The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman - Laurence Sterne [279]
3. Maes … Sambre … Vauban’s line … abbey of Salsines … gate of St. Nicolas: In the battle of Namur the crossing of these rivers to reach key points and outposts in taking the fort is recounted by Tindal. For Vauban, see n. 7 below.
4. assimulation: assimilation; an obsolete spelling.
5. ween: believe (archaic).
6. incumbition: “the action of lying or pressing upon”: the sole illustration in the OED.
7. Ramelli … Blondel: Sterne obtained the names of these military writers from Chambers’s article on fortifications and probably did not read them. A few have wider importance in this narrative. Simon Stevinus (1548–1620), a Dutch mathematician and engineer, is Toby’s favorite. The French Marshal Sébastien le Prestre de Vauban (1633–1707) took Namur from the Dutch General Baron Menno van Coehoorn (1641–1704) and redesigned the fortifications.
8. almost as many more books … library: Don Quixote (1.1.6; 1:42–51).
9. N. Tartaglia … Maltus … Gallileo … Torricellius: Niccolò Tartaglia and the others are all in Chambers, whose language Sterne draws upon for latus rectum, a straight line, among other things. See the articles “Projectile” and “Gunnery.”
10. mases: mazes.
11. fly … serpent: “Flee from sin as from the face of a serpent” (Ecclesiasticus 21:2).
12. sit up … old age: Sterne had used this passage in his Fragment, 1089–90 and n.
13. radical moisture: the humors (see I, i, n. 1), perceived as life-giving liquid, the “animal spirits.”
CHAP. IV
1. cum grano salis: with a grain of salt; warily.
2. Ronjat: Étienne Ronjat (1657–1737), premier surgeon to William III.
CHAP. V
1. When a man … discretion: Florida calls attention to a rough resemblance to Jonathan Swift’s “when a Man’s Fancy gets astride on his Reason, when Imagination is at Cuffs with the Senses, and common Understanding, as well as common Sense, is Kickt out of Doors; the first Proselyte he makes, is Himself” (A Tale of a Tub, ed. A. C. Guthkelch and D. Nichol Smith, 2nd ed. [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958], section IX, 171). Perhaps Sterne’s own phrase “out of doors” in the previous paragraph triggered the allusion. The “ruling passion,” which has much in common with the hobby horse, was a familiar conception of human motivation in the eighteenth century and was given wide currency by Alexander Pope’s Epistles to Several Persons. Sterne subscribes to it at the beginning of his sermon “Evil Speaking” (4:103).
2. incarnate: to form a scab or heal (flesh over).
3. duration … succession of his ideas: cf. Essay, 2.14, where Locke discusses these ideas.
4. ’Change: the London Exchange, the English trade center from 1669.
5. demigration: change of houses. Sterne is the sole eighteenth-century citation in the OED.
6. James Butler: Trim shares a name with the Irish second Duke of Ormond (1665–1745), who succeeded the Duke of Marlborough as commander in chief of the British forces in 1712. He was stripped of his command in 1714 and impeached for his secret role in the negotiation of the Treaty of Utrecht in 1715. Soon after, he led an abortive rebellion against England in support of James Edward Stuart, son of James II, former king of England.
7. broke no squares: did not matter (proverbial; troops battled in square formations).
8. Dunkirk: a French seaport required by the Treaty of Utrecht (1713) to destroy its fortifications, as is mentioned in ch. v.
9. ichnography: a ground plan or map of a place. Sterne had a character puzzle over this word in Political Romance, 37.
10. sit down before: Toby could do this both literally and figuratively: the military expression means “to encamp before laying siege.”
11. mark me the polygon: begin planning the fortifications. The polygon consists of representations of the fronts of the fort inscribed in a circle.
12. campaign: open field.
13. something like a tansy: “properly, fittingly, perfectly”; the OED’s last illustration.
14. red as scarlet: “For though our sins be as red as scarlet, they