The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman

by Laurence Sterne

  CHAPTER XVIII

  1. James Butler: See n. 6 to II.v.

  CHAPTER XIX

  1. my own… Shandy-family: Walter echoes Exodus 20:5: ‘for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children’.

  2. child of wrath: Scriptural phrase; see Ephesians 2:3.

  3. book of embryotic evils: OED cites this passage for its first recorded usage and refers to embryonic, 2 fig.: ‘Immature, undeveloped.’ The context, however, points to embryonic, 1: ‘Pertaining to… an embryo.’

  4. radical heat: Chambers, s.v. Flame (vital), defines ‘radical heat’ as the ‘fine, warm, ignious substance, supposed… to reside in the hearts of animals, as necessary to life, or rather, as that which constitutes life itself’. For ‘radical moisture’ see n. 13 to II.iii.

  5. stamina: See n. 30 to IV.S.T.

  6. non-naturals: See n. 12 to I.xxiii.

  7. There she gave vent: Sterne perhaps plays on vent; cf. p. 295, where the mother is referred to in legal parlance as the venter.

  CHAPTER XX

  1. undertaking criticks: Work’s note (298, n. 1), with an eye on Swift, is useful: ‘Enterprising; used here in the derogatory sense of officious, over-reaching.’ Cf. p. 320.

  2. splash’d a bishop: Almost certainly an allusion to Warburton (see n. 4 to I.xi), who liked the first instalment of the work so well he gave Sterne a purse, along with advice to tone down his bawdiness. As each instalment proved equally bawdy, the Bishop lost patience with the ‘heteroclite parson’, soon referring to him as an ‘irrecoverable scoundrel’. Sterne evokes Warburton directly only once in TS (IX.viii), where the Divine Legation and A Tale of a Tub are linked with TS, but there are numerous covert allusions; see New, ‘Sterne, Warburton’, in Further Reading.

  3. doctors of the Sorbonne: The doctors responsible for the ‘Memoire’ on intrauterine baptism, I.xx.

  CHAPTER XXI

  1. state*: Sterne cites the Menagiana (1693), a collection of gossip and bons mots, by Gilles Ménage (1613–92), and elaborates greatly on the one sentence that tells this story. Francis I (1494–1547) ruled France from 1515 until his death.

  2. Shadrach, Mesech, and Abed-nego: The three friends of Daniel delivered from the fiery furnace; see Daniel 1:7, 3:1–30.

  3. By saint Peter’s girdle: Nonce oath, such as Rabelais created: e.g. by St Winifrid’s placket, by St Anthony’s hog, etc.

  4. pulling up his breeches: Louis XIV was infamous for conducting state business while sitting at stool.

  CHAPTER XXII

  1. disport: OED cites this passage as its sole illustration: ‘bearing, carriage, deportment’.

  2. Francis the Ninth: See n. 8 to III.xxxviii.

  3. the duke of Ormond: See n. 6 to II.v.

  4. If ’tis… duodenums: This assertion of purpose, to make us laugh, has often been considered Sterne’s own view of his work. In diction, he parodies the mechanistic bent of his age’s medical science: e.g. ‘from the above-mention’d Communication between the Plexus Nervosus peculiar to Man, and the Nervus Diaphragmaticus, the true Cause appears, why Risibility is a Property of human Nature; which is, because the Diaphragm, as well as the Heart… is drawn upward by the Intercourse of the Nerves… and the Lungs are likewise mov’d; then, because the same Intercostal nerve is continued upward, etc.’ (from Thomas Willis, Anatomy of the Brain). That laughter was effective against the spleen was a truism; cf. Swift’s labelling A Tale of a Tub ‘A dangerous treatise writ against the spleen’ (‘The Author upon Himself’). OED cites this passage as its last illustration of ‘inimicitious’: ‘unfriendly, hostile’.

  CHAPTER XXIII

  1. these great dinners: On the institution of the visitation dinner, see Cash, EMY, 128–32. Goldsmith, Citizen of the World, letter 58, describes it thus: ‘it was formerly the custom here for the… [bishops] to go about the country once a year, and examine upon the spot whether those of subordinate orders did their duty…’ He describes the dinners as orgies of feasting. Sterne’s **** in Ch. xxv represents York.

  CHAPTER XXV

  1. chasm of ten pages: The first edition skips nine pages (147–55), resulting in even-numbered right-hand pages for the remainder of Volume IV; to avoid this anomaly, which would have to continue to the end of modern one-volume editions, ten pages are usually skipped, as in this edition.

