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By Root 1694 0

follow? … if the Sun go out of the Zodiack?” (152). Walker uses a “battel” (153) where Walter will use a “white bear.” The term may come from a Yorkshire clergyman’s recent recollection of the use of this phrase to describe “a peculiar term for extravagant Conceits … in the compositions of preachers. I think we called them white Bears; meaning thereby, such Emblems, or Similes, as were too bold and striking to be easily forgotten; and yet, from some strange Impropriety or Oddness in them, could not be remembered but with discredit to the brains that formed them” (Thomas Sharp, “Discourse II” [1756], in Discourses on Preaching [1787], 25). See Mark Loveridge, “Walter’s White Bear in Tristram Shandy,” Notes and Queries 244 (1999): 358–60.

2. barren … magazine of conceptions: Walker promises “a Magazin [storehouse] of conceptions” and speaks of “barren” subjects (144).

VOL. VI

CHAP. I

1. Jack Asses: emblems of dullness, as on Alexander Pope’s frontispiece to the Dunciad; here, the reviewers.

2. G-sol-re-ut: an especially high, shrill note. Cf. Rabelais, (2.31; 2:240).

CHAP. II

1. ten predicaments: Although derived from Aristotle, Sterne has Walker’s use of them in mind (152ff.).

2. Vincent Quirino … Cardinal Bembo: drawn from Baillet’s account of “Querinus,” which mentions the great Italian Humanist Pietro Bembo in his Des enfants célèbres, Jugemens des savans (5.1.40). Baillet says 4,500 theses.

3. Grotius … Lipsius: All these European scholarly prodigies and their works appear in Walker (ch. 10) or Baillet or both, sometimes verbatim. “Substantial forms” are an Aristotelian method of learning successfully derided by Locke and others. The footnote from Baillet contests Yorick’s claim about Lipsius: “the first day of his life,” not “the day of his fleshly birth but that on which he began to use his reason.” That is, Lipsius was said to have written a poem at nine. Baillet admires the wit of the remark.

CHAP. III

1. destruction … nose: Syphilis causes the bridge of the nose to collapse.

CHAP. IV

1. fomentation: like a cataplasm, a poultice, or warm compress, usually medicated.

CHAP. V

1. Marcus Antoninus … conception: Walter’s account of Marcus Antoninus (121–80) comes nearly verbatim from Walker, 48.

2. person … about my son: Walker, Locke, and others have a good deal to say about tutors.

3. There is … flail: verbatim from Walker, 228.

4. Democritus … Protagoras: For Democritus, see V, 2nd epigraph, n. 3 above. Like Democritus, a Greek philosopher born in Abdera, Protagoras (c. 485–c. 410 BCE) was a Sophist. This story appears in Thomas Stanley’s account of Protagoras, History of Philosophy (London, 1687), 768.

5. the governor … fingers in company: This comes rearranged and abridged along with the prohibitions on pointing to “carrion and excrement” following the Erasmus quotation from Walker’s (not Pellegrini’s) description of the student, not the tutor (226–28).

6. Erasmus: from the first colloquy, “Forms of Salutation,” Colloquia Familiaria (1522–33).

7. I will have him … brave: Like the prohibitions above, these qualities of the student, not the tutor, are taken almost entirely from Walker (81–82), though Yorick’s “humble,” “gentle tempered,” and “good” do not appear there. Faceté is “facetious”; argute, “acute.”

CHAP. VI

1. Dendermond … allies: September 1706 in Flanders.

2. Ask my pen,—it governs me,—I govern not it: Cf. “my pen governs me—not me my pen” (Letters, 394).

3. roquelaure: cloak of the period reaching only to the knee.

CHAP. VII

1. death-watch: i.e., the death watch beetle, a wood borer of several species, supposed superstitiously by its ominous clicking to foretell death.

2. Breda: a town in the Netherlands that served as winter quarters. For Leven and Angus, see V, xxi, n. 2 above.

CHAP. VIII

1. a natural and a positive law: Natural law, which had its sources in Aristotle and Roman orators and jurists, was a Renaissance development which stressed reason. Positive law is officially laid down or imposed, often but not necessarily religious.

2. siege … into a blockade: