The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman - Laurence Sterne [311]
3. Landen: Aspects of this battle of July 29, 1693, are recounted by Trim in VIII, xix. Count Solms died of his wound within hours.
4. pell-mell … ounds: See the similar catalogue in III, v, and n. 5, on “Ding dong.” “ ’Ounds” is from the oath “by Christ’s wounds.”
CHAP. XXV
1. Confucius: foremost Chinese philosopher and political theorist (551–479 BCE). Watt suggests that Sterne’s note parodies “nonsensical allusion-hunting by political writers.” It may be, however, that Sterne had in mind the satirical attack on Tristram as “political writer” in Kunastrokius’s Explanatory Remarks, 42–45.
CHAP. XXVI
1. Fifty thousand … devils: Rabelais uses a similar locution in “The Author’s Prologue”: “I give myself fairly to an hundred thousand panniers full of devils” (2: vi).
CHAP. XXVII
1. lint and basilicon: material for dressing wounds, and an ointment.
2. de sede … Maimonides: the section “Of the basis or subject of circumcision” in John Spencer’s Of the Laws of Hebrew Ritual (1685), from which book Sterne obtains the Greek footnotes in the next chapter. In quoting Spencer, Sterne also plays with the identical name of the nobleman to whom he dedicates these two volumes. Moses Maimonides (1135–1204) was the greatest Jewish scholar of the Middle Ages. The list of nations comes from Spencer’s following section, “Origin and Antiquity of Circumcision” (1.4, 54). Florida notes that Sterne adds (characteristically) the Cappadocians from north and west Syria, now much of Turkey.
3. as follows: The use of lacunae is typical of Swift’s A Tale of a Tub, one of Sterne’s models.
4. SOLON and PYTHAGORAS: See IV, xvii, n. 2 above.
CHAP. XXVIII
1. ecliptic: the sun’s apparent circular orbit.
2. trine and sextil aspects … ascendents … lords of the genitures: Sterne picks up this astrological jargon from Burton (3.1.1.2, 416).
3. bo-peep: peek-a-boo.
4. Troglodytes: peoples on the coast of the Red Sea (literally, cave dwellers).
5. apothecaries … washer-women: The footnotes, taken from Spencer, translate as “a release from a terrible, hard to cure disease, called anthrax” (1.4.3, 45; like the next, from Philo Judaeus, Book of Circumcision); “Circumcised nations are the most prolific and populous” (1.4.3, 46); “for cleanliness’ sake” (not from Samuel Bochart, but Herodotus: Sterne miscopied or purposely took the wrong reference from Spencer).
6. ILUS: The footnote translates “Ilus is circumcised and made his allies do likewise” (1.4.3, 49; from Sanchuniathon, by way of Philo Byblius, c. 100). Spencer identifies Ilus as Saturn.
7. Pharoah-neco: Pharaoh-nechoh appears in 2 Kings 23:29–34 and elsewhere in the Bible. Defeated by Nebuchadnezzar, he was not contemporary with Ilus, if Ilus was a man.
8. polemic divines … practical divinity: This is an important opposition for all of Sterne’s work, though it helps to make clear some of his animus against Warburton, who wrote polemical volumes (The Divine Legation of Moses is one of the targets of Sterne’s satire) and argued for the necessity of polemics. The Latitudinarians in whose tradition Sterne wrote his own practical divinity, his Sermons, opposed the rancorous divisions that came about through arguing for doctrinal purity and led, as they saw it, to the English Civil War of the seventeenth century.
9. Gymnast and captain Tripet: The characters appear in Rabelais (1.24), which will be quoted in the following chapter.
CHAP. XXIX
1. which words … demi-pommadas: The quotation from Rabelais (1.35; 1:296–97) gives to both characters the verbatim actions of the aptly named Gymnast (except for abridgments and changing “my case goes backward” to “my case goes forward”). By applying this passage to the controversialists, Sterne’s strategy resembles that in Gulliver’s Travels, where Swift turns politicians into rope-walkers and shows them leaping over or creeping under sticks for rewards (1.3). In Rabelais’s chapter, Gymnast kills Tripet. en croup is “on the crupper or rump.” A demi- or half pomada is a vault upon a horse by placing one hand on the pommel of the saddle. The pomada