The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman - Laurence Sterne [270]
4. Didius: generally taken to refer to Dr. Francis Topham, whom Sterne satirized under the name of Trim in A Political Romance (1759?). He is later characterized as “the great church lawyer” (III, xx). See Cash, Early Years, 129–30.
5. whim-wham: The double entendre is part of the word’s history. Although the OED gives the meaning as “A fantastic notion, odd fancy” or a “trifle,” one of the historical illustrations of the word is “He caus’d some forms of flowers twixt the Beast’s legges be painted to hide his whim wham” (1641). Florida establishes the likeliest source: Ozell’s gloss of the word in Rabelais, “men’s pissing tools” (4.32, 214, n. 2).
6. Dr. Kunastrokius: Dr. Richard Mead, a distinguished physician rumored to take pleasure in such activities.
7. HOBBY-HORSES: As well as hobbies and horses made from a wooden stick, this word suggests prostitutes and obsessions. See the beginning of II, v.
8. running horses: obsolete term for race horses, though the phrase in this context suggests a venereal disease (Grose: “A clap or gleet”).
9. coins … maggots and their butterflies: collectors’ obsessions; though a “maggot” may mean also a “whimsical or perverse fancy” (OED) and hence describe all such hobbies.
CHAP. VIII
1. De gustibus non est disputandum: “There is no disputing tastes”; a Latin proverb. Cf. Tristram’s “every man to his own taste,” above, vii.
2. Moon … fiddler and painter: echoes John Dryden’s description of Zimri in Absalom and Achitophel, who “in the course of one revolving moon, / Was chemist, fiddler, statesman, and buffoon; / Then all for women, painting, rhyming, drinking, / Besides ten thousand freaks that died in thinking” (Absalom and Achitophel, in Dryden, Works, ed. Earl Miner and Vinton A. Dearing, 2:21, lines 549–52). Sterne himself painted and played the violin. On these topics, see R. F. Brissenden, “Sterne and Painting,” in Of Books and Humankind: Essays and Poems Presented to Bonamy Dobrée, ed. John Butt (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974), 93–108, and William Freedman, Laurence Sterne and the Origins of the Musical Novel (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1972).
3. pads: horses, especially those that go at an easy pace.
4. dedication: For Sterne’s real dedication to William Pitt, which appeared in the second edition, see xliii. Comic dedications were written earlier by Swift, Fielding, Smollett, and Charlotte Charke, among others.
CHAP. IX
1. bringing his points to bear: The phrase turns into a sexual pun.
2. guineas: The guinea was worth one pound, one shilling.
3. daubing: an inartistic painting implicitly compared to the mud or clay and wattles used to form walls.
4. painter’s scale: Roger de Piles popularized this twenty-point scheme for ranking the qualities of painters in his Cours de peinture (1708). Sterne’s passage is full of terms of art. See Brissenden, I, viii, n. 2 above.
5. keeping: the maintenance of harmony of composition, especially in relation to representations of nearer and farther objects in a painting.
6. principal lights: in a painting, the main parts represented as lit by sources of illumination.
7. tout ensemble: literally, whole assemblage (French)—the harmonious composition of the painting.
8. Mr. Dodsley: Sterne had originally tried (unsuccessfully) to interest Robert Dodsley, a prominent London bookseller, in publishing his book. This volume and the second were published in York, but Dodsley’s brother James, who took over the business in March 1759, published the second edition of both later that year.
9. MOON … run mad: Lunacy was believed at an earlier time to be caused by phases of the moon.
10. CANDID and Miss CUNEGUND’S: the hero and heroine of Voltaire’s Candide, published in English translation as Candid: or, All for the Best earlier in 1759.
CHAP. X
1. country-talk: The OED, giving Sterne as the sole example, says “the talk of a … country-side,” but cf. Hamlet’s bawdy “country matters,” Hamlet, 3.2.116.
2. Rosinante: Don Quixote’s horse, described as skin