The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman - Laurence Sterne [283]
3. Prince Maurice: Although Maurice, Prince of Orange, does not appear in Wilkins, Sterne could have known about Stevinus from Chambers.
4. German miles: A German mile is between four and five English miles.
5. Peireskius: Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc (1580–1637), an antiquarian.
6. sciences: fields of knowledge.
7. Tam citus erat, quam erat ventus: Latin; Sterne changes the quotation to make it match the familiar saying.
8. Prince … scientifick head: Alludes to an epigram thought to have been written by Swift: “Lewis the living learned fed, / And rais’d the scientific Head.” See Tom Keymer, “Scholia” 34 (2001–02): 111.
CHAP. XV
1. the next Halberd: that is, the next open promotion to sergeant (named for the spear-headed pike he carried), which required the ability to read and write.
CHAP. XVII
1. attitude: This term for posture derives from a technical term of painting. See Brissenden and I, viii, n. 2; II, vi, n. 6; II, ix, n. 3 above. Hogarth devotes chapter 16 (“Of Attitude,” 135–37) of his Analysis of Beauty (1753) to the topic.
2. angle of incidence: the angle made by the chord of the arc of a curved “plane,” or by the line of a flat plane, with the line of travel.
3. cyclopædia of arts and sciences: This is one of a number of Tristram’s characterizations of his work. Here it is linked as a book of knowledge to Chambers, on whom he so frequently draws, and to those works that Northrop Frye has dubbed “anatomies,” satires that look at the whole of something by intellectually analyzing their parts, such as Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy and Swift’s A Tale of a Tub. Sterne may echo the latter here. For the tradition of which Sterne is a part, see D. W. Jefferson, “Tristram Shandy and the Tradition of Learned Wit,” Essays in Criticism 1 (1951): 225–48.
4. line of beauty: The allusion to Hogarth’s Analysis of Beauty (ch. 9) again (see vi and ix, nn. 6 and 3, above) paved the way for Sterne to obtain an engraving by Simon Ravenet from Hogarth’s design for this scene in the second edition. He wrote to a friend, Richard Berenger, to ask “no more than ten Strokes of Howgarth’s witty Chissel, to clap at the Front of my next Edition of Shandy” and “The loosest Sketch in Nature, of Trim’s reading the Sermon to my Father &c” (Letters, 100).
5. fall upon their noses: Brissenden (100) suggests that Sterne parodies Leonardo da Vinci’s A Treatise of Painting (trans. 1721), which claims that “did not the weight of the Body, and of the Burthen … thus make an Equilibrium, the Man of necessity must tumble to the Ground” (120).
6. The SERMON: The nature of Sterne’s Latitudinarian Protestantism has been the subject of some dispute. For differing views of the issue see Isabel Rivers, Reason, Grace, and Sentiment: A Study of the Language of Religion and Ethics in England, 1660–1780 1:25–88 and W. M. Spellman, The Latitudinarians and the Church of England, 1660–1700 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1993). The Florida edition firmly backs the idea that Sterne’s religion was basically Augustinian Christianity. For the close relation of this sermon to some of Sterne’s others, especially “Self knowledge,” see Hammond and Florida.
7. have an old house over his head: bring trouble upon himself; variant of a proverbial phrase (OED).
8. I know nothing of architecture: Slop’s denial satirizes John Burton, who had published Monasticon Eboracense (1758), a church history of Yorkshire containing much about architecture.
9. never … before: an error or a delayed joke: Trim tells the whole story in IX, iv–vii, five years before Tristram is born (1713).
10. Wise Man … hardly … before us: Wisdom 9:16.
11. plann’d: laid out as alternatives. New suggests the word is an error for “placed.”
12. his heart condemns him not: “Or if our heart condemn us, God is greater than our heart, and knoweth all things. Beloved, if our heart condemn us not, then have we confidence toward God” (1 John