The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman - Laurence Sterne [308]
2. intaglio: a gemstone with a figure or figures incised below the surface (Italian).
3. Rapin … church: Sterne gently mocks his chief source for English history, Paul Rapin de Thoyras’s History of England, because at the end of a number of his volumes he inserts a chapter on the “State of the English Church.”
CHAP. VI
1. upon the tapis: partial translation of the French idiom sur le tapis (upon the tablecloth, meaning “on the table,” under consideration).
2. Dardanells: The Dardanelles is the strait, four miles across at its widest point, separating Europe from the westernmost tip of Asia Minor.
3. Job’s stock: In the end, Job had “fourteen thousand sheep, and six thousand camels, and a thousand yoke of oxen, and a thousand she asses” (Job 42:12).
4. Cato, and Seneca, and Epictetus: Marcus Porcius Cato the Elder, known as Cato the Censor (234–149 BCE), orator and statesman; Epictetus (55–c. 135), Greek philosopher associated with the Stoics and admired for his morality. For Lucius Annæus Seneca, see ch. iii, n. 2 above.
5. point, or turn: poetic or oratorical refinements. Johnson defines a “point” as “the sting of an epigram,” and a “turn” is “the manner of adjusting the words of a sentence.” Johnson’s definition of “elegy” is relevant: “A short poem without points or turns.”
CHAP. VII
1. Locke … words: Essay, 3.9.
2. Whitsontide … Shrovetide: Whitsuntide is the season of Whit Sunday (the seventh Sunday after Easter, and the days following). Shrovetide is the Sunday before Lent (Quinquagesima) and the two following days (OED), a time of merriment.
3. stocks and stones: Burton (3.2.1.2, 438), a passage he uses again for a pair of phrases in ch. ix below. “Stock” here is “a log, or block of wood.” The pairing was commonplace.
4. constitution in church and state: a parody of the claim of the popular orator Thomas Sheridan that oratory is more necessary to “the flourishing state of [Great Britain’s] constitution and government” than that of any other nation ever (A Discourse … introductory to His Course of Lectures on Elocution [1759], 5). Trim was introduced with a comment on his “elocution,” so Sterne may have this development in mind as early as 1759.
5. nor are we angels … imaginations: nearly verbatim in Sermons (4:402).
6. seven senses: See II, xix, n. 19 above.
7. the eye: Sight was most often given primacy over the other senses.
8. Barbati: bearded ones; i.e., philosophers.
9. meditate … upon Trim’s hat: as one would upon a death’s head, as a memento mori.
CHAP. VIII
1. green-gowns, and old hats: sexual puns: “To give a girl a green-gown” is “to tumble her on the grass” (OED), associated as early as 1602 with loss of chastity, and an “old hat” is “a woman’s privities” (Grose).
CHAP. IX
1. Are we not … corruption: The biblical sources include Isaiah 40:6 (“All flesh is grass, and all the goodliness thereof is as the flower of the field”); Job 10:9 (“thou hast made me as the clay”) and others to this effect; and 1 Corinthians 15:50 (“flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God; neither doth corruption inherit incorruption”).
2. pumkin … heart: taken from Burton, substituting “pumkin” for “gourd” and “pippin” for “pepon” (3.2.1.2, 438).
CHAP. X
1. in hot pursuit … not felt: Verbally echoes Bacon’s “Of Death” and follows his idea: “He that dies in an earnest pursuit, is like one that is wounded in hot blood” (Essays, 14).
2. by creeping into the worst calf’s skin: Montaigne says that if someone could avoid death “though by creeping under a Calves skin, I am one that should not be ashamed of the shift” (“That to study Philosophy, is to learn to dye” [1.19, 110]).
CHAP. XI
1. Nile: The myth that life was formed from the mud of the Nile was ancient and widespread. Florida quotes Dryden’s version from All for Love (5.6.153–56).
CHAP. XII