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CHAP. XXXII

1. since Adam: Tristram puns on Robert Adam, the great Scottish architect (1728–92), who participated in designing the house of Edwin Lascelles, an acquaintance of Sterne’s, near York. See Sharon Long Damoff, “Laurence Sterne, Robert Adam, and the Lascelles Family,” Notes and Queries 45 (1998): 468.

2. time … a thing to pray for: Ecclesiastes 3:1–8. The familiar anaphoric list begins, “To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: A time to be born, and a time to die” (1–2). David Israelsky wrote about this allusion in an undergraduate eighteenth-century novel course. I am unaware of any earlier edition’s recognition of the source.

3. nice: careful, perhaps fastidious.

4. Jenny is: See I, xviii, n. 4 above.

5. Shandeism: This term, which puns on Deism, is used in a letter (June 1761) to his friend John Hall-Stevenson to characterize his own feelings: “if God, for my consolation under [my miseries] had not poured forth the spirit of Shandeism into me, which will not suffer me to think two moments upon any grave subject, I would else, just now lay down and die—die——and yet, in half an hour’s time, I’ll lay a guinea, I shall be as merry as a monkey—and as mischievous too, and forget it all …” (Letters, 139). He also writes of Shandeism in letters of March 19 and April 19, 1762, to David Garrick (Letters, 157–58; 161–63), echoing in the latter some of the language of his dedication: “by mere Shandeism sublimated by a laughter-loving people, I fence as much against infirmities, as I do by the benefit of air and climate” (163).

6. Sancho Pança: In Don Quixote (1.4.2; 2:28) Sancho decides that since the people whom he will (supposedly) rule over will be black, he’ll turn slave trader. Tristram renounces this goal. In his sermon “Job’s Account of the Shortness and Troubles of Life, considered,” Sterne writes: “Consider how great a part of our species in all ages down to this, have been trod under the feet of cruel and capricious tyrants, who would neither hear their cries, nor pity their distresses——Consider slavery——what it is——how bitter a draught, and how many millions are made to drink it …” (Sermons, 4:99). Sterne would later become a correspondent of the African Ignatius Sancho, who initiated the correspondence in a letter admiring Sterne’s Sermons (quoting the passage above) and Tristram Shandy. See IX, vi, n. 1.

7. vile cough: Tristram shares his bad health with Sterne.

8. pluck at your beards: In Shakespeare such an action is insulting and contemptuous. For example, Hamlet: “Who calls me villain, breaks my pate across, / Plucks off my beard, and blows it in my face” (2.2.572–73), and King John: “You are the hare, of whom the proverb goes, / Whose valour plucks dead Lyons by the beard” (2.1.137–38).

VOL. V

EPIGRAPHS

1. Dixero … dabis: Latin; this epigraph and the next appeared in the first edition. Both actually come from Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (“Democritus Junior to the Reader,” 77), which though unmentioned in the text will be an allusive presence throughout this installment of Tristram Shandy. All three are responses to Sterne’s critics, especially those complaining that a clergyman should not have written this book. In using Burton, he is adding another to his tradition of satirist priests (Rabelais and Swift are the main figures). Horace’s adapted words translate: “If I should speak too jocosely, this bit of liberty you will indulgently grant me.”

2. Si quis … Democritus dixit: If anyone should censure [me] as too light for a proper churchman or too biting for a decent Christian, it is not I but Democritus who speaks (Latin). The last eight words are Sterne’s Englishing of Burton and Burton’s own Latin; the rest is from Erasmus’s The Praise of Folly in Burton (76). For Democritus (c. 460–c. 370 BCE), known as the “laughing philosopher,” see VI, v, n. 4, and VII, iv, n. 3 below. A third epigraph appeared in the Dublin edition of 1762 and the so-called second edition of 1767