The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (Penguin Classics)
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4. for the salt: The gabelle, tax on salt, one of four primary taxes in eighteenth-century France.
5. WATER… OYL: Sterne plays on the Roman Catholic practice of anointing with oil in the Sacrament of Unction of the Sick, often called Extreme Unction because it became associated with last rites; the Anglican church abandoned the custom in 1552.
CHAPTER XXXV
1. PAR LE ROY: By [order of] the king.
2. fermiers: Tax collectors, i.e. farmers of taxes, notorious in pre-Revolutionary France.
3. THE PEACE WAS MADE: The Peace of Paris in 1763 that ended the Seven Years War.
CHAPTER XXXVI
1. Sancho Pança… bitterly: See Don Quixote, I.III.9, a passage Sterne refers to again in ASJ. Sancho loses the ass along with everything else.
CHAPTER XXXVII
1. chaise-vamper: I.e. chaise-undertaker (see n. 2 to VII.xxix).
2. Louis d’Ors: Gold pieces worth about a guinea.
3. Dodsley, or Becket: Sterne turned from Dodsley to Thomas Becket and P.A. Dehondtin December 1761, and they remained his publishers to the end of his life – publishing Volumes V–IX of TS, Volumes III–IV of the Sermons (1766) and ASJ (1768).
CHAPTER XXXVIII
1. papilliotes: Curl-papers.
2. a la folie: Madly; to excess.
3. J’en suis bien mortifié e: I am simply mortified.
4. Tenez: Here, take them!
CHAPTER XXXIX
1. JESUITS… cholic: I.e. the suppression of the Jesuit order in France, beginning in early 1762.
CHAPTER XLI
1. nothing to see: Sterne ignores, by design, the famous papal residence at Avignon.
2. duke of Ormond: He spent thirty years in exile in Avignon. While other travel writers ignored this landmark, Sterne’s interest in the Treaty of Utrecht, the cause of Ormond’s exile (see n. 6 to II.v and n. 6 to VIII.xix), explains his mention of it.
3. windyness of Avignion: I.e. the mistral, the north-west wind that sweeps down the Rhône valley and is especially felt by the towns at the southern end, Avignon and Orange. Only one proverb was found concerning this: ‘Avignon venteuse, sans vent contagieuse’ (Avignon is windy, but when not windy, contagious).
CHAPTER XLIII
1. Baucaira and Tarascone: Towns on the Rhône, just south of Avignon. Sterne mentions the famous fair at Beaucaire in a letter from Toulouse, 14 August 1762.
2. plain into a city: One of Sterne’s most persistent ideas, receiving a fine restatement in ASJ: ‘—What a large volume of adventures may be grasped within this little span of life by him who interests his heart in every thing, and who, having eyes to see, what time and chance are perpetually holding out to him as he journeyeth on his way, misses nothing he can fairly lay his hands on.’
3. the best Muscatto: I.e. muscatel.
4. carousal: Fit of carousing. The word was often confused with carousel, a ‘tournament in which knights, divided into companies… engaged in various plays and exercises’. Sterne may combine both meanings.
5. running… pleasure: Chivalric exercise in which a rider attempts to pass his lance through a suspended ring, but here, as in Rabelais, also a sexual image; Sterne uses it again in ASJ.
6. saint Boogar: Play on ‘bugger’ (cf. bouger in VII.xxv), elaborated by ‘pricks’, ‘ring of pleasure’ and ‘backside of the door of purgatory’; typical of TS, this outrageous bawdiness and Nannette’s cursed slit in her petticoat (a term either borrowed from Samuel Butler, The Genuine Remains (1759), or available to both Butler and Sterne as a phrase of recognizably bawdy intent) are intertwined with one of the most pastoral and innocent scenes in all of Sterne.
7. Gascoigne roundelay: The rondel is a song in alternate parts, as Sterne indicates, designed to accompany a dance in the round (ronde or rondel ). ‘Long live joy! Fie on sadness’; fidon = fi-donc, which, Work conjectures (538, n. 3), was the Provençal accent as Sterne heard it.
8. Just disposer… sorrows: Cf. ‘The Grace’ in ASJ, where Yorick sees ‘Religion mixing in the dance’ of a peasant family; and sermon 20, ‘The prodigal son’, where Sterne writes: ‘When the affections so kindly break loose, Joy, is another name for Religion… Was it not for this that God gave man musick to strike upon the kindly passions; that nature taught the feet to dance to its movements…’
9. lap of content: Cf. Sterne’s letter dated 16 November 1764: ‘I shall spend every winter of my life, in the same lap of contentment, where I enjoy myself now—and wherever I go—we must bring three parts in four of the treat along with us—In short we must be happy within— and then few things without us make much difference—This is my Shandean philosophy.—You will read a comic account of my journey from Calais thro’ Paris to the Garonne, in these volumes…’
10. nut brown maid: Phrase previously made commonplace by the popular old ballad, ‘The Nut-Brown Maid’.
11. insiduous: OED considers this an erroneous spelling of insidious ; it occurs in one of Sterne’s earliest letters as well, where ‘insidious’ is clearly the meaning.
12. Perdrillo’s pavillion: Almost certainly Sterne’s erroneous recall of ‘Pringello’, the name assigned to Hall-Stevenson’s architect; see n. 2 to VII.xxviii. The place-names trace a 200-mile journey from Nîmes to Toulouse, similar to one Sterne and his family took in July 1762; they settled in Toulouse for a year (see Cash, LY, ch. 4).
VOLUME VIII
CHAPTER I
1. cabbage planter: See n. 4 to VI.xl.
2. Freeze-land, Fog-land: Nonce words.
CHAPTER II
1. the devil… imps: Proverbial: ‘No marvel it is if the imps follow when the devil goes before.’
2. Pope and his Portrait*: An allusion, perhaps, to one of the several allegorical engravings of Alexander Pope (1688–1744), receiving inspiration from the muses, that appeared in the collected works edited by Warburton; or to a passage in Julien Offray de La Mettrie’s L’homme machine (1747), translated as Man a Machine: ‘Let us view the picture of the famous Mr. Pope… The efforts and nerves of his genius are strongly represented in his physiognomy; it seems to be all in a sort of convulsion… because the source of the nerves is… in labour, and the whole body… feels the pangs of a painful delivery.’
3. TARTUFFE: See n. 8 to V.i. Sterne includes several catch-words of religious controversy, including ‘faith or fire’, ‘good works’, and ‘Zeal’; cf. a letter he wrote in 1767: ‘This nasty gout!… I wish it was the portion of splenetic philosophers, and Tartuffe’s of all denominations.’
CHAPTER III
1. periclitating: OED cites this passage as its last example of usage as a transitive verb: ‘endangering’. Sterne may have found the word in Rabelais. For ‘pardi’, see n. 6 to VII.xvii.
2. black velvet mask: Since wearing masks in public was a mark of disrepute, great-aunt Dinah’s slip (I.xxi) is being recalled.
3. one archbishop: Sterne’s great-grandfather, Dr Richard Sterne (c. 1596–1683), was Archbishop of York from 1664 until his death. The meaning of ‘Welch judge’ has eluded annotation.
CHAPTER IV
1. IT is… Cuckoldom: Play on the proverbial wisdom that a cuckold (i.e. the husband of an adulterous wife) is the last person to learn of it.
CHAPTER V
1. WHY weavers… them: Cf. Montaigne, ‘Of Cripples’, wherein he contemplates the longstanding notion that, as the marginal note puts it, ‘Lame People best at the Sport of Venus.’ Pined, i.e. wasted.
2. grinding the faces: Cf. Isaiah 3:15: ‘What mean ye that ye… grind the faces of the poor?’
3. Longinus: In On the Sublime, Longinus asserts that ‘the greatest Thoughts are always uttered by the greatest Souls’ and illustrates his point thus: ‘When Parmenio cried, “I would accept these Proposals if I was Alexander,” Alexander made this noble Reply, “And so would I, if I was Parmenio.”’ For Sterne’s interest in Longinus, see n. 3 to IV.x.
CHAPTER VI
1. ten cart-loads… hands: Of the 4,000 copies
printed of Volumes V and VI, some 1,000 remained unsold fifteen months after publication – much to Sterne’s chagrin; see Cash, LY, 149–50.
2. quirister: Chorister, choirboy.
CHAPTER VIII
1. case-knife: Knife with a sheath, a rather obvious sexual analogy.
CHAPTER IX
1. day-shifts: Nonce word, contrasting ‘night-shifts’, i.e. night-shirts.
2. Flemish ells: Variable measure, about 27 inches.
3. corking pin: A pin of the largest size.
CHAPTER X
1. old hat cock’d: See n. 1 to V.viii.
CHAPTER XI
1. Terra del Fuogo: Tierra del Fuego, the archipelago off the southern tip of South America; literally, land of fire. In light of the remainder of the sentence, Sterne’s bawdiness here may also include a play on ‘fugo’, an eighteenth-century colloquialism for the anus.
