The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman - Laurence Sterne [290]
9. Michael Angelo … gusto: While these too are clichés, Sterne may echo Hogarth’s “grandeur of gusto” (Analysis, v), though Hogarth would not say that Michelangelo lacks grace.
10. Justinian … digest: from Chambers on “Civil Law” (almost all of the same information is in “Code,” which Sterne clearly uses in III, xxxiv). The Emperor Justinian (483–565 CE) codified Roman law in 529 (Corpus Juris Civilis) and digested the laws four years later.
11. By the splendour of God: the usual oath of William the Conqueror (c. 1028–87), according to the historians of the day, though as a Norman, he spoke French.
CHAP. XIII
1. julap: i.e., julep. a sweet drink that also served as a medicinal base known by the same name.
2. child is where it was: The phrase suggests a difficult birth.
3. reduction of Lisle … year Ten: Work notes that Lille was actually captured by the English in 1708. The mutiny took place in 1712. Lille is in northern France, near the Belgian border; Ghent is in northwestern Belgium.
CHAP. XIV
1. in petto: literally, in the breast: in secret (Latin).
2. Tully’s second Philippick: Cicero’s longest attack on Mark Antony, so called because his speeches imitated those of Demosthenes against Philip, king of Macedon.
3. BAMBINO: Italian for “child” or “baby”; OED lists Sterne first to use it in English.
4. by head and shoulders: proverbial: forcibly; usually figurative.
5. trunk-hose: These short, baglike breeches covering the hips and upper thighs (OED) went out of style in the early seventeenth century.
CHAP. XVI
1. granado: grenade.
2. posset: the curdled milk vomited by a baby (Yorkshire dialect).
CHAP. XVII
1. difficult to know: John Burton asserts the difficulty of knowing “the Head of the Child from its Breech or Knees” in his Letter to Smellie, 97.
CHAP. XVIII
1. pantoufles: slippers, spelled the French way.
2. duration and its simple modes: Sterne had already drawn on Locke’s chapter “Of Duration, and its simple modes” in II, v and viii (Essay, 2.14). Sterne’s chapter makes heavy use of Locke’s, though at times modified by contemporary ideas (see Florida) and his own satiric purposes.
3. To understand … thinking: verbatim as Sterne’s footnote indicates (Essay, 2.14.3), apart from a few phrases. The quotation starts before the italics, and the last italicized phrase is Sterne’s. Locke speaks of infinity at 2.14.30, but not here.
4. we are so used … us: very close to Locke verbatim (Essay, 2.14.19), except that the mention of clocks and Walter’s parenthetical remark recall the events of I, i and Locke on the association of ideas.
5. regular succession of ideas … in train just like: Locke discusses the “regular succession of ideas” in Essay (2.14.12): “This train, the measure of other successions.” While Locke does not speak of “rapid succession,” he does talk of “the quickness and slowness of the succession of those ideas one to another” (2.14.9).
6. images … candle: verbatim from Locke (Essay, 2.14.9).
7. smoak-jack: The OED gives this as the first figurative (and now obsolete) usage of “the head, as the seat of confused ideas.”
CHAP. XIX
1. Lucian … Rabelais … Cervantes: Lucian of Samosata (120–post 180). Writers taken as the muses of satire or comedy, as Fielding invokes them (among others) in Tom Jones, XIII, i. Citing such lists of precessors was a standard convention of novelists. Keymer also gives as examples, Tobias Smollett, the popular Edward Kimber, and the little-known Adolphus Bannac (32–33).
2. devoutly to be wished for: Hamlet 3.1.63.
3. Ontologic: Sterne is the first to use this adjective for “Being” in any form (OED).
CHAP. XX
1. the siege of Messina next summer: One can argue here that neither Trim nor Toby knows it at this time, but the “mortars” will prove useful in July 1719 when the siege of Messina in Sicily enabled the British and their allies to take the city from the Spanish by October. Walter’s comments in ch. xxii and