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4. nine months together: that is, since the first two volumes were published. He has in mind the reviewers mentioned in n. 6 below.

5. ding dong: Although Grose defines the phrase as “helter skelter,” it seems closer to “tooth and nail” (OED: “earnestly,” “with a will”). Trim and Toby similarly apply a catalogue of these overlapping phrases in V, xxi.

6. monthly Reviewers: Sterne may be referring not just to the reviewers of the Monthly Review but also to those of journals which came out monthly and only in the 1750s began publishing reviews rather than excerpts and epitomes. Sterne received highly favorable reviews until the Sermons appeared in May, at which point Owen Ruffhead in the Monthly Review called his method of publishing them as Yorick’s (though with his own name on a second title page) “the greatest outrage against Sense and Decency … since the first establishment of Christianity.…” (See Sterne: The Critical Heritage, 77.) For an account of Sterne’s early reputation, see Howes, ch. 1.

CHAP. V

1. redden’d … colour: Hogarth’s scale of colors goes up to seven (Analysis, p. 116), though Sterne seems to be using the notion of a scale (which may be behind his mixing of musical and painterly language) differently from Hogarth.

2. the sixth of Avison’s Scarlatti: the sixth concerto in the edition of Domenico Scarlatti’s Twelve Concertos (1744) published by the English composer Charles Avison (1709–70). The second movement of Scarlatti (1685–1757) is to be played passionately.

3. con strepito: with noise, noisily.

CHAP. VI

1. cornish: cornice.

2. buccinatory muscles: the muscles for blowing. Sterne is the first to use this adjectival form of the word (OED).

CHAP. VII

1. tire-tête, forceps and squirt: See above, II, xi, nn. 7 and 8.

2. Hymen: god of marriage.

CHAP. VIII

1. obstretical … caball-istical: These two may be what Lewis Carroll would later call “portmanteau words” (Sterne uses such words elsewhere as well), packing two meanings, and even two words, into one. Stretto is the musical marking for a short, quick measure (see OED); hence “obstretical” suggests the jingling of the obstetrical instruments. “Caball” means “horse”; the word may glance at “cabalistic.” A “scrip” is a small bag.

CHAP. IX

1. Great wits jump: Great minds think alike. Proverbial, though often with “good” instead of “great.”

2. proposition; millions … understanding … passion or interest: echoes Locke on the understanding: “a Million of other such Propositions” etc. (Essay, 1.2.18); “All men are liable to errour … by passion or interest …” (Essay, 4.20.17).

CHAP. X

1. a little man,——but of high fancy: cf. Rabelais: “a … merchant of a low stature, but high fancy” (3.16, 110). Cited by Florida.

2. he rushed into the duke of Monmouth’s affair: Charles II’s bastard son, James Scott (1641–85), Duke of Monmouth, attempted unsuccessfully to seize the throne from the unpopular James II in June 1685 and was executed in July.

3. bona fide: in good faith.

4. annulus … implication: anulus is Latin for “ring”; the Latin origins of “implication,” as Richard A. Lanham suggests (Tristram Shandy: The Games of Pleasure [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973], 63), can mean sexual intercourse.

5. Injuries come only from the heart: unidentified.

6. Cervantick gravity: Earlier seen as characteristic of Yorick (I, xii), this pose will soon be characterized as “affected seriousness.”

7. ERNULPHUS the bishop: bishop of Rochester from 1114 to 1124.

8. Textus … Episcopum: “Text of the Church of Rochester by Ernulphus the Bishop.” Sterne probably took the Latin text from Thomas Herne’s edition (Oxford, 1720), where the actual chapter is 35, not 25. The English version of the curse comes from The Gentleman’s Magazine 15 (1745), 490, where it is titled “The Pope’s Dreadful Curse” and described as in the possession of the Dean and Chapter of the church of Rochester, the source of Tristram’s footnote thanking them. Sterne