ν . . . ἀρεταĩζ [ἐκ θεν . . . ἀρεταιˆζ]”: Pindar Pythian Odes 1.41: “From the gods come all the means for human achievements.”1. “bag”: See chap. 46, n. 6.
2. “Ludgate”: One of the gates to the City of London, demolished in 1760, and popularly thought to have been named for the mythical King Lud, who also loaned his name to the city itself; also a debtor’s prison, so named because of its proximity to the gate.
3. “lord mayor’s procession”: With its origins reaching back to the reign of King John in the thirteenth century, this popular annual procession or “show” was held on 29 October until the calendar was changed in 1752, when the date became 9 November. On that day, the lord mayor of London would travel by water from the City to the courts in Westminster, where he would be presented to the king or his justices. From the middle of the sixteenth century onward, the procession often featured elaborate pageants, some of which were composed by popular “city” poets. Upon disembarking from the barge after the return to the City, the lord mayor led a procession through Cheapside to the Guildhall. Plate 12 of Hogarth’s Industry and Idleness (1741) shows Francis Goodchild surrounded by a boisterous crowd as he makes his way in the mayor’s coach. The engraving captures well the frenzied behavior of the crowd.
4. “carman”: A carter or carrier (OED).
5. “Lisle”: See chap. 45, n. 14.
6. “Maltese cross”: The Maltese cross was worn by the Knights of the Order of the Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem, originally a religious order founded at the end of the eleventh century whose duties included the care of the sick in Jerusalem. The knights appeared in the twelfth century and fought in the Crusades. They moved from Jerusalem to Acre to Cyprus and then to Rhodes, which they lost to the Turks in 1522. In 1530 Charles V, the Holy Roman emperor, bestowed on them the island of Malta, which they held until 1798, when they surrendered it to Napoleon. According to Chambers, “All the knights, after their profession, are obliged to wear a white cross, or star with eight Points over the cloak or coat, on the left-side” (s.v. “Malta”).
7. “Fiacres”: See chap. 43, n. 11.
8. “citadel”: Nugent speaks of two citadels but gives details of one only: “Lisle has two citadels to defend it; the first is an irregular pentagon made by marshal Vauban [1633–1707], and looked upon as a master-piece of military architecture” (1:300).
9. “Promenade”: A cleared area between Lille’s citadel and the city proper planted with four rows of trees forming pleasant walks. Alban Butler (1709–73) remarks: “The Esplanade is a pleasant walking place for an evening airing” (Travels through France & Italy, and Part of Austrian, French, and Dutch Netherlands, during the Years 1745 and 1746 [Edinburgh: John Moir, 1803], 42).
10. “pioneers”: “A member of an infantry group going with or ahead of an army or regiment to dig trenches, repair roads, and clear terrain in readiness for the main body of troops” (OED).
11. “Cæsar’s Commentaries”: Julius Caesar’s famous memoirs of his military campaigns in Gaul from 58 to 52 BC and during the civil war against Pompey in 48 BC.
12. “Polybius”: See chap. 38, n. 11.
13. “Folard”: Jean-Charles de Folard (1669–1752), military officer and tactician whose theories of battle stirred controversy during the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth. He began his commentaries on Polybius after serving Charles XII. The first, titled Nouvelles découvertes sur la guerre dans une dissertation sur Polybe, appeared in 1724; the second, Histoire de Polybe, appeared from 1727 to 1730.
14. “Vineæ, Aggeres, Arietes, Scorpiones and Catapultæ”: Sheds for sheltering besiegers, ramparts, battering rams, and two kinds of engines for throwing missiles, respectively.
15. “siege of Platæa . . . Thucydides”: Thucydides (455?–400? BC), Greek historian who recounted the siege of Plataea (429–427 BC) in The History of the Peloponnesian War (2.71–78, 3.20–25, 52). The Plataeans resisted the siege by the Spartans until their supplies ran out. Those who had not escaped were executed.
16. “Tortoise”: From testudo (Lat.), a shed for protecting attacking soldiers; or a formation of soldiers with interlocking shields held over their heads for protection.
17. “Caledonian”: Scotsman, from the Roman name for north Britain.
1. “comedy”: Here, meaning “theater” rather than the dramatic genre.
2. “Cid of Corneille”: Le Cid, a tragicomedy by Pierre Corneille (1606–84), first performed in 1636–37. A sensational success, the play established Corneille’s reputation as the leading writer of French classical drama.
