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3. ACCUSING SPIRIT … chancery … RECORDING ANGEL: The basic notion probably derives from the book of all who “shall be delivered” (Daniel 12:1) and the “book of life” (Revelation 20:12). The Court of Chancery is the highest court, except for that of the House of Lords, in England. This sentimental passage was much admired by Sterne’s contemporaries.

CHAP. X

1. wheel … circle: Although the echo of Ecclesiastes 12:6 is clear, the phrasing has been traced by J. T. Parnell to John Norris of Bemerton’s sermon “The Importance of a Religious Life considered from the Happy Conclusion of it” in Practical Discourses Upon Several Divine Subjects (1691), 165–66. The context is significant for this deathbed scene: “When I shall lie faint and languishing upon my Dying Bed, with my Friends all sad about me, and my Blood and Spirits waxing cold and slow within; when I begin to reckon my Life not by the Striking of the Clock, but by the throbbings of my Pulse, every stroak of which beats a Surrender to the Pale Conqueror, in this great Ebb of Nature, when the Stream of Life runs low, Eccles. 12:6, and the Wheel at the Cistern can hardly turn round in its Circle … Many things there are that divert and engage our Thoughts in the course of our Life, but at the end of it, there is nothing that will be regarded by us, or afford us any Satisfaction, but a good Conscience” (“Scholia” 29–30 [1997]: 295–96). See also Parnell’s article “A Story Painted to the Heart? Tristram Shandy and Sentimentalism Reconsidered,” Shandean 9 (1997): 122–35.

2. wistfully: Melvyn New convincingly amends this from “wishfully” on the basis of a fair copy manuscript in Sterne’s hand given to Viscountess Spencer.

3. ligament: figuratively, “a tie, or bond of union” (OED).

CHAP. XI

1. WATER-LANDISH: Daniel Waterland (1683–1740), a conservative Anglican polemicist and former chancellor of York Cathedral.

2. tritical: trite. Swift had written “A Tritical Essay upon the Faculties of the Mind.”

3. N. B.: Nota bene: note well (Latin).

4. sermon … stolen … it: In Sterne’s “Rabelaisian Fragment,” Homenas, experiencing writer’s block, starts lifting a number of pages from Samuel Clarke “without any felonious intention in so doing” (1089). The eighteenth-century attitude toward such copying is complex. Sterne registers part of it here, but his own sermons frequently take passages verbatim from earlier sermon writers, a fact which he inadequately registers by referring in his preface to a “suspicion” that he may have borrowed some of what he says from others without crediting them (Sermons, 4:2). Some of these liftings were noted in the eighteenth century by Ferriar and Jackson. For a modern account that prints Sterne’s sermons and sources side by side, see Hammond, though his conclusions have been questioned. In his autobiography, Benjamin Franklin, a contemporary of Sterne who lived for a while in England, indicates both sides of the issue upon the discovery that a preacher he liked was copying his sermons from others: “This detection gave many of our party disgust, who accordingly abandoned his cause.… I stuck by him, however, as I rather approv’d his giving us good sermons composed by others, than bad ones of his own manufacture, tho’ the latter was the practice of our common teachers” (Autobiography and Other Writings, ed. Russel B. Nye [Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1958], 91).

5. Paidagunes: Pedagogue.

6. Altieri’s Italian dictionary: Ferdinando Altieri’s Dizionario Italiano ed Inglese: A Dictionary Italian and English (1726–27).

7. Yorick’s dramatic sermons: Sterne intended to publish his sermons as The Dramatic Sermons of Mr. Yorick, though he eventually dropped the adjective and added his own name on a second title page.

8. lentamente … l’arco upon that: Italian musical terms: lentamente, slowly; tenutè (tenuto), sustained; grave, serious; adagio, slowly and gracefully; a l’octava alta, in a high octave; Con strepito, clamorously; Scicilliana, slowly, as in a Sicilian dance; Alla