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

by Laurence Sterne

  13. By the splendour of God: Cf. Tindal: ‘[William] was so provoked… he swore by the Splendor of God, his usual Oath…’

  CHAPTER XIII

  1. julap: I.e. julep, a medicinal drink, usually the base for other medicines.

  2. reduction… year Ten: Not in 1710, but in December 1708; Sterne dates it correctly in VI.xxiii. A mutiny over bread took place at Ghent in 1712.

  CHAPTER XIV

  1. in petto: In the breast; in secret.

  2. Tully’s second Philippick: The longest of the fourteen diatribes Cicero delivered against Mark Antony. The most memorable use of the cloak, however, was Mark Antony’s, when he produces Caesar’s ‘pink’d’ mantle and will from under his (see Julius Caesar, III.ii.169ff.).

  3. by head and shoulders: Proverbial; here and elsewhere, the humorous literalism of many of Sterne’s proverbial expressions is noteworthy.

  4. trunk-hose: Loose-fitting breeches of the previous century, sometimes stuffed with wool, as opposed to the tighter breeches of the eighteenth century, which could not be stuffed.

  CHAPTER XVII

  1. difficult to know: Cf. Burton, Letter to Smellie: ‘how is it possible that you can tell the Head of the Child from its Breech or Knees… It is an Observation of the best Operators, that… the Knees greatly resemble the Head, and are not easily distinguishable from it…’

  CHAPTER XVIII

  1. pantoufles: Slippers.

  2. duration and its simple modes: Ch. 14 of Book II of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding is entitled ‘Of Duration, and its simple Modes’. This passage is Sterne’s most extensive borrowing from Locke.

  3. rapid succession: Locke never quite ties the length of duration to the speed of the succession of ideas, but the notion had become a commonplace; see Essay, II.14.3–4.

  4. the ideas… us: The ideas that do not concern Toby are precisely those of most interest to Locke.

  5. INFINITY… NECESSITY: While all these topics are discussed by Locke, Chambers, s.v. Prescience, directs the reader to ‘liberty’ and ‘necessity’. One must always suspect Sterne in instances of this kind.

  6. To understand… preconceived: Cf. Essay, II.14.3, quoted almost verbatim. Sterne invents the phrase ‘and so according to that preconceived’ to create a sense of interruption; he had actually completed Locke’s passage with ‘our thinking’.

  7. ’Tis owing… all: Cf. Locke, II.14.19. The parenthetical comment may glance at a phenomenon reported in The Clockmakers Outcry, one of many imitations of TS to appear in 1760, namely, that the enquiry ‘Sir, will you have your clock wound-up?’ had become popular among street walkers; hence Walter’s (or Sterne’s) comment. Or perhaps Walter is simply lamenting the association established in I.i.

  8. regular… candle: Cf. Essay, II.14.9: ‘[is it] not probable that our Ideas do, whilst we are awake, succeed one another in our Minds at certain distances, not much unlike the Images in the inside of a Lanthorn, turned round by the Heat of a Candle’.

  9. smoak-jack: OED credits Sterne with a new, figurative meaning for this word, ‘The head, as the seat of confused ideas.’ The jack was used to turn a roasting-spit by means of the hot air rising from the fire.

  CHAPTER XIX

  1. Lucian… Cervantes: Cf. Fielding, Tom Jones, XIII.1: ‘Come thou, that hast inspired thy Aristophanes, thy Lucian, thy Cervantes, thy Rabelais…’ These are the writers one would traditionally summon as Muses for a work of comedy or satire. Lucian of Samosata (c. 120–after 180), the model for much subsequent prose satire, especially the dialogue and the fantastic voyage.

  2. devoutly… for: Cf. Hamlet, III.i.62–3.

  3. Ontologic: Ontology is the study of Being and abstractions.

  CHAPTER XX

  1. siege of Messina: Messina in Sicily, held by Spain, was besieged in July 1719 and taken in October. That Toby and Trim have this information eight months before it happens may be a simple error, a play with the malleability of time, or – as suggested in Ch. xxv – a bit of military acumen, although that discussion ends with Walter convincing Toby that the campaign would not be in Sicily.

  2. Agelastes: One who never laughs; a name in Rabelais.

  3. Triptolemus: Greek hero and demigod, taught the arts of agriculture by Ceres; Plato and Tully name him as a judge of the dead. Why Sterne includes him among these invented names is not known.

