• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

2. Life of Socrates: possibly a satire on John Gilbert Cooper’s Life of Socrates (1759) and the dispute it occasioned between Cooper and Warburton. For details, see Florida.

3. Socrates’s oration … disturbance: This rendition combines Montaigne’s version of Socrates’s speech with the most famous of Hamlet’s soliloquies: “transmigration” and “annihilation” occur in Montaigne’s Plato, as does “a profound Sleep, without Dreams” (3.12, 457–58). Montaigne praises the “inimaginable loftiness” of the speech (459), as Tristram praises his father’s “heroic loftiness.” Although what Hamlet says of dreams and sleep runs counter to Montaigne’s Socrates (2.1.59–67), “To be, or not to be” (2.1.5) is verbatim, and Tristram’s “entering upon a new and untried state of things” describes Hamlet’s dilemma “Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer / The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, / Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, / And by opposing, end them” (2.1.56–59). Many scholars since Sterne’s time have discussed the importance of Montaigne for Shakespeare.

4. That we and our … Josephus: Sterne takes Eleazer’s oration not from Flavius Josephus, De Bello Judaico (Of the Jewish War), but nearly verbatim (rearranged) from John Donne’s account of it in Biathanatos (1646), 54, though what Donne reports of the Indian philosophers is different. See W. G. Day, “Sterne, Josephus and Donne,” Notes and Queries, n. s. 17 (1970): 94.

5. Alexander … Babylon: “Life of Alexander,” Plutarch, Lives, trans. John Dryden et al. (London, 1701), 6:91.

6. maroders: marauders (a typical spelling).

7. By water … Alexandria: Tristram traces the route for Alexander’s Eastern knowledge to reach the West (known as the translatio studii, literally, translation of studies) around India (the route around the Cape of Good Hope at the tip of Africa and thence to Europe was not known) through the Gulf of Aden to the Red Sea and then gives alternate routes to Jidda, the port of Mecca in Saudi Arabia, or else farther north to El Tor or Suez in Egypt on the west bank of the Gulf of Suez, ending in Egypt’s library of Alexandria, a city on the Mediterranean Sea from which it would reach Europe. Coptos, now occupied by Qift on the right bank of the Nile, was the last stop on a caravan route.

CHAP. XIII

1. Job’s … such a man: Sterne satirizes Warburton’s reading of the Book of Job as an allegorical account of the Babylonian captivity in The Divine Legation of Moses (1738–41). See Jonathan Lamb, “The Job Controversy, Sterne, and the Question of Allegory,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 24 (1990): 1–19.

2. pleading: In the margin of Cotton’s Montaigne, the speech is described as “Socrates his pleeding” (3.12, 457), a translation of Montaigne’s “plaidoyer.”

CHAP. XV

1. farce: probably from the “Life of Rabelais” in Ozell’s edition, in which Rabelais’s last words are given as “Let down the curtain, the farce is done” (1: xviii). Tristram picks up the theatrical metaphor (“first act”).

2. S’death: a pun on the oath “By His (Christ’s) death.”

3. Caprichio to Calliope: i.e., to play a capriccio, a lively, free-form composition (a caprice), to the muse of epic poetry.

4. Cremona … Jew’s trump: Cremona is the Italian town where the best and most expensive violins were made. Sterne is the first entry for the term in the OED. The Jew’s trump (Jew’s harp) is a simple instrument held between the teeth and plucked.

5. Apollo … fiddle after me: Apollo was sometimes depicted playing a violin, as in Palma Giovane’s painting Apollo and Marsyas, rather than the more familiar lyre.

CHAP. XVI

1. Xenophon: Xenophon’s Cyropaedia (The Education of Cyrus, after 370 BCE). Martinus Scriblerus’s father Cornelius had written such “Treatises of Education” (Memoirs, 97).

2. scattered … adolescence: closely parodies Obadiah Walker’s Preface to Of Education (1673): “I … chused to gather up disorderly and bind together, such scattered counsels and notions …” (A4r). See John M. Turnbull, “The Prototype of Walter Shandy’s Tristra-pædia,” Review of