The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman - Laurence Sterne [299]
4. Socrates … school of Athens: One of the most renowned artists of the Renaissance, Raphael (Raffaello Sanzio, 1483–1520) painted the large School of Athens (1509), a depiction of ancient philosophers including Socrates, on a wall of the Stanza della Segnatura of the Vatican. The description and putative words of Socrates’s argument come nearly verbatim from Jonathan Richardson, An Account of Some of the Statues, Bas-reliefs, Drawings and Pictures in Italy (London, 1722), 212, as Brissenden noted (101, n. 1). The attractive young man (Tristram’s “libertine”) whom Socrates engages is Alcibiades, who appears in Plato’s Symposium.
5. Garrick: This public hint to David Garrick that Tristram Shandy would make a good play follows on Sterne’s telling Garrick in a letter of January 27, 1760, that he might write “a Cervantic comedy” based on his first four volumes (Letters, 87).
CHAP. VIII
1. Though man … sense of it: Sterne draws again on his sermon “Trust in God” (Sermons, 4:322–23). Toby’s opposition to Walter here accords with Sterne’s position in the sermon. Sterne’s metaphor offers a notion of mechanism opposed to Thomas Hobbes’s conception of the “secret springs” of self-love.
2. GEORGE or EDWARD: compliments to the new king George III (1738–1820), who ascended to the throne in 1760, and his brother, the Duke of York (1739–67). Work notes that Sterne was in the Duke’s company before writing this passage.
CHAP. IX
1. anew: enough (enow).
CHAP. X
1. story of a roasted horse: obsolete phrase for a cock-and-bull story, a tale of a tub, to use two synonymous phrases with resonance in this narrative, or a shaggy dog story. Such a story is long, pointless, and despite what Tristram says, often funny. He uses the phrase in his Fragment, ed. New (1088).
2. conceits: here, “ideas.”
3. Diana’s temple … Longinus: Florida convincingly links this passage to a note in William Smith’s translation (1739) of the putative Dionysius Longinus’s On the Sublime (first century), which gives one of the bombastic Hegesias’s “frigid expressions” when the temple of the goddess Diana at Ephesus burned down (113). Longinus, whom Sterne described as “the best critic the eastern world ever produced” (“Search the Scriptures,” Sermons, 4:394), was greatly admired from the late seventeenth century on. See Samuel Holt Monk, The Sublime (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960).
4. Avicenna and Licetus … foetus: Both Avicenna and Licetus come from Adrien Baillet’s accounts in Des enfants célèbres (originally published 1688) in the posthumous edition of his vast Jugemens des savans sur les principaux ouvrages des auteurs (1685 and following). Avicenna (Abo-Ali) is said to have read Aristotle’s Metaphysics forty times and learned it by heart without understanding it (1725 ed., 6:71); there is no such parallel in “Liceti.” Sterne’s footnote on Fortunio Liceti, taken with few changes (5:240), reads in part: “This fœtus was no bigger than the palm of the hand, but his father, having examined him as a doctor and having found that he was something more than an embryo, transported him living to Rapallo [Italy], where he was seen by Jerome Bardi and other physicians. They found that he was missing nothing essential to life, and his father, in order to make an experiment of his experience, undertook to achieve the work of nature, and to work at the formation of the infant with the same artifice as that with which chickens are hatched in Egypt. He instructed a nurse in everything that she had to do, and having put his son in a properly accommodated oven, he successfully raised him and made him achieve his necessary growth by the uniformity of a foreign heat measured exactly by the degrees of a thermometer, or another equivalent instrument. (See Mich[ael] Giustinian, in the Scrit[ori] Liguri, 223.488.)
One would certainly still be very satisfied at the industry