  4. Phutatorius: Copulator; he will receive the hot chestnut in his lap at the Visitation dinner, IV.xxvii.

  5. wit and judgment: Sterne’s refusal to separate the two is reminiscent of Pope’s similar refusal in his Essay on Criticism, lines 82–3: ‘For Wit and Judgment often are at strife, / Tho’ meant each other’s Aid, like Man and Wife.’ The opposite view was embraced by both Hobbes and Locke; see Leviathan, ch. 8, and Essay, II.11.2 and III.10.34. In so far as Sterne’s critics were accusing him of having too much wit, too little judgement, the ‘Author’s Preface’ is a retort to them, rather than a serious engagement with Locke.

  6. de fartandi… fallaciis: Literally, ‘concerning the deceptions of farting and illustration’. Didius: see n. 3 to I.vii.

  7. opacular: OED cites this passage as its sole illustration; Sterne seems to mean ‘opaque’.

  8. thrice able critics: Comic mode of address borrowed from Rabelais.

  9. Monopolos… Somnolentius: Sterne’s inventions: a monopolist, lick-spittle (less politely, ass-kisser), big-belly and sleeper. The last three reappear at the Visitation dinner.

  10. several receptacles… out: Cf. Rabelais, III.31: ‘the more promptly, dexterously, and copiously to suppeditate, furnish, and supply him with store of spirits, sufficient to replenish, and fill up the ventricles, seats, tunnels, mansions, receptacles, and celluls of the common sense…’ Here, and in what follows, Sterne has in view Rabelais’s description of the glorious world that will ensue when all men are lenders (see III.3–4).

  11. satire and sarcasm: In sermon 18, ‘The Levite and his concubine’, Sterne offers some strictures on men of ‘wit and parts’ who make ‘shrewd and sarcastick reflections upon whatever is done in the world… [I]t has helped to give wit a bad name, as if the main essence of it was satire: certainly there is a difference between Bitterness and Saltness,—that is,——between the malignity and the festivity of wit, ——the one is a mere quickness of apprehension, void of humanity,— and is a talent of the devil; the other comes down from the Father of Spirits, so pure and abstracted from persons, that willingly it hurts no man…’

  12. milk and honey: Scriptural commonplace.

  13. compass of his cave: Thomas Salmon, Modern History, 3rd edn. (1744), points out that winters in the north are nine months long and that in Nova Zembla (Arctic islands off the coast of eastern Russia), the inhabitants must ‘escape to some cave and shelter themselves’ if they are to survive them.

  14. where the spirits… itself: Another glance at the theory that climate and national character are linked; see I.xxi.

  15. Angels… defend us: Hamlet, I.iv.39; ‘plentiful a lack of wit’ is also from Hamlet, II.ii.199.

  16. run a match: A horse-race.

  17. Norway… Tartary: Sterne almost certainly traced this voyage on a map. From Russia’s Novaya Zemlya islands (Nova Zembla), between the Kara and Barents Seas, he moves south-west across the northernmost regions of Scandinavia and Finland (North Lapland); reaching Norway, he turns nearly 180 degrees and moves east, crossing Sweden through the northern district of Angermania to the Gulf of Bothnia, between Sweden and Finland, and then enters Russia just north of the Gulf of Finland, at the easternmost point of which is St Petersburg. Carelia is the area north of St Petersburg, Ingria the area south. Sterne then continues eastward in Russia.

  18. luxuriant island: An earlier statement of these commonplaces – that climate and national character are interrelated, and that England’s changeable weather produces eccentric characters – is found in William Temple’s essay ‘Of Poetry’, quoted at length in the Florida Notes.

  19.
height… necessities: Cf. Swift, A Tale of a Tub, sect. IX: ‘For, what Man in the natural State, or Course of Thinking, did ever conceive it in his Power, to reduce the Notions of all Mankind, exactly to the same Length, and Breadth, and Height of his own?’ The sufficiency of our faculties to our needs is discussed by Locke, Essay, II.23.12, a section Pope paraphrases in his Essay on Man, I.193–206. See also Locke, IV.14.2.

  20. dialectick induction: Cf. Chambers, s.v. Induction: ‘Suidas reckons three kinds of induction; that… which concludes or gathers some general proposition from an enumeration of all the particulars of a kind, he calls the dialectic induction.’ We now know Suidas is the name of a Greek lexicon rather than its author.