2. gashly: OED cites this passage to illustrate an obsolete form meaning ‘ghastly, horrid’. More likely, Sterne had in mind an adjectival form of gash.
3. furr’d cap: In a letter to a friend, Sterne joked: ‘When you have got to your fireside… and are so much a sovereign as to sit in your furr’d cap (if you like it, tho’ I should not, for a man’s ideas are at least the cleaner for being dress’d decently)…’
4. finger in the pye: Proverbial, although perhaps not in Sterne’s bawdy usage here. Despite many contemporary attacks on Sterne for his bawdiness, this chapter is blatantly licentious – a signal that he would defy tartuffery to the end.
5. staragen: Tarragon, a seasoning.
6. devil’s dung: Asafoetida, a particularly foul-smelling drug, but also used in cooking.
CHAPTER XIII
1. alphabetically speaking: Cervantes, I.IV.7, has an alphabetical list of the requirements of a good lover that may have inspired Sterne’s. Some of Sterne’s entries are nonce words: ‘Futilitous’, rooted in ‘futile’; ‘Galligaskinish’, derived from ‘galligaskins’, ludicrous term for loose breeches; ‘Handy-dandyish’, probably an allusion to the child’s game in which one guesses the hand that holds an object; and ‘Iracundulous’, meaning ‘inclined to anger; irascible’.
2. Obstipating: Constipating.
CHAPTER XIV
1. wicker gate: Probably a solecism for wicket gate, a small gate opening on to a field or enclosed space for those on foot.
CHAPTER XV
1. set on fire… end: Sterne brings new life to a proverbial expression, ‘to burn or light a candle at both ends’, signifying prodigality or sociability.
2. blind gut: The discussion here bears comparison to those in I.xxv, on the location of Toby’s wound, II.xix, on the advantages of the ‘Ccesarian section’ and, of course, II.vi, on Toby’s ignorance concerning the right and wrong end of a woman. The play is on ‘blind gut’ as a term for the ccecum (the beginning of the large intestine), and, generally, for any tubular passage with one end closed.
3. Illion: Ileum, the lowest part of the small intestine.
CHAPTER XVI
1. movement: moment?
2. from Dan to Beersheba: Scriptural formula (Judges 20:1, 2 Samuel 24:2), marking the boundaries of Canaan, north and south.
CHAPTER XVII
1. Bouchain: The siege of Bouchain (August 1711) was one of Marl-borough’s great triumphs, the well-fortified town surrendering in just twenty days. A foldout map is provided in Tindal.
2. snuffy: Soiled with snuff.
3. the pricks… love: For St Radegund, see n. 10 to IV.S.T.; she was particularly known for her self-inflicted physical punishments. Eric Rothstein (Systems of Order and Inquiry in Later Eighteenth-Century Fiction (University of California Press, 1975)) calls attention to the bilingual puns (‘Fesse’ and ‘clunis’, French and Latin, respectively, for ‘buttock’) and the implication that ‘this spiritual voyage becomes a shifting of hams with “pricks” in media re’.
CHAPTER XIX
1. Servius Sulpicius: See V.iii and nn.
2. half of the entertainment: Sterne recalled this passage in response to a complimentary letter he received a month before his death: ‘a true feeler,’ he wrote, ‘always brings half the entertainment along with him. His own ideas are only call’d forth by what he reads, and the vibrations within, so entirely correspond with those excited,’tis like reading himself and not the book.’
3. every year: The ‘science’ of chronology, still taken very seriously in Sterne’s day, built complex chronological tables for biblical and parallel eventsin the ancient world; hence creation took place on23 October 4004 BC, the flood began on 7 December 2349 BC, Abraham was born in 1996 BC, and the Israelites departed Egypt on 5 May 1491 BC. Parallel dates were derived by several methods, including Greek Olympiads, the ‘years of Nabonnassar’ (the first King of Babylonia, perhaps alluded to in Sterne’s ‘Dynasties’), and the founding of Rome (ab urbe condita).
4. MODESTY… open: As noted by W. G. Day (‘A Novel Compliment’, BSECS Newsletter 5 (1974)), Sterne alludes to Guido Reni’s painting, variously called ‘Liberality and Modesty’ or ‘Generosity and Modesty’, perhaps as a compliment to John Spencer (see n. to Vol. V, dedication), who owned a studio version.
5. cast-year: Constructed (as is ‘cast-almanack’) by analogy perhaps to cast-clothes, i.e. something discarded.
