The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman - Laurence Sterne [273]
black pages: Florida cites a seventeenth-century tradition of totally black or substantially black pages, especially in elegiac circumstances, as in several books by Joshua Sylvester. Ferriar (2:38) claims that they derive from Robert Fludd’s Utriusque Cosmi Historia (1617), 26.
CHAP. XIII
1. rhapsodical work: “of a literary work: consisting of a medley of narratives, etc.; fragmentary or disconnected in style. Obs.” (OED). This is the last example. Montaigne refers to his book as a “rhapsody” (1.13, 1.56; 1:59, 381).
2. out-edge: Sterne alone seems to use this word, both here and in Sentimental Journey. See OED.
3. commentary … meaning: As Florida notes, this passage owes something to Swift’s A Tale of a Tub, which will later be explicitly mentioned by Tristram in connection with his own book.
CHAP. XIV
1. Jack Hickathrift or Tom Thumb: folktale heroes probably found in chapbooks like those Toby will confess to have read (VI, xxxii, 367).
2. historiographer: historian.
3. Loretto: location of a holy shrine, and therefore suggesting a pilgrimage. Stout calls attention to a parallel in Sterne’s Sentimental Journey, 119.
4. Pasquinades: “lampoon[s] affixed to some public place” (OED).
CHAP. XV
1. Walter … Elizabeth: Tristram’s father may be named for “merry Walter,” the French equivalent of “merry Andrew,” the jester or clown who accompanies a mountebank or provides various sorts of entertainment. See Rabelais (“Author’s Prologue,” 1: cxxx, n. 7). Elizabeth’s name is unlikely to be accidental, since the mother of Sir Tristram, who bore that name, died of a difficult childbirth. Sterne’s wife, however, was also named Elizabeth.
2. messuage: a house with its land and outbuildings (law French).
3. ingress, egress, and regress: James Aiken Work, in The Indebtedness of Tristram Shandy to Certain English Authors, 1670–1740 (Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University, 1934, 376), traces this phrase with its bawdy innuendo to Tom Brown, The Widow’s Wedding (quoted from Works, Serious and Comical, in Prose and Verse [London, 1760], 4:144). Cf. IV, xxxi n. 6 below.
4. femme sole: “single woman” in law French; this passage is filled with legal terminology.
5. fee-farms, knights fees, views of frank-pledge, escheats: These are, respectively, “land[s] … subject to a perpetual fixed rent,” “a court held periodically for the production of the members of a tithing, later of a hundred or manor,” “the amount of land for which the services of an armed knight were due to the sovereign,” and properties forfeited to the king (OED).
6. put in exigent, deodands, free warrens: These are, respectively, served with a writ requiring “the defendant to appear and deliver up himself upon pain of outlawry”; “a thing forfeited or to be given to God”; and the right to keep and hunt game within a certain area (OED).
7. advowson: the right of a property-holder to designate clergy “to a benefice or living” (OED).
8. tenths, tythes, glebe-lands: “Tenths” and “tythes” are etymologically related. Traditionally the Anglican priest is entitled to tithes. The great tithes are of corn, hay, wood, fruit, and other crops. The small, or praedial, tithes were personal to the vicar. “Glebe-land” is cultivated “land assigned to a clergyman as part of his benefice” (OED).
9. toties quoties: as often as needed; repeatedly (Latin).
10. swell of imagination: false pregnancy.
CHAP. XVI
1. wall-fruit: fruit grown in England along a protective wall on lattices or stakes.
2. From Stilton … to Grantham: coach stops thirty-six miles apart on the Great