The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman - Laurence Sterne [300]
But when one recognizes that the infant lived nearly eighty-five years, and that he composed eighty different works, all fruits of long reading—one ought to realize that everything which is incredible is not always false, and that Appearance is not always on the side of truth. He was only nineteen when he composed Gonopsychanthropologia, on the Origin of the Human Soul. (Celebrated Children [1723], reviewed and corrected by M. [Bernard] de la Monnoye of the French Academy).” Sterne uses Baillet again in ch. xv and in VI, ii.
5. de omni scribili: of everything scribbled. Dick Hoefnagel notices a pun on “de omni scibili,” “of everything known or knowable,” which he reasonably suggests that Sterne picked up from Baillet along with the Avicenna anecdote (Baillet, 6:40). See “Sterne and Avicenna,” Notes and Queries, n. s. 28 (no. 4, August 1981): 305.
6. picking straws: meaningless activity.
CHAP. XII
1. Job’s … asses: Job had one thousand asses after his ordeals (Job, 42:12). (See also V, vi, n. 3 below.)
2. each to himself: a good example of Tristram’s third-person omniscient narration. At the outset of the fiction, he ascribes to his uncle Toby the information in chapter one.
CHAP. XIII
1. chairman: The sedan chair, a one-person vehicle, was carried by two chairmen who bore the weight in front and rear on a pair of poles.
2. day-tall critick: on the analogy of a worker hired and paid by the day (“daye-tale”; OED).
3. the middle of things, as Horace advises: This time Tristram gets it right. Horace recommends beginning in medias res (Ars Poetica, line 148), not ab ovo. Cf. I, iv, n. 3 above.
4. this propitious reign … now open’d to us: George III ascended to the throne on October 25, 1760.
CHAP. XV
1. God’s blessing … cloak: Don Quixote, 2.3.68; 4:304.
2. Montaigne … it: two passages from “Of Experience” (3.13, 396–97; 376–77) rearranged and joined nearly verbatim.
3. La Vraisemblance (as Baylet … Verité: The sentence from Baillet (“y” and “i” were interchangeable) is translated from Sterne’s note in ch. x, n. 4 above.
CHAP. XVII
1. riddles and mysteries—the most obvious … at a loss: The first phrase is probably a development of St. Paul’s “we see through a glass darkly” (literally, “by means of an enigmatic mirror”), 1 Corinthians 13:12. Sterne’s formula, however, has been traced by Florida to John Norris of Bemerton in Practical Discourses (1691), 2:238, and linked to Sterne’s sermon “Felix’s Behaviour towards Paul examined,” where the phrase is also used (Sermons, 4:182). The rest of Sterne’s language here comes verbatim from Locke’s consideration of the “Extent of Humane Knowledge” (Essay, 4.3.22) and is also used in “The Ways of Providence justified to Man” (Sermons, 4:415), where he clearly alludes to St. Paul (“darkly … as in a glass”). Norris is also indebted to this passage of Locke.
2. Pythagoras … Mahomet: Pythagoras (c. 580–c. 500 BCE) is best known as a mathematician, but was represented by Ovid as learned in the laws of Lycurgus and was represented in the Renaissance as a lawgiver. Plato (428/427–348/347 BCE) wrote the Laws. Solon (c. 630–c. 560 BCE) framed the constitution of Athens; Lycurgus (c. 390–c. 324 BCE) did the same for Sparta. The laws as well as the religion of Islam come from the Qur’an of Muhammad (570–632).
CHAP. XVIII
1. James Butler: See II, v, n. 6 above.
2. stick: cane.
CHAP. XIX
1. my own sins … Shandy-family: alludes to God’s “visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation.…” (Exodus 20:5).
2. child of wrath: Cf. “children of wrath,” Ephesians 2:3.
3. embryotic: embryonic (first usage in OED of this word).
4. radical heat and radical moisture: “Radical moisture,” synonymous with “animal spirits” as used in this paragraph (for which see I, i, n. 1), is sometimes perceived as nourishing the “radical heat” or flame of life. The relation between the two was contested by physicians.