3. “objections of Mons. de Scudery”: Georges de Scudéry (1601–67), author of sixteen plays, published Observations sur le Cid in April 1637, just three months after Corneille’s Cid appeared in print. Scudéry criticized Le Cid for violating the dramatic unities and a host of other faults, including indecency. When Corneille responded in Lettre apologétique du Sr Corneille, contenant sa responce aux observations faictes par le Sr. Scudéry sur le Cid (Paris, 1637), Scudéry appealed to the Académie française to adjudicate the dispute. The academy sided with Scudéry and censured Corneille for the play’s implausibility. H. Carrington Lancaster summarizes the debate in his History of French Dramatic Literature in the Seventeenth Century, 9 vols. (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins Press, 1929–42), pt. 2, vol. 1, pp. 118–51.
4. “Covent-Garden club of criticks”: Perhaps the Sublime Society of Beef Steaks founded in 1735 by Covent Garden’s manager, John Rich (1692–1761). The society met in rooms atop the Covent Garden Theatre, and Hogarth was one of its charter members. Smollett’s friend and correspondent John Wilkes became a member in 1754. See Letters, 77 n. 1. In Sir Launcelot Greaves Smollett describes a meeting of the club and names three actors who were admitted as members in the 1740s (31 nn. 6, 8). Robert J. Allen notes: “Smollett is said to have attended one of the dinners as a guest” (Clubs of Augustan London [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1933], 144). For Covent Garden, see chap. 98, n. 6.
5. “order”: “A pass for free or reduced-price admission to a theatre or other place of entertainment” (OED).
6. “one woman”: Clifford suggests Susannah Maria Cibber (née Arne) (1714–66), wife of Theophilus Cibber (790). She began her stage career in singing roles at the Haymarket Theatre in 1732 and remained active in the London Theatre up to the year of her death despite ill health for many years. She was generally considered the greatest actress of her day. On the day of her death Drury Lane closed its doors to honor her.
7. “Monimia and Belvidera”: Heroines of Thomas Otway’s Orphan (1680) and Venice Preserved (1682). Mrs. Cibber played Monimia thirty times and Belvidera seventeen times between 1735 and 1750. Speaking of Mrs. Cibber’s portrayal of Monimia, John Hill writes that “she seems inspir’d with the very genius of the author who wrote the part, and with the very soul of the heroine whom she represents” (The Actor [London, 1750], 183). Samuel Foote wrote about Mrs. Cibber: “There is a melancholly Plaintiveness in her Voice, and such a Dejection of Countenance, (without Distortion,) that I defy any Man, who has the least Drop of the Milk of Human Nature about him, to sit out the distresses of Monimia and Belvidera, when represented by this Lady, without giving the most tender and affecting Testimonies of His Humanity” (The Roman and English Comedy Considered [London, 1747], 35). Smollett used the name and traits of Monimia in his next novel, Ferdinand Count Fathom.
8. “Cornelia and Cleopatra”: Heroines of Charles Hénault’s Cornélie Vestale (Paris, 1713, though not published until 1768 by Horace Walpole under his Strawberry Hill imprint) and Jean-François Marmontel’s Cléopâtre (Paris, 1750). Smollett may have seen Cléopâtre when he visited the Continent in 1750. It was performed at the Comédie-Française eleven times between 20 May and 13 June 1750. See Jean-François Marmontel, Memoirés, ed. Jean-Pierre Guicciardi and Giles Thierriat (Paris: Mercure de France, 1999), 498 n. 174.
9. “players of Amsterdam”: See chap. 70, n. 6.
10. “gracioso’s”: The gracioso is “the buffoon of Spanish comedy” (OED). The OED notes that Smollett used this word in Gil Blas, where the word is glossed as “a favourite actor” (296).
11. “one of these”: David Garrick (1717–79), the century’s most famous actor as well as a theater manager and playwright. Garrick made his debut on the London stage as Richard III on 19 October 1741. Resentful because of what he considered to be Garrick’s role in the failure to have The Regicide produced on the London stage, Smollett had attacked Garrick in Roderick Random in the character Marmozet. Melopoyn, a disappointed author like Smollett himself, tells Random that “Marmozet was the sole occasion of my disappointment; that he had acted from first to last with the most perfidious dissimulation, . . . that nothing could equal his hypocrisy but his avarice” (335). Smollett also attacked Garrick by implication though not by name in his preface to The Regicide (published in 1749). In an undated letter to Alexander Carlyle, Smollett claimed that his failure to have The Regicide produced by John Rich at Covent Garden Theatre was due to the “Pitifull Intrigues of that little Rascal Garrick” (“To Alexander Carlyle, [1747?],” in Letters, 4). For the complicated history of the quarrel between Smollett and Garrick, see Buck, 86–94; Knapp, 49–57.
