The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman - Laurence Sterne [277]
15. Foro Scientiæ: forum of knowledge (Latin).
16. Lillabullero: an anti-Catholic song written in Ireland in 1687 and sung by the troops of William III. See Poems on Affairs of State, 1685–1688, ed. Galbraith M. Crump (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968), 4:309–13.
17. Argumentum ad Verecundiam, ex Absurdo, ex Fortiori: These are the argument [addressed] to respect, the argument from absurdity, and the argument from the stronger (reason), usually “a Fortiori” (Latin).
18. Ars Logica: Art of Logic (Latin).
19. to silence: This paragraph echoes Locke, Essay, 4.17.19, 685–86.
20. by these presents: This phrase parodies the language of letters patent, commands from a king or person in authority.
21. Argumentum Fistulatorium … Argumentum Baculinum … Argumentum ad Crumenam: the arguments, respectively, of the piper (or whistler), of the stick, and to the purse (Latin).
22. Argumentum Tripodium … Argumentum ad Rem: argument to the tripod or three-legged thing; argument to the thing (Latin). The latter of these two bawdy innovations contains a common euphemism for the female genitals.
CHAP. XXII
1. Hall … Decads … Beal … himself: Despite Tristram’s admirable specificity and accuracy about Hall’s book and printer, the quotation does not appear there. Florida quotes a similar sentiment from Hall (1574–1656), who was a favorite source for Sterne’s sermons. The “divine art of meditation” is Decad 7, Epistle 4.
2. digression: Digressions were expected parts of rhetorical performances, though Swift in A Tale of a Tub suggests that all modern learning is a digression through his narrator’s frequent use of digressions.
3. steps forth like a bridegroom: cf. “cometh forth as a bridegroom,” Psalms 19:5 (Psalter version).
CHAP. XXIII
1. Momus’s glass: Momus, the god of mockery and carping criticism, complained that human beings did not have windows in their breasts to permit their hearts to be seen. This idea, which can be found in Pope and others in the eighteenth century, derives from Lucian’s Hermotimus.
2. window-money: a tax on the windows of houses.
3. dioptrical: “capable of being seen through” (OED); used to describe beehives with glass windows on opposing sides.
4. maggots: eccentric or odd notions (archaic). Tristram immediately gives way to the more familiar meaning, “grubs.”
5. Mercury: Sterne might have found information on the planet’s heat in Chambers, “Mercury.”
6. efficient cause … final cause: two of Aristotle’s four causes. The former produces an effect, and the latter is the end for which a thing is done.
7. mere: Florida emends “mere” from “more.”
8. play the fool … in her own house: alludes to Hamlet: “play the fool … in’s own house” (3.1.132).
9. wind instruments … Virgil … Dido and Æneas: The trumpets of fame, as in Virgil’s Aeneid, IV, were sometimes satirized by a posterior trumpet; there is such a trumpet in Butler’s Hudibras (2.1.69–74). A posterior trumpet, though not of fame, appears in Dante’s Inferno.
10. Italians: The Italian castrati were popular in imported operas.
11. forte or piano: strong or soft (loud or low) (Italian musical terms).
12. ad populum: to the people (Latin).
13. evacuations … repletions: Like Swift in Gulliver’s Travels, Sterne satirizes the medical practice of analyzing excrement. Cf. Swift, “Their fundamental is, that all diseases arise from repletion; whence they conclude, that a great evacuation of the body is necessary …” (4.6).
14. smell … of the lamp: be pedantic, the work of a scholar late at night.
15. operose: tedious, laborious.
16. Non-Naturals: in medical usage, “the six things necessary to health, but liable, by abuse or accident, to become the cause of disease[:] air, meat and drink, sleep and waking, motion and rest, excretion and retention, the affections of the mind” (OED). Dr. John Burton, satirized later as Dr. Slop, published A Treatise on the Non-naturals (York, 1738).
17. against the light: This phrase puns on the location of the light in drawing which produces a figure in shadow, as analogous to one who goes against