The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman - Laurence Sterne [333]
6. Sienna … Capua: Tristram goes from Lombardy and Milan (the latter is mentioned in Sentimental Journey, 6:77–78) in the north to Siena, one hundred and forty miles from Rome and the castle of Radicofani, seventy miles nearer Rome, ends at Capua, north of Naples, around one hundred and forty miles south of Rome. A Paul (paolo) is a small Italian silver coin, now obsolete.
7. keeps his temper: This is a sidelong hit at Tobias Smollett’s Travels through France and Italy (1766). Smollett comes in for some stronger attacks in Sentimental Journey as Smelfungus, the antitype of the sentimental traveler, whose book was “nothing but the account of his miserable feelings” (6:37).
8. voitures: carriages.
9. kindliest harmony vibrating: characteristic of sympathy.
10. Maria: This sentimental scene was much admired, and it was depicted by Angelica Kauffmann and a great number of other artists. Like the Lefever episode, it ends with a shift of tone. Probably this episode was another foretaste of Sentimental Journey, in which Yorick meets Maria, whom his friend “Mr. Shandy met with near Moulines” (6:149–54). Moulin is one hundred and sixty miles south of Paris, on the Loire.
11. sensible for short intervals: reflecting the view that the mad had “lucid intervals.”
CHAP. XXV
1. foam of Zeuxis his horse: Although Pliny tells several famous stories of Zeuxis, Nealces was the painter who threw a sponge at the canvas to represent the foam of a horse’s mouth. See C. Plinius Secundus, The History of the World Commonly Called the Natural History, trans. Philemon Holland (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964), 419.
2. cake-bakers of Lernè: See Rabelais (1.25; 1:257). Sterne chooses fewer than a dozen nouns from among the forty-four compound epithets on offer. “Doddipol,” like so many of the other terms, means “blockhead.” Lerné was in the former province of Poitou in west central France.
THE EIGHTEENTH CHAPTER
1. Spanish proverb: Ross suggests “En las venturas de amor / dice más el que más cala” (“In affairs of love, the less said the better”).
2. REAL PRESENCE … making it: The “real presence” is the Catholic doctrine that in the Communion the real body and blood of Christ are present, a position denied explicitly by Anglicans.
3. black-pudding: blood sausage.
4. Common-Prayer Book: “It was ordained for the procreation of children,” “for a remedy against sin, and to avoid fornication.…” “Thirdly, it was ordained for the mutual society, help, and comfort, that the one ought to have of the other.” (See “The Form of Solemnization of Matrimony” in the Book of Common Prayer.)
5. certain sorrows … uncertain comforts: proverbial.
CHAPTER THE NINETEENTH
1. allons: Let’s go.
CHAP. XXVI
1. Corporation: the governing body of York.
2. Drake’s anatomy … Wharton … Graaf: James Drake, Anthropologia Nova, or a New System of Anatomy (1707); Thomas Wharton, Adenographia (1656); Reinier de Graaf wrote, as the “editorial” footnote suggests, on both the organs of generation and the pancreatic juice: De virorum organis generatione inservientibus (1668) and Tractitus anatomico-medicus de succi pancreati natura & usu (1671). As Florida notes, Sterne was drawing on Chambers, “Anatomy.”
3. et cætera: The term doubles again as a euphemism for the genitals.
4. critick in keeping: by analogy to a kept woman, a mistress: a critic paid to favor a particular publisher’s or author’s wares.
CHAP. XXIX
1. quart major to a terce: a highly unequal relationship. In piquet, the quart major is the top sequence of ace, king, queen, jack, and the terce is any three-card sequence of the same suit.
CHAP. XXXI
1. compassionate … humanity: Sterne praises compassion and humanity in his sermons.
CHAP. XXXIII
This chapter draws heavily (often verbatim) upon passages from Pierre Charron, On Wisdom (1601; De la sagesse), trans. Samson Lennard (1612; 1.22, 83–85; 1.39, 138), for Walter’s views on procreation. Charron was a follower