12. “tobacconist”: Although Johnson defines the word as a “preparer and vender of tobacco,” the OED records an obsolete meaning of “a habitual tobacco-smoker” as late as 1757.
13. “Bedlam”: See chap. 35, n. 4.
14. “Lothario”: The rake in Nicholas Rowe’s The Fair Penitent (1703), which Garrick first played on 2 December 1741 at Goodman’s Fields Theatre and as recently as 28 November 1750 at Drury Lane. See London Stage, 3:947, 4:223.
15. “his competitor in fame”: James Quin (1693–1766), who acted during the 1740s at Covent Garden, where he and Garrick appeared together during the 1746–47 theatrical season. Throughout his career, Quin’s acting was regularly and often harshly criticized, especially his performances in tragic roles. Smollett had attacked Quin as Mr. Bellower in Roderick Random, where he appeared as another of the villainous players in Mr. Melopoyn’s story (chap. 63). According to Buck, Quin was among those players and managers who rejected The Regicide (65–81). Smollett made up the quarrel with Quin by inserting him favorably in his own person in Humphry Clinker, where Jery Melford calls him “one of the best bred men in the kingdom. He is not only a most agreeable companion; but (as I am credibly informed) a very honest man; highly susceptible of friendship, warm, steady, and even generous in his attachments, disdaining flattery, and incapable of meanness and dissimulation” (48–49).
16. “Crookback”: Richard III. See chap. 31, n. 9.
17. “Hector”: See chap. 44, n. 8.
18. “Brutus”: Quin first performed this role in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar at Drury Lane Theatre on 8 November 1734 (London Stage, 3:430). During the 1750–51 season he played the role in a version of the play attributed to William D’avenant and John Dryden, Julius Caesar with the Death of Brutus and Cassius. D’avenant’s biographer, Arthur H. Nethercot, denies that either author had a hand in revising the play and calls this version “an unscrupulous attempt to capitalize on the pair’s fame” (Sir William D’avenant: Poet Laureate and Playwright-Manager [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1938], 385). Thomas Davies called Quin “utterly unqualified for the striking and vigorous characters of tragedy,” but he admitted that the actor “often gave true force and dignity to sentiment by a well regulated tone of voice, judicious elocution, and easy deportment. His Brutus and Cato will be remembered with pleasure by the surviving spectators of them, when their candour would wish to forget his Lear and Richard” (Memoirs of the Life of David Garrick, Esq., 2 vols. [London, 1780], 1:28).
19. “coblers”: Though a cobbler is a mender of shoes, the OED also notes the meaning “one who mends clumsily, a clumsy workman, a mere botcher,” which certainly would apply in this instance.
20. “Merry Andrews”: See chap. 27, n. 5.
21. “Bartholomew Fair”: See chap. 27, n. 6.
22. “English Æsopus”: Claudius Aesopus, a celebrated tragic actor in Rome during the first century BC, contemporary of the great comic actor Roscius. James Thomson (1700–1748) called Quin “th’ ESOPUS of the age” in his Castle of Indolence (1748), 1.67.595. For Smollett’s familiarity with Thomson’s poem, see Buck, 105; for Smollett’s acquaintance with Thomson, see Knapp, 82–84. Smollett mentions Thomson in the dedication to Ferdinand Count Fathom, “To Doctor * * * * * *” (3 n. 3).
23. “St. Vitus’s dance”: “A convulsive disorder, usually occurring in early life, and characterized by irregular involuntary contractions of the muscles, esp. of the face and arms” (OED).
24. “Shakespear . . . rags”: Hamlet’s words in his address to the players: “It offends me to the soul to hear a robustious periwig-pated fellow tear a passion to tatters, to very rags. . . . I have thought some of Nature’s journeymen had made men, and not made them well, they imitated humanity so abominably” (Hamlet, 3.2.8–10, 33–35).
25. “Falstaff”: One of Quin’s favorite roles, generally acknowledged by his contemporaries as his best. Samuel Foote writes: “I can only recommend the Man, who wants to see a Character perfectly play’d, to Mr. Quin, in the Part of Falstaff; and if he does not express his Desire of spending an Evening with that merry Mortal, why, I would not spend one with him, if he would pay my Reckoning” (Roman and English Comedy, 41). Quin played the Falstaff of 1 Henry IV several times during the 1750–51 theatrical season (London Stage, 4:220, 231, 235, 237, 241).
26. “the eighth Henry”: Another of Quin’s favorite and lauded roles, which he played at Covent Garden Theatre as recently as 4–5 May 1749 (London Stage, 4:118).
27. “the Plain Dealer”: In the role of Manly in Wycherley’s play (1676). Quin’s last recorded appearance as Manly was at Covent Garden Theatre on 24 January 1743 (London Stage, 3:1029).
28. “Sir John Brute”: Libertine husband in Vanbrugh’s Provoked Wife (1697), another of Quin’s favorite roles. Quin played the part on 16 October 1750 at Covent Garden. The theater-going public had the chance to see Garrick in the same role four days later at Drury Lane (London Stage, 4:212, 214).
29. “one of your own countrymen . . . fool or a Frenchman”: The anecdote comes from Sir John Chardin’s Travels in Persia, trans. Edm. Lloyd, 2 vols. (London, 1720). Chardin, who has brought jewelry to sell to a nazir, or Muslim official, is asked for a list of his goods: “I had made a Memorandum of them in Persian; he made his Eunuch come to take it of me, for in that Country one must keep in ones [sic] Place without stirring from it, and when any body stirs in the presence of a Nobleman, whether he be sitting or standing, they immediately say that’s a Fool or a Frenchman, the reason of it is, because they have observ’d that the French or Europeans have naturally a motion or Gesticulation with them” (1:27). Sir John Chardin was born in Paris but immigrated to England in 1681. He was knighted by Charles II in the same year. His Travels appeared in French and English in 1689 (ODNB).
30. “famous Parisian stage-heroine”: Claire Josèphe Hippolyte Léris (1723–1803), “La Clairon.” She made her debut at the Comédie-Française in 1743. Oliver Goldsmith writes of her: “Mademoiselle Clairon, a celebrated actress at Paris, seems to me the most perfect female figure I have ever seen upon any stage,” before describing her acting thus: “She sometimes begins with a mute, eloquent attitude. . . . By this simple beginning she gives herself a power of rising in the passion of the scene. As she proceeds, every gesture, every look acquires new violence, till at last transported, she fills the whole vehemence of the part, and all the idea of the poet” (“On Our Theatres,” Bee, no. 2 [13 October 1759], in The Collected Works of Oliver Goldsmith, ed. Arthur Friedman, 5 vols. [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966], 1:389). Marmontel (see above, n. 8) was said to have urged her to be more natural in her style. See Frederick Hawkins, The French Stage in the Eighteenth Century, 2 vols. (1888; repr., Grosse Pointe, Mich.: Scholarly Press, 1968), 2:22.
31. “your favourite male-performer”: Clifford (790) suggests Charles-François Racot de Grand-val (1710–84). Hawkins calls him the “tragedy-hero of the theatre” (French Stage, 2:2). When Grandval retired from the stage in 1768, he enjoyed a greater reputation as a comic than as a tragic actor (2:152, 435).
32. “plays . . . the Athenians”: Financing of the plays in classical Athens was collaborative and included public and private financial support as well as entrance fees, the last of these subsidized by the public treasury from the mid-fifth to the mid-fourth century BC. The actors were paid with public funds. Wealthy citizens were appointed by the city magistrates as choregi, or chorus leaders, to finance the chorus, a costly obligation.
33. “theater at Rome”: The amphitheater known as the Colosseum, finished in AD 80. It is now thought to have been capable of holding fifty thousand spectators. In his Travels, Smollett calls it “the most stupendous work of the kind which antiquity can produce. . . . The height and extent of it may be guessed from the number of spectators it contained, amounting to one hundred thousand; and yet, according to Fontana’s mensuration, it could not contain above thirty-four thousand persons sitting, allowing a foot and an half for each person” (260).
34. “Saltator”: A dancer.
35. “Declamator”: One who declaims or speaks.
