see Soud in Further Reading.

  12. fly… serpent: Ecclesiasticus 21:2: ‘Flee from sin as from the face of a serpent…’

  13. Is it fit… age: Sterne borrows this passage from his ‘Rabelaisian Fragment’, two chapters of an abortive effort to write a parodic ‘Art of Sermon-writing’ similar to Pope’s Peri Bathous; see New, ‘Sterne’s Rabelaisian Fragment: A Text from the Holograph Manuscript’, PMLA 87 (1972). Radical moisture is a medieval medical term for that which nourishes and preserves the vital flame of life.

  CHAPTER IV

  1. I Would… groat: Proverbial; the groat was not coined after 1662, but remained a term for a very small sum.

  2. cum grano salis: With a grain of salt.

  3. clean shirt: A daily clean shirt was the century’s sign of respectability.

  4. Monsieur Ronjat: Etienne Ronjat, first surgeon to William III.

  CHAPTER V

  1. WHEN a man… discretion: Cf. Swift, A Tale of a Tub, sect. IX: ‘But when a Man’s Fancy gets astride on his Reason, when Imagination is at Cuffs with the Senses, and common Understanding, as well as common Sense, is Kickt out of Doors; the first Proselyte he makes, is Himself…’ (ed. A. C. Guthkelch and D. Nichol Smith, 2nd edn. (Clarendon Press, 1958)).

  2. incarnate: To cause flesh to grow on or in (a wound or sore); to heal over.

  3. The sound… mind: Sterne touches on Lockean concepts ofduration and the succession of ideas, discussed more fully in III.xviii.

  4. ’Change: The Royal Exchange, London’s trading centre, built in 1669.

  5. demigration: Migration.

  6. James Butler: Second Duke of Ormonde (1665–1745). He replaced Marlborough as General of the Army in 1712 and pursued the orders of Anne and Bolingbroke in implementing the Treaty of Utrecht, for which he was impeached when the Whigs returned to power in 1715. Like Trim, he was wounded at Landen in 1693 and took part in the battle of Namur.

  7. broke no squares: Proverbial for ‘made no difference’; its origin is military, i.e. breaking ranks.

  8. ichnography: In Sterne’s Political Romance one character offers a solution to the ‘allegory’ based on the ‘Ichnography and Plan’ of Gibraltar, but another character protests that he does not understand the word; it evidently struck Sterne as a difficult – or humorous – word.

  9. sit down before: Trim puns on the military usage of sit, meaning ‘to encamp before a town, etc., in order to besiege it; to begin to a siege’ (OED).

  10. mark me the polygon: John Muller, A Treatise… of Fortification (1746), makes the point that the first step in planning a fortification is to ‘inscribe in a circle a polygon of as many sides as the fortification is designed to have fronts’.

  11. campaign: Tract of open country, a plain.

  12. something like atansy: OED cites this passage asits last illustration of the phrase: ‘properly, fittingly, perfectly’. Tansy is the name of a plant and, by extension, of a pudding or omelette flavoured with its juice.

  13. red as scarlet: This comparison occurs in the Commination service in the Book of Common Prayer: ‘For tho’ our sins be as red as scarlet, they shall be made white as snow.’

  14. bowling-green: In a possible precursor to TS, the anonymous Life and Memoirs of Mr. Ephraim Tristram Bates (1756), the hero practises the use of his firelock on a ‘Bowling-green… so surrounded with a Hedge-row that no one suspected any People there at that Time’. When he dies, people pass his grave and cry ‘Alas! poor Bates’. The argument of an influence is made by Helen Sard Hughes in JEGP 17 (1918).

  15. retina: OED cites this passage as its first illustration of figurative usage.

  16. epitasis: Traditional second part of a drama in which the plot or action is complicated.

  CHAPTER VI

  1. Susannah… ravish her: Probably an allusion to the apocryphal story of Susanna, who bathes in her garden while two elders spy on her and later attempt her virtue.

  2. pudding’s end: Sterne has something more bawdy in mind than the knotted end of a sausage, i.e. a trifle; the trumpeter’s wife in ‘Slawkenbergius’s Tale’ calls Diego’s nose a ‘pudding’s end’.

