The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman - Laurence Sterne [310]
3. Nicholas Tartaglia: Toby could have read Nicholas Tartaglia’s (Niccolò Tartaglia, c. 1499–1557) Three Bookes concerning the Arte of Shooting (London, 1588; Italian ed., 1554).
4. hussive: a housewife; i.e., a small carrying case for needles, pins, thread, scissors, etc. (OED).
5. duodecimo: a small book composed of printer’s sheets folded into twelve leaves.
6. John de la Casse: Giovanni della Casa (1503–56), archbishop of Benevento, was highly unlikely, given his age at death, to have spent forty years on any work. Tristram confuses his Galateo, published posthumously (1558) and Englished as The Refin’d Courtier, with De laudibus sodomiae seu pederastiae, della Casa’s early book in praise of sodomy and pederasty.
7. Rider’s Almanack: Cardanus Rider’s very short popular almanac, much shorter than della Casa’s.
8. primero: a fashionable Renaissance gambling card game.
9. fed … famous: See III, xx, n. 32 above for Colley Cibber’s remark.
10. Methusalah: “all the days of Methuselah were nine hundred sixty and nine years …” (Genesis 5:27).
11. Term-time: the period when the law courts are in session.
12. life of a writer … state of warfare: another allusion (as Florida notes) to Warburton, who called “the state of authorship … a state of war” in Remarks on Several Occasional Reflections (1744), and Sterne may also be remembering Alexander Pope’s earlier comment that “The life of a Wit is a warfare upon earth …” (Preface, Poems, 1717).
13. clack of nurses … nonsense of the old women: echoes Locke on education’s production of ideas we take to be innate in Essay (1.3.22): “doctrines … derived from no better original than the superstition of a nurse, or the authority of an old woman.” Noted by Pål Anderson, “Scholia” 32 (2000): 402.
14. drawing a sun-dial: engaged in purposeless activity.
CHAP. XVII
1. great weights upon small wires: proverbial; Tilley W255.
2. August the 10th, 1761: He writes to John Hall-Stevenson of beginning vol. V on July 29 and to another correspondent of “these two volumes” on September 21 (Letters, 142, 143).
3. ******* ***: chamber pot; spelled out elsewhere.
4. **** *** ** *** ******: piss out of the window.
5. well hung: The sexual pun combines the phrase aptly applied to window sashes with (as the OED puts it) “Furnished with large pendant organs; spec. (of a man) having large genitals.”
CHAP. XVIII
1. accessaries … principals: Although this is true of high treason, it was not the case for murder. See NLD, “Accessary.”
CHAP. XIX
1. prevented: anticipated.
2. Lewis the fourteenth: The use of the enemy’s (Louis XIV was King of France when Toby fought) church bells, lead roofing, etc., for ordnance and implements of war was widespread.
CHAP. XX
1. Steenkirk: This account of the Battle of Steenkirk (July 24, 1692) comes from Tindal (3:208–9), sometimes verbatim. Heinrich Maastricht, Count Solms (1636–93), according to Tindal, was “envious of the English and… [jealous] of the Prince of Wirtemberg’s commanding the attacks.…”
2. priests and virgins … toit: This is Sterne’s response to a letter from Warburton, which had become public, urging that “one who was no more than even a man of spirit would wish to laugh in good company, where priests and virgins may be present” (Letters, 119). First noted by Michael O. Houlahan, “William Warburton and Tristram Shandy,” Notes and Queries 217 (October 1972), 378–79.
CHAP. XXI
1. picquetted to death: forced as a military punishment to stand with one hand tied up as high as it can reach, and the toe of the opposite foot on the point of a stake (picket). See Edward Phillips, OED, “picket” sb. 2. This form of torture was voguish in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
2. Cutt’s … Leven’s: See Tindal (4, 209). Mackay has been mentioned as dying at Steenkirk (see IV, iii, n. 1 above). James Hamilton, Earl of Angus, was also killed. The other commanders named were Baron John Cutts of Gowran (brigade of Mackay’s division); Sir Charles Graham (regiment); and David Melville, third Earl of Leven (regiment).