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2. AMBITION: Toby typically represents his role as soldier as defensive. The appeals to glory and ambition are sometimes reprehended by Sterne as preacher and by Christian moralists more generally.

3. Posterity … Legation of Moses, or the Tale of a Tub: Sterne knew that William Warburton’s The Divine Legation of Moses (1738–41), one of the targets of his satire elsewhere in the book, was unlikely to have the same fate with posterity as Jonathan Swift’s A Tale of a Tub (1704), dedicated to “Prince Posterity” and one of Tristram Shandy’s models.

4. days … more precious … than the rubies … light clouds of a windy day, never to return more: This poignant passage is full of biblical echoes, though the emphases are different in the Bible: “She is more precious than rubies” (Proverbs 3:15); “As the cloud is consumed and vanisheth away: so he that goeth down to the grave shall come up no more” (Job 7:9); “As for man, his days are as grass: as a flower of the field, so he flourisheth. For the wind passeth over it, and it is gone” (Psalms 103:15–16).

5. Heaven have mercy upon us: “Lord have mercy upon us” is part of the Evening Prayer spoken by the minister while kneeling, and also part of the burial of the dead.

CHAP. IX

1. ejaculation: a short prayer in an emergency (OED), but probably in contradistinction to that other ejaculation (or lack of one) with Jenny in VII, xxix. Sterne uses the same double entendre when forced to share a bedroom with a woman at an inn near the conclusion of A Sentimental Journey: “I begg’d a thousand pardons, but insisted it was no more than an ejaculation …” (6:164).

CHAP. XI

1. assent … proposition … understand … had no ideas … term of art: Echoes Locke’s inquiries about “ready assent given to a proposition, upon first hearing and understanding the terms” (1.1.18, 57) and one of his remedies for the abuse of words: “to use no word without a signification.… This rule will not seem altogether needless to any one who shall take the pains to recollect how often he has met with such words as instinct, sympathy, …&c., … so made use of as he might easily conclude that those that used them had no ideas in their minds” (3.11.8, 512).

2. godfathers and godmothers promised: The child promises through them “to renounce the devil and all his works, to believe in God, and to serve him [as well as] to hear Sermons; and learn the Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, and the Ten Commandments, in the vulgar tongue, and all other things which a Christian ought to know and believe to his soul’s health.…” See “The Ministration of Publick Baptism of Infants” in the Book of Common Prayer.

3. tenant for life: By the terms of her marriage settlement, Widow Wadman does not own her property.

4. piano … fortissimè: soft; most strongly (properly fortissimo), or “very loud.”

5. sacrament day: a day on which Holy Communion is celebrated. Typically, but not necessarily, the first Sunday of each month, which puts Walter in mind of business to be carried out the first Sunday night of each month.

CHAP. XII

1. temperance … chastity: “To keep my body in temperance, soberness, and chastity” are among the duties towards one’s neighbor in the Anglican Catechism in the Book of Common Prayer.

2. sniveling virtue of Meekness: The Bible is full of praise for meekness (e.g., Matthew 5:5: “Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth”). Sterne’s sermons are at odds with Walter’s opinion.

CHAP. XIII

1. gummous: like gum.

2. plumb-lift: straight-up lift (or perhaps, to pull out like the plumb of a fishing rod); apparently Sterne’s coinage.

3. Dutch commentator: a watchword for pedantry.

4. Ludovicus Sorbonensis: This nonexistent scholar is clearly a Sorbonne professor. The Greek means “an exterior thing or matter.”

5. the soul and body are joint-sharers: Cf. III, iv, n. 1. Variations on this idea are also expressed by Yorick in Sentimental Journey and Sterne in his sermons and letters. Cf. Sermon 43, “Efficacy of Prayer” (4:407).

CHAP. XIV

1. thersitical: like that of Thersites; a watchword