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2. sesquipedality: literally, being a foot and a half long. Usually applied to words, though R. Badley had spoken of a “sesquipedale belly” in 1611. Sterne’s is the first use of the noun illustrated by OED.

3. Hogarth’s analysis of beauty … three strokes: Sterne had already alluded to the “line of beauty” (ch. vi above) in Hogarth’s Analysis of Beauty (1753), which claims “two or three lines at first are sufficient to shew the intention of an attitude” (“Of Attitude,” ch. 16, 135). This positive attention to Hogarth as an aesthetician at a time when his book was often satirized probably helped Sterne obtain the two illustrations from Hogarth for the second editions of volumes I and II.

4. fardel: This term for “burden” was almost certainly triggered by Hamlet’s “who would fardels bear” in his soliloquy on death (3.1.75).

5. Whiston’s comets: William Whiston (1667–1752), Newton’s successor as Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University, hypothesized that a comet (identified with Halley’s comet, which returned earlier in the year Sterne published this volume, 1759) caused the biblical deluge in a near miss of the earth and would bring about the end of the world in keeping with biblical chronology. See James E. Force, William Whiston: Honest Newtonian (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 43, 47–48.

6. hydrophobia: used here in its etymological sense: fear of water. The first such use in the OED.

7. imprompt: unprepared. The OED’s sole example.

8. beluted: covered with mud. The OED’s first example.

9. transubstantiated: transformed (anti-Catholic mockery of the doctrine of Transubstantiation, in which the bread and wine of the Eucharist become the body and blood of Christ).

CHAP. X

1. unwiped, unappointed, unanealed, with all his stains and blotches on him … like Hamlet’s ghost, motionless and speechless: This is neither a misremembrance of old Hamlet’s ghost (1.5.77), to whom Tristram compares Dr. Slop, nor only a clever substitution; the second word gives Lewis Theobald’s emendation in his edition The Works of Shakespeare (London, 1733): “Unhousel’d, unappointed, unaneal’d” (7:253). No other Shakespeare editor uses this emendation. Sterne adapts the first word to describe the “beluted” Dr. Slop. Theobald’s explanation of the two terms is relevant to Sterne’s anti-Catholicism: “unappointed,—i.e. no Confession of Sins made, no reconciliation to Heaven. … Unaneal’d … not having the extream Unction.” The ghost’s silence is remarked often in Act I (1.1.51–52; 1.2.215; 1.4.63). The ghost himself mentions how “a most instant tetter bark’d about, / Most lazar-like, with vile and loathsome crust / All my smooth body” when he was poisoned, and how he was “sent to my account / With all my imperfections on my head.” Cf. Sterne’s other clear uses of Theobald’s edition in I, xi.

2. the majesty of mud: First appearing in Pope, Dunciad (1729), describing the winner of the mud-diving contest (2.302), but Sterne probably knew its more apposite reworking dating from 1743: “Slow rose a form in majesty of mud” (2.326). His other allusion to the Dunciad (ch. x above) derives from this edition or that of 1744. One of the mud-nymphs is named Lutitia, perhaps suggesting Sterne’s description of Slop as “beluted.” Theobald was the “hero” of the first version of the poem and the Dunciad Variorum. Theobald provides the link for Sterne in this chapter between Shakespeare and Pope, whose edition of Shakespeare Theobald attacked.

3. mental reservation: The Catholic doctrine of “mental reservation” was interpreted to allow Jacobites to circumvent the punishments to which they would be subjected in eighteenth-century Britain if they refused to swear allegiance to the king and to abjure James II and his heirs. Hence, Protestants regarded Catholics as hypocrites.

4. Argumentum ad hominem: See vol. I, xix, n. 10 (Latin).

5. sensorium: “the seat of sensation in the brain” (OED); a medical term, but here used for the first time as a jocular synonym for “brain.”

6. Stevinus: