The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman - Laurence Sterne [282]
CHAP. XI
1. conversation: The word bears the same double meaning as “intercourse” does today.
2. sad overthrow: The fallen angels in Hell “rue the dire event / That with sad overthrow and foul defeat / Hath lost us heaven” (Milton, Paradise Lost, 2.126–28). Keymer, 28.
3. pumps: light, close-fitting shoes, often worn by servants.
4. obstetrick hand: Pope’s Dunciad (1743) IV, 394: “And Douglas lend his soft obstetric hand.”
5. Lucina: Roman goddess of light and birth.
6. Pilumnus: Roman god of childbirth.
7. tire-tête … new-invented forceps: The tire-tête, literally, “draw-head,” was invented in the seventeenth century by François Mauriceau to remove a dead child from the womb. John Burton’s new forceps is described in his Essay towards a Complete New System of Midwifery (London, 1751).
8. crotchet … squirt … salvation and deliverance: A “crotchet” is a hooked surgical instrument; a “squirt,” a syringe, which midwives distrusted but doctors used for a variety of purposes, though certainly carried by Slop for uterine baptism. At once satirizing Slop’s medical and religious opinions, Tristram implies these are instruments to kill the child (widely believed) and hence lead him to heaven, as the puns on “deliverance” and “salvation” suggest. He earlier discussed at length baptism in the womb by means of a syringe (I, xx).
9. bays: baize.
CHAP. XII
1. Ad Crumenam: See I, xxi, n. 21 above (Latin).
2. curtins … horn-works … Dennis … pun: Although John Dennis (1657–1734) is reported to have said “A man who could make so vile a pun would not scruple to pick a pocket,” the quotation does not appear in his writings (The Gentleman’s Magazine [1781] 50:324). For his attacks on puns, see The Critical Works of John Dennis, ed. Edward Niles Hooker, 2 vols. (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1939–43) 2:341, 347, 383–84. Slop’s implied puns on “curtin” and “horn-works” suggest the possibility that Walter is a cuckold (the horned husband of an unfaithful wife), as Toby notes in explaining the military meanings. Some other details, such as the date of Tristram’s birth, would support this notion.
3. Du Cange: Toby’s explanations come from Chambers (curtin, ravelin, half-moon). Sterne found Charles du Fresne Du Cange (1610–88), French medieval historian and philologist, in the first article.
4. Accoucheur: French for man-midwife; a word Burton uses in A Letter to William Smellie, M.D., as Florida notes.
5. fifth chapter: actually, the second chapter; perhaps the error is a remnant of Tristram Shandy before Sterne revised the manuscript at the recommendation of Robert Dodsley and others.
6. no jarring element … all was mix’d up so kindly: Like the earlier panegyric on Walter (I, xix), this description echoes Julius Caesar: “the elements / So mix’d in him, that Nature might stand up, / And say to all the world, “This was a man!” (5.5.73–75).
7. Literæ humaniores: humane letters; the humanities (Latin).
8. philanthropy: “Love of mankind; good nature” (Johnson). Sterne’s sermon “Philanthropy Recommended” (4:21–30) and his claim in the Preface that “the sermons turn chiefly upon philanthropy” (4:2) are typical of Latitudinarian Protestantism.
9. rash humour which my mother gave me: The phrase comes from Julius Caesar (4.3.20), a play echoed earlier in this chapter and I, xix. See also ch. xiv.
10. Not a jot: While the phrase is used elsewhere unremarkably, here it may echo Othello’s dejected response to Iago’s “I see this hath a little dash’d your spirits”: “Not a jot, not a jot” (3.2.214–15).
CHAP. XIII
1. In a family-way: familiarly, with the freedom characteristically taken by members of a family. The punster Dr. Slop plays on the phrase’s meaning as “pregnant.”
CHAP. XIV
1. Brutus and Cassius: following mutual recriminations while calling each other “brother” (Julius Caesar, 4.3). See ch. xii for another allusion to this scene, and that chapter and I, xix for others to the play.
2. sailing chariot: Sterne draws his account from John Wilkins, Mathematicall Magick, as Gwin Kolb first