The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman - Laurence Sterne [302]
5. blot in my escutcheon: Here the figurative expression for “dishonor” becomes literal: an “escutcheon” is the shield on which the coat of arms appears.
6. by siege: by evacuation; hence the pun on “tail” in the proverbial phrase.
7. Homenas: Sterne originally used this name, drawn from Rabelais’s Bishop of Papimany (4.48ff.), footnoted as “a great loggerhead booby, that has neither wit nor breeding,” for a clergyman in his Fragment.
8. Montaigne … accident: The phrases that immediately follow (“had … accessible”) are verbatim from Cotton’s translation. See “Of the Education of Children” (1.25, 156).
CHAP. XXVI
1. Kysarcius … low countries: The bawdy puns extend from name to location.
2. my horse with me: proverbial.
3. To preach … heart: Although oppositions of heart and head were commonplace in the period, the idea is particularly important for Sterne the preacher as well as for Tristram. This passage echoes some of his comments (cf. “tinsel’d over with … words, which glitter, but convey little or no light to the understanding”) in “Search the Scriptures” (Sermons, 4:392), both in thought and in rhetoric. New calls attention to Anthony Blackwall’s The Sacred Classics Defended and Illustrated (1725), which influences the sermon verbally and Yorick’s ideas on rhetoric, but both also derive key terms from St. Paul (1 Corinthians 14:19): “Yet in the church I had rather speak five words with my understanding, that by my voice I might teach others also, than ten thousand words in an unknown tongue” (Robert Erickson in correspondence).
CHAP. XXVII
1. Zounds: [by] God’s wounds.
2. twelve-penny oath: The Profane Oaths Act of 1746 (19, II George, 19, c. 21) required this fine (the lowest) for common people (see NLD).
3. purtenance: “that which pertains or appertains, or forms an appendage, to that which is the principal thing” (OED).
4. Galligaskins: wide breeches worn in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but used jocularly for breeches in the eighteenth century (see Johnson).
5. a yard below: again, a pun on the meaning “penis.” See III, xl, n. 2 above.
6. Johnson’s dictionary: Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language (1755) was quickly recognized as the best English dictionary, though it did not have the most words of any.
7. temple of Janus … peace at least: Janus, the Roman god of doors and beginnings, faced two ways. They would be closed for peace; open for war.
8. Acrites or Mythogeras: Doubtful or Talebearer.
9. de Concubinis retinendis: of keeping Concubines (Latin).
10. compursions: pursings.
11. Asker: dialect (including Yorkshire) for a newt. Newts were thought to spit fire into the wounds made by their bites (Watt).
12. trifles light as air: Othello (3.3.322–24).
13. ***—*****: cod-piece.
14. dreams of philosophy … Shakespear … jest: two allusions to Hamlet: “There are more things in heav’n and earth, Horatio / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy (1.5.165–66); “a fellow of infinite jest” (5.1.184–85).
CHAP. XXVIII
1. a very devil: a play on the “printer’s devil,” the youngest apprentice in the printing house, often a messenger, characteristically blackened by freshly printed sheets.
2. de re concubinariâ: of the matter [thing] of concubinage (Latin). As elsewhere, Sterne puns bawdily on “thing.”
CHAP. XXIX
1. in nomino patriæ & filia & spiritum sanctos: Through ignorance of Latin the declensional endings are wrong. Although the phrase is rendered meaningless, it could refer as easily to the native land, the daughter, and the holy ghost instead of “In the name of the father, the son, and the holy ghost.” Sterne adapts this example from Ozell’s notes to Rabelais (1.19, 1:218, n. 8). See Day, “Sterne and Ozell,” English Studies 53 (1972): 434–36. Pope Zachary, not Leo III, issued the decree.
2. John Stradling’s: This name seems meant as a legal fiction. Perhaps, as Florida suggests, it relates to the Scriblerian “Stradling versus Stiles” (though that plaintiff is “Matthew Stradling”). Sterne would not miss that a stile is frequently