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15. rood: an area roughly eight yards square.

16. epitasis: a formal term of drama corresponding to the second part, the complication (“working up”).

CHAP. VI

1. Susannah … ravish her: plays on the well-known story of Susannah and the elders who attempt to ravish her in the Apocrypha (Daniel) of the Bible.

2. pudding’s end: the tied end of a sausage, though “pudding” is also slang for a penis. Here the term has the force of a useless thing or “nonsense.”

3. her****: Commenting on this passage, the pseudonymous Jeremiah Kunastrokius says “four asterisms are but four asterisms—and ever since asterisms have been in use, we have always been taught that their number should be supplied by a like number of letters to make out the sense” (Explanatory Remarks [London, 1760], 27). In Tristram Shandy this claim is only sometimes accurate, as here.

4. period’s: A period is a sentence.

5. Aposiopesis: a stop or break in speech, often as though the speaker is overcome with emotion. This is one of Sterne’s major rhetorical devices, put to many different uses in Tristram Shandy (cf. IV, xxvii).

6. Poco piu … Poco meno … precise line of beauty … chisel: Sterne alludes throughout this paragraph to William Hogarth’s Analysis of Beauty (London, 1753), which claims “there is but one precise line, properly to be called the line of beauty” (ch. 9, 49), the “serpentine line.” The Italian phrases mean, literally, “little more,” “little less,” as Tristram notes. The first is from Hogarth (ch. 10, 62). The second phrase (as Florida notes) is used not in art criticism but in music. Hogarth also draws attention to “the most exquisite turns of the chissel” (p. 61). See Brissenden, 104–8.

7. et cætera: euphemistic substitution, here for the penis.

CHAP. VII

1. natural philosopher: The word “scientist” did not yet exist.

2. Aristotle’s Master-Piece: a pseudo-Aristotelian book on sexuality. Work notes that it is actually in Aristotle’s Book of Problems (London, 1710), pp. 9–10, a book often bound with the first.

3. com-at-ability: While this word is Sterne’s coinage, “come-at-able,” with or without hyphens, was a widely used term.

4. a Devil of a rap at the door: perhaps a remembrance of the knocking at the gate in Macbeth (2.3): “Knock, knock! Who’s there in the other devil’s name?” (2.3.7–8). Barbara Lounsberry, PQ 55 (1976): 411, connects the scene with 2.3.73–74 “Ring the alarum-bell! … and look on death itself.”

CHAP. VIII

1. hour and a half’s tolerable good reading … rung the bell: John Sutherland elegantly defends Sterne from the charge of having made a slip by suggesting plausibly that Toby rang the bell following his original observation that “it would not be amiss” to ring it (II, vi, 76). See “Slop Slip” in Can Jane Eyre Be Happy?: More Puzzles in Classic Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 25–30.

2. hypercritick: severe or excessive critic.

3. unity, or rather probability, of time: Many critics from the Renaissance to the eighteenth century insisted upon a “unity of time” that is not a rule in Aristotle’s Poetics, though probability is one of his criteria.

4. idea of duration … simple modes … succession of our ideas: Again, Sterne draws on Locke, Essay, 2.14, “Idea of Duration and its Simple Modes.”

5. between the acts: In the eighteenth-century theater, such entertainments (entr’actes) were characteristically put on between the main play and the afterpiece.

6. ROMANCE: a novel or extended fiction. Tristram Shandy is a romance in this sense.

CHAP. IX

1. Doctor Slop: Although scholars agree that Sterne satirizes the man-midwife and medical author John Burton under this name, the real Burton was tall, attractive, and not a Catholic, though a Jacobite (a supporter of the line of the deposed Stuart king). Florida calls attention to Tobias Smollett’s description of Gil Blas’s uncle in the first paragraph of his translation of Gil Blas (1748): “Figure to yourself a little fellow, three feet and a half high, as fat as you can conceive, with a head sunk deep between