  2. Turpilius… Basil: Turpilius (first century) and Hans Holbein (1497–1543), left-handed painters, often linked for that reason alone.

  3. bend dexter: In heraldry, the bend dexter is the diagonal band drawn across the shield from the top left (looking at the shield), or dexter chief, to the lower right (sinister base); when the band is drawn in the opposite direction, it is called the bend sinister and indicates bastardy.

  4. blot in my escutcheon: Play on the literal and figurative meanings of the phrase, i.e. stain on a person’s reputation.

  5. by siege: Sterne plays with the bawdy usage of the word for the anus.

  6. Homenas: Name of a clergyman in the ‘Rabelaisian Fragment’. Sterne borrowed it from Rabelais’s Bishop of Papimany, annotated (IV.48) thus: ‘They use it in Languedoc, when they would say, a great loggerheaded booby, that has neither wit nor breeding.’ It may, however, be a simple play on ‘homilist’.

  7. as Montaigne complained: In ‘Of the Education of Children’, Montaigne complains that introducing a passage from an ancient author highlighted the insipidity of the book he was reading.

  CHAPTER XXVI

  1. See… pipes: In Spectator 46, Addison describes how the Spectator misplaces his notes in Lloyd’s Coffee-house (cf. VII.xxxvi), and how, regaining possession, he ‘twisted [the paper] into a kind of Match, and litt [his] Pipe with it’.

  2. Kysarcius: See n. 9 to III.xx; the mock geographical reference underscores the obscenity.

  3. head instead of my heart: Sterne often uses this formula, as in his preface to Volumes I and II of Sermons: ‘I trust [these sermons] will be no less felt, or worse received, for the evidence they bear, of proceeding more from the heart than the head.’ The preference was stated almost universally in the eighteenth-century Anglican pulpit in reaction to the polemical and divisive theologizing of the previous century.

  4. To preach… heart: Cf. Sterne’s sermon 42, ‘Search the Scripture’, in which he compares the eloquence of Scripture with false rhetoric consisting of ‘an over-curious and artificial arrangement of figures, tinsel’d over with a gaudy embellishment of words, which glitter, but convey little or no light to the understanding’. The language is borrowed from Anthony Blackwall, The Sacred Classics Defended and Illustrated (1725).

  CHAPTER XXVII

  1. Zounds: God’s wounds, i.e. Christ’s wounds on the cross.

  2. Phutatorius: See n. 4 to III.xx.

  3. twelve-penny oath: According to the Profane Oaths Act of 1746, the penalties for swearing were determined by the class of speaker rather than the oath uttered. Twelve pence was the fine for the lower orders; gentlemen paid more. Sterne would have been familiar with the act, since it was required to be read in church on four Sundays each year.

  4. a yard below: Sterne puns on yard = penis.

  5. Gastripheres: See n. 9 to III.xx, for this and other names at the visitation dinner.

  6. Johnson’s dictionary: The ‘chaste’ words in the eighteenth century were flap or fall, but Johnson’s Dictionary does indeed fail us.

  7. temple of Janus: Janus, Roman god of doors and beginnings; closing the temple doors signified peace, opening them, war.

  8. Acrites or Mythogeras: Respectively, ‘confused, undiscriminating’ and ‘tale-bearer’.

  9. de Concubinis retinendis: On Keeping Concubines.

  10. compursions: OED cites this passage as its sole example: humorously, ‘A pursing together.’

  11. Asker: Common name, in West Midlands and Yorkshire dialect, for a newt.

  12. aposiopestick-break: See n. 4 to II.vi.

  13. trifles light as air: Cf. Iago�
�s comment on leaving Desdemona’s handkerchief in Cassio’s lodging: ‘Trifles light as air / Are to the jealous confirmations strong / As proofs of holy writ…’ (Othello, III.iii.322–4).

  14. Euclid’s demonstrations: See n. 1 to V.xxx.

  15. worth stooping for: See n. 2 to IV.i.

  16. as Shakespear… jest: Hamlet, V.i.184–5: ‘Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio, a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy.’ The echoing of Hamlet here suggests that ‘dreams of philosophy’ is also a recall (I.v.166–7): ‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’

  CHAPTER XXVIII

  1. take out the fire: Sterne plays on the ‘heat’ of venereal infection; cf. the eighteenth-century term fire-ship for a prostitute.