36. “a certain prince . . . did not understand”: The story is found in Lucian (The Dance 64) and repeated by William Chetwood in A General History of the Stage (London, 1749):
The Mimes and Pantomimes crept in, and shov’d out these antient Chorus’s; some were loose and wanton Mimics, that the Roman Luxury too well lik’d; others were more decent, who by Action and Gesture could describe a Story without speaking, in all its Variety of Passions. One of these was so excellent, that when a foreign Prince came to Rome in the Time of Nero the Tyrant, at his Departure, he ask’d no other Favour of the Emperor, but that Mime, whom he had seen perform, for this Reason; that as he had many barbarous Nations bordering round him, of different Speech, this Man by his Action could be an excellent Interpreter, whose Meaning was so well understood without the Use of Speech. (11)
37. “cynic philosophers”: The origins of the doctrines of Cynicism are generally traced to Anti-sthenes (c. 445–c. 360 BC). Diogenes (c. 400–c. 325 BC) was the most famous Cynic philosopher. Cynics rejected luxury and the ease it brought, and they were generally opposed to all inherited beliefs and practices.
38. “story from Lucian”: The Dance 83–84.
1. “Cabaret”: A tavern (Johnson).
2. “cheese-toasters”: A contemptuous name for their swords.
3. “oakum”: “Cords untwisted and reduced to hemp, with which, mingled with pitch, leaks are stopped” (Johnson). Smollett used this name for the tyrannical captain of Roderick Random’s ship the Thunder.
4. “trimmed them . . . yard to square”: Although trim has nautical meanings referring to both the load of a ship and its sails, this instance requires the meaning “to beat, thrash, trounce.” The OED notes an instance of this usage in Roderick Random (23), spoken by Tom Bowling. To square the yard, the spar that supports the sail, is to set it at a right angle to the mast; figuratively, it means to settle accounts. In this case, Pipes contends that he would have beaten them so that they would not have been able to set themselves to rights again.
5. “marrow-bones”: “The shin bones; (also) the knees. Freq. used humorously in phrases referring to kneeling in supplication, prayer, etc.” (OED).
6. “Diligence”: See chap. 40, n. 3.
7. “Capuchin”: See chap. 40, n. 6.
8. “club”: “To join to one effect; to contribute separate power to one end” (Johnson).
9. “desolation of Menin”: In 1744 French forces under the command of Louis XV took control of the town and razed the fortifications, which had been built by Marshal Vauban (1633–1707), acclaimed military engineer of Louis XIV.
10. “Courtray”: A town five miles from Menin noted for making “the finest table linen in Europe” (Nugent, 1:293).
11. “burthen”: Refrain or chorus; words repeated at the end of each verse (OED).
12. “The pigs they lie with their arses bare.”: The Greig-Duncan Folk Song Collection, vol. 8, ed. Patrick Shuldham-Shaw et al. (Edinburgh: Mercat Press, 2002), features an entry “Oor Little Pigs” to the tune of “Lillibulero.” The first stanza is as follows:
Our little pigs lies wi’ their backs aye bare, bare (grunt), -are,
Sind dah reedle ah
Oh my dad was a bonny wee man, man [spoken shrilly] (grunt) -an
Oh my dad was a bonny wee man. (196)
Of course, the line of song above that resembles Smollett’s song is not the song’s burthen. No closer match to the song has been found.
1. “Benoni . . . son of my sorrow”: Jolter is correct; the name, given to Jacob’s youngest son by his mother, Rachel, who died after giving him birth, means “son of my sorrow.” Jacob changed it to Benjamin, “son of the right hand” or “son of the south.” Benjamin was Jacob’s only child to be born in Canaan. See Genesis 35:18. The Septuagint is the Greek version of the Old Testament, having taken its name from the belief that it was completed in seventy-two days by seventy-two Palestinian Jews (OED).