  21. reverences and worships: Sterne’s common mode of address to embrace clergy and nobility.

  22. How d’ye: Earlier in the century servants called on their master’s or mistress’s acquaintances to ask, with their compliments, ‘How do ye?’ – equivalent to leaving a card.

  23. I tremble… kennels: Cf. Swift, A Tale of a Tub, sect. XI: ‘HE would shut his Eyes as he walked along the Streets, and if he happened to bounce his Head against a Post, or fall into the Kennel (as he seldom missed either to do one or both)…’ The serious side of both passages is suggested by scriptural echoes (Isaiah 59:9–10, Job 5:14, Luke 6:39, John 3:19–20) amidst the comedy. Stinks: sinks ? Kennels = gutters.

  24. full butt: Point-blank meeting, violent collision.

  25. like hogs: Cf. Pope, Dunciad (B), IV.525: ‘The vulgar herd turn off to roll with Hogs.’

  26. In this… one: A typical witticism at the expense of doctors, found in Swift, Pope and Fielding, but perhaps most succinctly in Sancho Pança’s proverb, ‘A Doctor gives his Advice by the Pulse of your Pocket.’ Aesculapius was for both Greeks and Romans the god of medicine.

  27. coalition of the gown: I.e. the legal profession; hence the ‘spacious HALL’ = Westminster Hall.

  28. John o’Nokes… Tom o’Stiles: Fictitious names for parties in a legal action.

  29. centumvirate: Body of one hundred men.

  30. contrist: Make sad: Sterne may have found this rare word in Rabelais; cf. Trist ram.

  31. for what… chair: Copied verbatim from Rabelais, III.16. Sterne adds the ‘cane chair’ from which he creates his argument; mittain = mitten.

  32. to answer one another: As a principle in painting, ‘embellishments’ answering one another were less desirable among connoisseurs than variety. Cf. IV.xxxi, where the water-mill on one side of the river is to be ‘answered’ by a wind-mill on the other.

  33. sow with one ear: Sterne conflates three proverbial expressions: ‘You cannot make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear’; ‘To have the sow by the right [or wrong] ear’; and ‘To take the right [or wrong] sow by the ear.’

  34. good fame or feeding: In his January 1760 letter defending TS, Sterne argues that he ‘wrote not [to] be fed, but to be famous’, inverting Colley Cibber’s ‘I wrote more to be Fed than be Famous’ (A Letter from Mr. Cibber to Mr. Pope (1742)).

  35. thousand vulgar errors: Thomas Browne, in his preface to the best known collection of vulgar (common) errors, Pseudodoxia Epidemica (1646), cites numerous forerunners in the tradition, but perhaps the most famous is Burton’s Anatomy. Locke defines himself in his Essay as ‘employed as an Under-Labourer in clearing Ground a little, and removing some of the Rubbish, that lies in the way to Knowledge…’

  CHAPTER XXI

  1. handy-cuffs: Blows with the hands, i.e. fisticuffs.

  2. Inconsistent… man is: Sterne borrows the observations of this paragraph from John Norris, Practical Discourses upon Several Divine Subjects, Volume Three (1693):

  Do [men] not disquiet themselves about Phantastick and Imaginary Goods… [T]here is no Man but who vainly disquiets himself.

  Poor unhappy Creature that he should do so! Are there not necessary and unavoidable Causes of Trouble sufficient, but he must needs add Voluntary Afflictions to his heap of Misery,… disquiet himself, and that too in Vain, without Reason, and without Measure…

  John Norris of Bemerton (1657–1711), philosopher, poet and cleric, was an important source for Sterne’s sermons; for example, the idea of this passage is repeated in sermon 22 (‘History of Jacob’):

  If there is an evil in this world, ’tis sorrow and heaviness of heart.——The loss of goods,——of health,——of coronets and mitres, are only evil, as they occasion sorrow;——take that out——the rest… dwelleth only in the head of man.

  Poor unfortunate creature that he is! as if the causes of anguish in the heart were not enow——but he must fill up the measure, with those of caprice; and not only walk in a vain shadow,——but disquiet himself in vain too.

  3. pouring in oyl: Cf. the parable of the good Samaritan (Luke 10:33–4).

  CHAPTER XXII

  1. our government… hinges: Almost certainly a reference to the sudden death of George II on 25 October 1760.

