The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman - Laurence Sterne [317]
7. Bayfius: Lazarus Bayfius, French scholar, Opus de re vestimentaria (Work on Clothing, 1631).
8. fibula: a brooch or fastener (Latin). First edition has “tibula.”
9. lost the horse, but not the saddle: To “win the horse, but lose the saddle” is proverbial.
CHAP. XX
1. Poco-curante: literally, one who cares little; from Voltaire’s character by this name in Candide (ch. 25). OED credits Sterne with the first use in English.
CHAP. XXI
1. Marlborough: John Churchill, first Duke of Marlborough (1650–1722), commander in chief of the British forces during the War of the Spanish Succession from nearly the end of William III’s reign (1701) through much of Anne’s (1711).
2. the first … place: Noting the italics, Florida finds that John Muller, A Treatise containing the Elementary Part of Fortification (1746), specifies this exact distance.
CHAP. XXII
1. post-morning: time at which the mail arrives; the OED’s only example.
2. Gazette: The London Gazette, the official government newspaper.
3. chamade: drummed signal to parley (French).
4. Liege and Ruremond: Flemish cities captured by Marlborough on October 14, 1702 (Liège is now part of Belgium), and October 7, 1702 (Ruremonde is in the Netherlands), respectively.
CHAP. XXIII
1. Amberg … Limbourg: Captured in 1703, the first three are in Germany, the latter two in the Netherlands.
2. Ghent … Flanders: The first two, cities in Flanders, were not captured until 1708. Brabant, now split between Belgium and Holland, includes Brussels and Antwerp.
3. Proteus: the shape-shifting sea god of Greek myth.
4. Landen … Dendermond: battles (except Landen, a mistake for Landau) of 1704–06. Sterne was taking his names from the marginal notes of Tindal; hence he put Drusen instead of the correct Drusenheim.
5. The next year: 1708.
6. succedaneum: substitute (Latin).
7. desiderata: things desired (Latin).
CHAP. XXIV
1. Turkish tobacco pipes: hookahs.
2. Montero-cap … as the word denotes: not a mounted soldier’s cap, but a hunter’s (literally, mountaineer’s) cap with flaps (see OED); from the Spanish montera.
3. Lower Deule … river: the battle at Lille, on the Deûle River, and the siege was indeed “the most bloody.” Tindal, who puts the loss of the battle at one thousand rather than Tristram’s “above eleven hundred,” claims “the French lost between six and seven thousand men … and the Allies near eight thousand” (4:87) during the entire seige. New points out that the total loss is put by modern scholars at 23,000 dead.
4. ramallie wig: The battle of Ramillies in 1706 was one of Marlborough’s greatest victories. The wig commemorating it is characterized by a long plait behind tied with bows at top and bottom, or just at the bottom (see OED).
CHAP. XXV
1. genius: here in the sense of “attendant spirit.”
2. clod of the valley: Job 21:33.
3. rosemary: “There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance” (Hamlet, 5.5.175).
4. lips … plain: Isaiah 32:4; 35:6.
CHAP. XXVI
1. taggs and jaggs: of similar meaning: pendants cut and hanging from the clothing of which they are a part. See also xix, n. 4 above.
2. as sure as a gun: proverbial phrase.
CHAP. XXIX
1. theatre: Although Tristram uses theatrical language here and brings in once again his relationship to Garrick, “theatre” also means “the area of military operations.”
2. plainness … served your purpose: This characterization of Toby, though part of the plot, has much in common, both in content and in rhetoric, with Sterne’s characterization of his soldier father Roger in his “Memoirs of the Life and Family of the Late Rev. Mr. Laurence Sterne,” published and titled by his daughter: “[H]e was … of a kindly sweet Disposition—void of all Designe; & so innocent in his own Intentions, That he suspected no one, So that you might have cheated him ten times in a Day—if nine had not been sufficient” (Sterne’s Memoirs: A Hitherto Unrecorded Holograph, ed. Kenneth Monkman [Coxwold: The Laurence Sterne Trust, 1985], 15). In VI, xxxiv, Rhasis and Dioscorides are represented