2. “nos poma natamus”: “How we apples swim,” from Aesop’s Fables, in which an inundation overflows a farmer’s stable. For a contemporary version, see Samuel Richardson, Aesop’s Fables (1740; repr., New York: Garland Publishing, 1975), 84. Smollett’s readers may also have been familiar with Swift’s version of the fable as recounted in a poem “On the Words—Brother Protestants, and Fellow Christians, so familiarly used by the Advocates for the Repeal of the Test Act in Ireland, 1733”:
A Ball of new-dropt Horse’s Dung,
Mingling with Apples in the Throng,
Said to the Pippin, plump, and prim,
See, Brother, how we Apples swim. (The Poems of Jonathan Swift, ed. H. Williams, 3 vols. [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1937], 3:811)
3. “Issachar”: Issachar, fifth son born to Jacob by Leah. His name is thought to mean “hireling” because Leah’s firstborn son, Reuben, gave to Jacob’s second wife, Rachel, mandrakes that he had harvested, in exchange for which Rachel agreed to let Leah lie with Jacob. His name could mean “man of reward,” because he was Leah’s reward for letting her handmaid Zilpah lie with Jacob (Genesis 30:14–18). At his death, Jacob calls Issachar “a strong ass crouching down between two burdens: And he saw that rest was good, and the land that it was pleasant; and bowed his shoulder to bear, and became a servant unto tribute” (Genesis 49:14–15). These verses suggest that Issachar and his tribe may have been subjected to the Canaanites. H. R. S. van der Veen identifies the reference and reads it as a joke at Jolter’s expense (Jewish Characters in Eighteenth-Century English Fiction and Drama [Groningen, Batavia: J. B. Wolters, 1935], 46 n. 1).
4. “those who crucified . . . world”: Jolter’s attack on his traveling companion represents traditional anti-Semitic sentiments, which remained strong in England through most of the eighteenth century. Frank Felsenstein notes that “endemic attitudes persisted in casting [Jews] in the popular imagination as infernal bogeymen shamelessly conspiring to undermine the Christian church” (Anti-Semitic Stereotypes: A Paradigm of Otherness in English Popular Culture, 1660–1830 [Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995], 220). A similarly unflattering portrait of a Jew can be found in Roderick Random in the figure of Isaac Rapine, whose “whole figure was a just emblem of winter, famine, and avarice” (55). In his next novel, Ferdinand Count Fathom (1753), Smollett introduced the figure of the benevolent Jew in the character of Joshua Menasseh. For a brief survey of Smollett’s attitudes toward Jews, see Jerry Beasley’s notes to Ferdinand Count Fathom, 423–24 nn. 11–12. See also van der Veen, 37–50, for a survey of all the allusions to Jews in Smollett’s fiction. The Jewish Naturalization Act, also known as the Jew Bill, was passed in mid-1753, only to be repealed some few months later after a general xenophobic and anti-Semitic public outcry.
5. “furnace seven times heated”: Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, built an image of gold and ordered all to worship it. Those who failed to abide by his decree were to be cast into a “burning fiery furnace.” Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, Jews who served the king, refused to obey his decree. Enraged by their disobedience, the king ordered the furnace to be heated “seven times more than it was wont to be heated.” Although the soldiers who cast the men into the furnace died in that act, the three Jews emerged unharmed. See Daniel 3.
6. “Ghent”: City in Belgium at the junction of the Scheldt and Leys Rivers taken from Austria in 1745 by France and returned by the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748. Nugent notes that the “town is one of the largest in Europe, being about fifteen miles in circumference. . . . The streets are large, and well paved, the market-places spacious, and the houses well built of brick. . . . Travellers are generally desired to take notice of the bridge called Dogebrack, where there are two brazen statues, representing a son cutting off his father’s head with a sabre. . . . The churches of this town are very numerous and magnificent” (1:276–77).
7. “Amanda”: The heroine of Sir John Vanbrugh’s The Relapse (1696), who remains chaste despite the infidelity of her husband, Loveless, with her friend Berinthia, the same friend who helps Worthy in his attempts to overcome Amanda’s virtuous resistance to his advances. Unlike Pickle’s Amanda, Vanbrugh’s heroine single-handedly convinces Worthy to desist in his attempts at rape.
8. “Lucretia”: Legendary chaste Roman heroine. After telling her father and her husband, Tarquinius Collatinus, that she had been raped by Sextus Tarquinius, son of King Tarquin, Lucretia commits suicide in front of her husband and father by stabbing herself in the heart with a knife that she had hidden beneath her dress. Lucius Junius Brutus, who was present with her husband at her suicide, swore by the knife with which she killed herself to drive the Tarquins from Rome. Brutus used the event to incite other aggrieved Romans to destroy the monarchy and usher in the republic. See Livy Ab urbe condita 1.57–60.