  2. make a very devil: Pun on ‘printer’s devil’, the errand-boy in a printing shop.

  3. de re concubinariâ: ‘On the thing of a concubine’; cf. Argumentum ad Rem, p. 62.

  CHAPTER XXIX

  1. Had a priest… last: Sterne borrows his discussion from Ozell’s note to Rabelais, I.19. Had he pursued Ozell’s citation he would have discovered, as Work notes (327, n. 2), that Pope Zachary (741–52), not Pope Leo III (795–816), issued the decree; in all likelihood, Sterne cited his authority at random. At stake is whether or not grammatical errors (here, wrong declensional endings) invalidate a baptism. The correct Latin is in nomine patris et filii et spiritus sancti (in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost).

  2. John Stradling’s: Like Tom-o’Stiles above, Stradling was a conventional fictitious name for a party in a lawsuit.

  3. best lawyers: As Sterne’s first note indicates, he copies this dispute from Henry Swinburne’s Briefe Treatise, the work used to create his nonsense footnote in ‘Slawkenbergius’s Tale’ (see n. 37 to IV.S.T.). The notes here are culled from Swinburne’s margins; although Kysarcius asserts that ‘reason’ is strongly on the side of the determination, Swinburne believed the opposite.

  4. civilians: Civil lawyers.

  5. jactitation: OED cites this passage as its sole illustration of an obsolete usage: ‘discussion; bandying to and fro’.

  6. Triptolemus: See n. 3 to III.xx.

  7. Lord Coke: Sir Edward Coke (1552–1634), English jurist. Brook refers to Sir Robert Broke (d. 1558), another jurist cited by Swinburne.

  8. juris-consulti: Legal counsellors.

  9. juris-prudentes: Persons learned in the law.

  10. consistory and prerogative courts: The function of these ecclesiastical courts is discussed by Cash, EMY, ch. 12.

  11. Liberi… liberorum: Sterne translates this immediately above: ‘that the child may be of the blood… etc.’, except that, following Swinburne’s translation rather than the Latin, he twice adds ‘seed’ to ‘blood’.

  12. *Mater non… signific: The mother is not numbered among the blood relations. The sentence is from Swinburne, as is the reference to Pietro Baldi de Ubaldis (c. 1327–1400), Italian jurist.

  13. levitical law: Although Leviticus 18:6ff. prohibits numerous cohabitations, it does not specify grandparents. The Book of Common Prayer, however, ends with a table of prohibited marriages, headed by grandmother and grandfather.

  14. Selden: See Table Talk of John Selden (1689), ed. Sir Frederick Pollock (Quaritch, 1927)): ‘The King… [charged them with treason because they] charged my Lord of Canterbury & Sr. George Ratcliffe … with as much Logick as the boy that would have layen with his Grandmother said to his father, You lay with my Mother & why should I not lye with yors.’ Selden (1584–1654), English jurist and orientalist.

  15. Argumentum commune: Cicero discusses the exordium commune, an exordium ‘equally applicable to both sides of the case’, and perhaps Sterne had this in mind; argumentum commune appears to be an invented term.

  CHAPTER XXX

  1. said: Sad ?

  CHAPTER XXXI

  1. loop of his hat: Since the cocked hats in fashion during the century were made by turning up (i.e. ‘cocking’) the brim on three sides and securing it with buttons and loops, to ‘let down one loop’ suggests dishevelment, perhaps mourning.

  2. Hippocrates: As previously (p. 75), Sterne has his Hippocrates via Mackenzie’s History of Health: ‘Moderate joy and anger, on the other hand, and those passions and affections of the mind which partake of their nature… invigorate the nerves, accelerate the circulating fluids, promote perspiration, and assist digestion.’

  3. build a wind-mill: Gene Washington, Scriblerian 25 (1992), suggests a proverbial allusion – ‘he has windmills in the head’ – derived from Don Quixote, and meaning ‘full of projects or plans’.

  4. the Missisippi-scheme: The Mississippi Company reached its peak in the winter of 1719–20 and collapsed in the spring, one of several trading-company schemes in the first decadesofthe century that turned sour, with great loss to speculators.

  5. whinny: Covered or abounding with whins or furze-bushes.

  6. ingress… regress: Legal term, with bawdy connotations long before Sterne’s usage.