6. seventeen hundred and twelve: Sterne borrows from Tindal the events of the closing campaign of the War of the Spanish Succession, marked by the Duke of Ormond’s refusal to support Prince Eugène and the Dutch General François Nicolas Fagel (1655–1718) at their siege of Quesnoy because of ‘orders’ from Queen Anne or Marl-borough. The precise nature of those ‘orders’ was the subject of Ormond’s later impeachment trial. Contemporary accounts suggest that the army shared Toby’s anger at what was considered a gross dereliction of duty; Roger Sterne, Laurence’s father, was among the troops disbanded by the cessation of hostilities.
7. how Marlborough… marched: Sterne condenses four double-column folio pages from Tindal describing Marlborough’s march into Germany; Sterne (or his compositor) altered the spelling of many of the place-names, but the entire list appears in one form or another in Tindal.
8. invention of powder: Sterne takes his discussion primarily from Chambers, s.v. Gunpowder. Wenceslaus (1361–1419) became Holy Roman Emperor in 1378; the account of Berthold Schwartz, a German monk, is taken verbatim from Chambers. Don Pedro, Bishop of Leon, died in 1112; Sterne misread Chambers, and gives us the account of another authority on the events of 1343. ‘Friar Bacon’ is Roger Bacon (c. 1214– c. 1294), father of English philosophy.
9. even: ever ?
10. the Chinese: Many of the military treatises Toby studied gave attention to the invention of gunpowder, repeating the information in Chambers, and adding the Chinese claim as well. In view of Trim’s question, ‘How came priests and bishops… to trouble their heads so much about gun-powder?’, one notes that Bishop Warburton discusses the history of gunpowder in Julian, or A Discourse Concerning the Earthquake (1750); Sterne may again be tweaking Warburton’s nose.
11. kingdom of Bohemia… whatever: Familiar trope for a never-never-land setting, as in The Winter’s Tale; the coastline of a landlocked Bohemia was a common joke.
12. affair of Landen: Sterne’s account of the Battle of Landen (29 July 1693) is taken from Tindal. It was a costly battle, with some 20,000 casualties. The three regimental generals, Hugh Wyndham (d. 1708); Henry Lumley (1660–1722); and the Earl of Galway (1648–1720), are all mentioned by Tindal, as are the Prince de Conti (1664–1709), who led the French cavalry, and François-Henri de Montmorency, duc de Luxembourg (1628–95), the Marshal of France and head of its army at Landen. Thomas Talmash, or Tollemache (c. 1651-94), was a lieutenant-general who fought at Limerick and Steinkirk.
13. he deserves… halter: Possibly proverbial: ‘As well worth it as a thief is worth a rope.’
14. mob: Informal head-covering, with a puffed crown and side pieces that could be tied under the chin or l
eft dangling.
15. cæteris paribus: Other things being equal.
CHAPTER XX
1. Beguine: See n. 47 to IV.S.T.
2. My fever… night: In his ‘Journal to Eliza’ Sterne comments on the ‘truth’ of this description: ‘Twas a prophetic Spirit, wch dictated the Acct of Corpl Trim’s uneasy night when the fair Beguin ran in his head,—for every night & almost every Slumber of mine, since the day We parted, is a repe[ti]tion of the same description…’
CHAPTER XXI
1. sisserara: I.e. siserary: with a vengeance, suddenly.
CHAPTER XXII
1. despair: Some modern editors emend to ‘affair’, perhaps a better reading.
CHAPTER XXIII
1. archives of Gotham: ‘As wise as a man of Gotham’ was proverbial, usually meaning a mask of folly to disguise real wisdom.
CHAPTER XXIV
1. raree-shew-box: Often called a Savoyard’s box (see n. 1 to III.xxvi); a scenic representation (often of battles) with moving figures. ‘Raree’ is supposedly a Savoyard’s attempt at rare, indicating connection with the wandering inhabitants of Savoy.
2. Thracian * Rodope’s: Sterne borrows his footnote from a marginal note in Burton, 3.2.2.3, itself lifted from Heliodorus’s An ÆEthiopian History; Thomas Underdowne’s popular Renaissance translation may also have caught Sterne’s attention: ‘Rhodopis… [was] perfectly instructed in all Venerious entisements [cf. the widow’s ‘venereal’ eyes], and wanton behaviour, so that it was possible for none that looked on her, not to be intangled with her love, of such an unavoidable force, was the whorish allurement that proceeded from her eyes.’ Rhodopis of Thrace, Greek courtesan of the sixth century BC