The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman - Laurence Sterne [332]
2. sinking genius: perhaps one fit for Pope’s Peri Bathous: or, … the Art of Sinking in Poetry.
3. Archbishop … Galatea: See V, xvi, n. 6 for the confusion of Galateo, a conduct book for courtiers, with one on sodomy. Sterne plays on the purple robes of the archbishop and on his investiture.
CHAP. XV
1. How our … world: Sterne has a similar sentence in his first sermon: “Our pleasures and enjoyments slip from under us in every stage of our life” (4:10).
2. strange creature … man: Sterne’s second sermon reflects “So strange and unaccountable a creature is man!” (4:14).
CHAP. XVI
1. perdue: from the French for “lost,” an obsolete usage derived suitably from a military term: “Placed in an extremely hazardous position, such as that of a ‘forlorn sentinel’ ” (sentinel perdue), advanced and alone (OED).
CHAP. XVII
1. Rousseau: Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Émile was translated as Emilius, or an Essay on Education (1763), and Sterne is interested in education throughout Tristram Shandy, but there were a number of ways for Sterne to know of Rousseau’s interest in a simple country life.
2. a bar length: Throwing the bar was a country sport.
3. Vestal: a jocular metaphor comparing the unmarried servant who lit the fire to the vestal virgins, priestesses who kept a perpetual fire in the Temple of Vesta.
CHAP. XX
1. [asterisks]: In A Tale of a Tub, Swift uses such a long series of asterisks to indicate a lacuna in the text.
2. translate: This term for rendering gestures in words, so important throughout Sterne’s fictions, is developed in Sentimental Journey, “The Translation. Paris” (6:76–78).
3. look at it: The widow Wadman seems to be following Walter’s advice on auxiliary verbs, as Florida notes.
CHAP. XXII
1. mysteries and riddles: See IV, xvii, n. 1.
2. Platonic exigences: Platonic love is one focus of the discussion of Plato’s commentators, drawn from Burton (3.1.1.2, 409), in VIII, xxxiii. Florida usefully quotes Chambers on Platonic love: “The world has a long time laugh’d at Plato’s notions.…”
3. causes for which matrimony was ordained: See below, chapter XXV, “The Eighteenth Chapter,” n. 6.
CHAP. XXIII
1. to play her cards herself: to follow her own wisdom or instinct.
2. ten-ace: At whist, the player holding “the first and third best Cards, and being the last Player” (Hoyle, quoted by OED) will win both when an unsuspecting player leads or throws into them.
CHAP. XXIV
1. fourscore ounces of blood: Although Tristram coughed up blood from his consumption, this very large amount comes from bloodletting. The fever did not reach a crisis or turning point (“uncritical”) which would lead to death or full recovery. See Sterne’s discussion of his fever in a letter of January 7–9[?], 1767 (Letters, 294).
2. serous or globular: “The Blood … separates into two Parts, one of a more glutinous and solid Texture, call’d the Globular, and the other of a more thin and fluid nature, called the Serous” (George Cheyne, The English Malady, 2.1.5, 118 [1733], partly quoted by OED).
3. aura of the brain: An aura is “a subtle emanation or exhalation from any substance” (OED).
4. CERVANTES … life: Sterne could have known of Cervantes’s lost hand from “An Account of the Author,” which prefaced the Motteux-Ozell translation. Cervantes himself speaks of writing in prison in “The Author’s Preface to the Reader.” For precedents for such invocations, see III, xix, n. 1.
5. Lyons … Lombardy … Italy: This passage and what follows may be taken as Sterne’s whetting of appetites for his Sentimental Journey through France and Italy (1768). He visited Italy in November 1766, staying until May (Cash, Later Years, ch. 6). Since Sterne died on March 18, 1768, within weeks of the publication of the first two volumes, he did not reach the Italian narrative. Curtis notes that an anecdote in