  7. feather… cap: Proverbial; the earlier meaning of ‘honour without profit’ is closer to Sterne’s intention than the more favourable connotations of present usage.

  8. tantum valet… sonat: It’s worth as much as it sounds.

  CHAPTER XXXII

  1. choicest morsel: Cf. p. 571, where Tristram again refers to Toby’s amours with these words.

  2. akes dismally: Rabelais makes a similar complaint in concluding Book II: ‘My head aches a little, and I perceive that the registers of my brain are somewhat jumbled and disordered with the septembral juice.’

  3. True Shandeism: Cf. Sterne’s letter to Hall-Stevenson in June 1761: ‘I have not managed my miseries like a wise man—and if God, for my consolation under them, had not poured forth the spirit of Shandeism into me, which will not suffer me to think two moments upon any grave subject, I would else, just now lay down and die—die——and yet, in half an hour’s time, I’ll lay a guinea, I shall be as merry as a monkey—and as mischievous too…’ Shandeism bears comparison with Rabelais’s ‘Pantagruelism’, as, e.g., Rabelais’s concluding words to Book II: ‘And if you desire to be good Pantagruelists, that is to say, to live in peace, joy, health, making yourselves always merry, never trust those men that always peep out at one hole’ (II.34), i.e. narrow-minded persons.

  4. like Sancho Pança: Cf. Don Quixote, I.IV.2, where Sancho, considering the fact that ‘the People, over whom he was to be Governor, were all to be black’, decides that the only remedy is ‘loading a Ship with ’em, and having ’em into Spain’, where he would be able to sell them.

  5. vile cough: Sterne had opened TS with an allusion to his ill-health, but he recovered somewhat during 1760, when writing Volumes III and IV. Within the next year, however, his health failed to the point of sending him, in January 1762, to the south of France in pursuit of a more congenial climate. See Cash, LY, 104–5.

  6. pluck at your beards: In the Renaissance a gesture of contempt, but Sterne’s usage is softer.

  VOLUME V

  Mottoes: The two mottoes of the first edition are borrowed from Burton’s Anatomy and alert readers to the frequent presence of Burton in Volumes V and VI. Burton’s introductory ‘Democritus Junior to the Reader’ explores, among other subjects, the use of a satiric voice or ironic persona and the freedom it affords; Sterne found his mottoes in one paragraph of this discussion: ‘If I have overshot my selfe in this which hath beene hitherto said, or that it is, which I am sure some will object, too phantasticall, too light and comicall for a Divine, too satyricall for one of my profession, I will presume to answer with Erasmus, in like case, ’Tis not I, but Democritus, Democritus dixit [Burton’s marginal note here reads: ‘Mor. Encom. si quis calumnietur levius esse quam decet Theologum, aut mordacius quam deceat Christianum’]: you must consider what it is to speake in ones owne or anothers person… and what liberty those old Satyrists have had, it is a Cento collected from
others, not I, but they that say it. Dixero si quid fortè jocosius, hoc mihi juris / Cum veniâ dabis.’ The concluding verses are from Horace, Satires, I.iv.104–5: ‘if in my words I am too free, perchance too light, this bit of liberty you will indulgently grant me’. The passage from Erasmus’s Praise of Folly is from the introductory letter to Sir Thomas More, translated by W. Kennett (4th edn., 1724): ‘And it is a Chance if there be wanting some Quarrelsome Persons that will shew their Teeth, and pretend these Fooleries are either too Buffoon-like for a grave Divine, or too Satyrical for a Meek Christian.’

  Sterne added a third motto to the second edition (1767), borrowed from the Second Council of Carthage (or an intermediate source not yet discovered): ‘Si quis clericus aut monachus verba scurrilia joculatoria, risumque moventia loquitur, acerrime corripiatur’ (If any priest or monk speak words which are scurrilous, jesting, and exciting to laughter, let him be very sharply rebuked). Sterne alters this somewhat to ‘If any priest or monk uses jesting words, exciting laughter, let him be denounced.’ On the actual title-page, ‘visum’ is a misprint for ‘risum’.

  Dedication: Sterne’s friendship with John Spencer (1734–83) began in 1761 and continued until Sterne’s death. The great-grandson of the Duke of Marlborough, Spencer was created Baron of Althorp in 1761. The fair copy of Le Fever’s story that Sterne sent to Lady Spencer, misplaced at the British Library for a century, has resurfaced; see A Note on the Text.