  2. jack-boots: Riding boots of the gentry and the military, and a likely allusion to Lord Bute, who was already beginning his rapid rise to power as George III’s most trusted minister; John Bute was easily corrupted into Jack Boot, his iconographic as well as cognomenal representation in political prints and pamphlets.

  3. cut off the entail: Legal expression meaning to put an end to the limitation of an inheritance to a particular line of heirs; one rightly suspects a bawdy play. A perpetuity in law is considered odious because it prevents the circulation of property and wealth; cf. Pope, Imitations of Horace, Ep. II.ii.246–7: ‘The Laws of God, as well as of the Land, / Abhor, a Perpetuity should stand.’

  4. Sir Roger… Marston-Moor: Marston Moor, eight miles west of York, scene of Cromwell’s greatest victory of the Civil War (July 1644). Sterne’s great-grandfather, Dr Richard Sterne (1596–1683), later Archbishop of York, became famous during the war for loyalist activities. Roger Sterne, Laurence’s father, was a soldier.

  CHAPTER XXIII

  1. retrograde planet: Astrological term for a planet that moves (apparently) contrary to the succession of signs and degrees, i.e. east to west; birth under such a planet was deemed unlucky.

  CHAPTER XXIV

  1. Bridget: In addition to the play on bridge, Sterne may have in mind a connection with St Brigid, patroness of Ireland, for whom Bridewell Hospital, the London house of correction for wayward women, was named. ‘Mrs’ was used for both married and unmarried women in the eighteenth century.

  2. tagging of points: Fastening metal ends to laces; i.e. trivial tasks.

  3. opificers: OED: ‘One who makes or constructs a work’; this passage is its last example of a word Johnson says is ‘not received’.

  4. Aristotle… Ricaboni: The question of single versus multiple plots was of great importance to neoclassical critics, all of whom started with Aristotle’s Poetics. Le Bossu (see n. 4 to III.xii) has a chapter in his Treatise entitled ‘Of the Vicious Multiplication of Fables’. Luigi Riccoboni (1676–1753), playwright and theatrical historian, comments on the subject in his work. Why Sterne also cites the Roman tragedian Marcus Pacuvius (220– c. 130 BC) is unclear.

  5. vis a vis: Light carriage for two persons sitting face to face (correctly: vis à vis). Madame de Pompadour (1721–64), mistress of Louis XV.

  6. trumpet of Fame: See n. 8 to I.xxiii.

  7. soss: OED cites this passage as its sole illustration of usage as an adverb: ‘with a heavy fall or dull thud’. Now considered dialect.

  8. break his leg: Eric Partridge, A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, 7th edn. (Macmillan, 1970), records the colloquial meaning, ‘give birth to a bastard’.

  9. BATTERING-RAMS: Most of this information is found in Chambers, but differences in wording suggest Sterne had another source. The scorpion was used to launch arrows, the catapulta, javelins, the ballista, stones, and the pyraboli, flaming arrows. Battering rams and the terebra were used to knock down walls; the vinea was a shelter protecting those approaching the wall. Chambers n
otes that Marcellinus (c. 330– c. 395), a Greek historian of Rome, described the ballista and also wrote that the catapulta was the invention of the Syrians. Tyre fell to Alexander the Great in 332 BC

  10. sally port: Opening in a fortification allowing troops to conduct raiding parties (sallies); the term almost certainly had bawdy connotations.

  CHAPTER XXV

  1. cardinal Alberoni’s intrigues: In chronicling the events of 1718–19, culminating in the retaking of Messina (see n. 1 to III.xx), Tindal notes in his margin: ‘Intrigues of Spain’, and below it: ‘Alberoni ’s practices discovered in France.’ Giulio Alberoni (1664–1752), prime minister of Philip V of Spain, involved him in a disastrous war against England, France, Holland and Austria (the Quadruple Alliance). The ‘preengagements’ refer to the Treaty of Utrecht’s guarantee of the neutrality of Italy, violated by Spain.

  2. For… itself: Almost all of Sterne’s details in this paragraph are found in Chambers, s.v. Bridge, including references to the work of Jacques Bernouilli (1654–1705) and Guillaume-François Antoine de l’Hospital (1661–1704), both mathematicians; however, Chambers does not mention the bridges at Spires and Brisac (Breisach). For an insightful essay that ties Sterne’s interests in cycloids and parabolas to his interest in ‘bridging’ gaps in communication, see Burckhardt in Further Reading.