  3. My sister… her * * * *: A very real problem for man-midwives, as suggested by the contemporary pamphlet Man-Midwifery Analysed (1764): ‘I desire every woman… to consider whether she be strictly entitled to the appellation of… a modest woman, after she has admitted a male operator thus to insult her person.’

  4. Aposiopesis: The sudden breaking-off in mid-course. Sterne was especially interested in this rhetorical figure and concludes ASJ with one of the most famous examples in literature:

  So that when I stretch’d out my hand, I caught hold of the Fille de Chambre’s end of vol. ii.

  END OF VOL. II

  5. Poco piu… Poco meno: The little more and the little less. Brissenden, ‘Sterne and Painting’, traces Sterne’s discussion to Hogarth’s The Analysis of Beauty (1753), where Hogarth alludes to ‘what the Italians call, Il poco piu (the little more that is expected from the hand of a master)’. ‘The precise line of beauty’ also alludes to Hogarth, his argument that all beauty can be associated with the sinuous curvatures (the serpentine line) represented by a wire twisted round a cone.

  Sterne’s inclusion of poco meno, a term not used in art criticism, indicates familiarity with the origin of both terms in musical notation.

  6. et cætera: Here as elsewhere, an allusion to sexual parts, usually female.

  CHAPTER VII

  1. natural philosopher: A term denotatively equivalent to scientist or physicist today, but its connotation, in unsympathetic hands, might have suggested a dabbler or amateur.

  2. demolition of Dunkirk: In 1713. It is described at length in VI.xxxiv; the shock Toby receives is described in IX.xxxi.

  3. Aristotle’s Master-Piece: Not in Aristotle’s Master-Piece, but in another pseudo-Aristotle, often bound with it, Aristotle’s Book of Problems. These popular works served the eighteenth century as sex manual, midwife’s guide, book of remedies and compendium of folk-science, and were reprinted well into the nineteenth century.

  4. Analogy: Cf. Chambers: ‘a certain relation, proportion, or agreement, which several things, in other respects different, bear to each other’.

  CHAPTER VIII

  1. IT is… bell: Only Chapters vi and vii have occurred since the ringing of the bell. Toby was interrupted mid-sentence in I.xxi, and is allowed to conclude his thought with the suggestion to ring the bell only at the beginning of II.vi; this is the ‘hour a
nd a half ’ of reading to which Sterne alludes.

  2. unity… of time: Watt’s note (79, n. 1) is useful: ‘One of the three neo-classical dramatic unities, the unity of time required that the events in a play take no longer than they would in real life. Aristotle, in the Poetics, stated that the events in a plot should be probable; this may account for Sterne’s reference to probability.’

  3. duration… ideas: Sterne again anticipates his discussion of duration in III.xviii. The issue is treated in Locke’s Essay in a chapter entitled ‘Of Duration, and its simple Modes’ (II.14).

  4. between the acts: By 1720 the practice of a full evening of entertainment, with entr’acte performances, was well established on the London stage.

  CHAPTER IX

  1. IMagine… height: See n. 2 to I.xviii. As Cash notes, the real John Burton appears to have been ‘a tall Well sett’ person, and not a Roman Catholic (EMY, 180); Sterne’s portrait is imaginary in its most salient details. Cf. the opening paragraph of The Adventures of Gil Blas, trans. Tobias Smollett: ‘Figure to yourself a little fellow, three feet and a half high, as fat as you can conceive, with a head sunk deep between his shoulders, and you have my uncle to the life.’

  2. sesquipedality: Literally, foot-and-a-half long, usually applied to long words, here, obviously, to Slop’s equal girth and height.

  3. three strokes: Cf. Hogarth, Analysis of Beauty: ‘The general idea of an action, as well as of an attitude, may be given with a pencil in very few lines… [T]wo or three lines at first are sufficient to shew the intention of an attitude…’ Work (104, n. 3) finds this passage a ‘graceful compliment’ to Hogarth, but William V. Holtz, Image and Immortality (Brown University Press, 1970), sees Sterne primarily critical of Analysis.