1. “Mercury”: A Roman deity, messenger to the gods, and frequently a go-between in amorous affairs. The OED notes that Smollett used the name in this sense in his translation of Gil Blas (94, 145).
2. “lodgment upon the covered way”: Terms from fortification. Peregrine has established himself on the besieged’s sheltered or hidden (covert) way, which is intended to protect the defenders of the besieged city from enemy fire.
3. “curtain of the counterscarp”: More terms from fortification. The curtain usually refers to the wall that connects two bastions, but it can also mean a plain wall. A counterscarp is the “outer wall or slope of the ditch, which supports the covered way” (OED). There may be an echo to counterpane, or outer covering of the bed, transformed in this instance by the controlling military conceit. The meaning is clear: no physical obstacles stand between Peregrine and his Amanda.
4. “Benedicite”: An interjection “expressing astonishment or remonstrance: Bless us! Good gracious!” (OED).
5. “astronomer’s globe”: An astronomer’s or celestial globe “is an artificial sphere, on whose convex surface the fixed stars are laid down. . . . The use of these globes, is to exhibit the phænomena of the motions of the sun, and stars, in an easy, and obvious manner” (Chambers, s.v. “globe”). The globe was suspended within a “brazen meridian” so that it could be rotated by hand.
1. “battle of Melle”: On 9 July 1745, during the War of the Austrian Succession, a contingent of the allied forces, led by Lt. Gen. Count von Moltke and dispatched to protect Ghent from the French forces, was surprised by a superior French force at Melle, an Augustinian priory between Alost and Ghent in Flanders. Outnumbered three to one, the British and Dutch allied forces fought the French with the result that Moltke reached Ghent at the cost of seven hundred soldiers killed and wounded and fourteen hundred soldiers captured. See E. E. Char-teris, William Augustus, Duke of Cumberland: His Early Life and Times (1721–1748) (London: E. Arnold, 1913), 201–2; Francis Henry Skrine, Fontenoy and Great Britain’s Share in the War of the Austrian Succession, 1741–48 (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1906), 225–29; and Horace Walpole to Mann, 5 July 1745 OS, who relied on inaccurate news accounts of the battles (Walpole, 19:68 n. 3).
2. “Duke of Marlborough . . . Lewis the fourteenth”: John Churchill (1650–1722), 1st Duke of Marlborough, courtier, general, diplomat, and politician, was one of the most influential figures in England during the first decade of the eighteenth century. Commander in chief of the allied forces during the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–11), he won renown for his victories against the French or Franco-Bavarian forces at Blenheim (1704), Ramillies (1706), and Oudenarde (1708). Marlborough was accused of waging war for personal profit and dismissed by Queen Anne at the urging of her Tory ministers on 30 December 1711. A contemporary account of these and other of his campaigns had recently appeared in Capt. Robert Parker’s Memoirs of the most remarkable military transactions from the year 1683 to 1718 (London, 1747).
3. “madam de Maintenon”: Françoise d’Aubigne (1635–1719), second wife to Louis XIV, whom she married secretly in the winter of 1685–86. She was reputed to have had a significant influence on Louis’s decisions, including the act that led to the War of the Spanish Succession. See Charlotte Haldane, Madame de Maintenon, Uncrowned Queen of France (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1970), 206–9. This scene is based on Smollett’s experience, as he recounted in his Travels: “In the year 1749, I had like to have had an affair with a Frenchman at Ghent, who affirmed, that all the battles gained by the great duke of Marlborough were purposely lost by the French generals, in order to bring the schemes of madame de Maintenon into disgrace” (36).
4. “Dauphin”: “The title of the eldest son of the King of France” (OED); in this case, Louis, dauphin of France (1661–1711), son of Louis XIV and Queen Marie-Thérèse. His grandson became Louis XV.
5. “marshal Boufflers”: Louis-François (1644–1711), duc de Boufflers and maréchal de France (1693–1711). A decisive victory by the allied armies at Oudenarde on 11 July 1708 was followed by the siege of Lille by Marlborough and Prince Eugène from 13 August through 9 December 1708, when the citadel fell. Boufflers capitulated on his own terms and was allowed to march the garrison out of the city. A modern historian describes the siege as having involved “what was probably the most brutally intensive fighting of the entire eighteenth century.” The same historian says that the defense of Lille was “ably directed by Boufflers” (J. R. Jones, Marlborough [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993], 170).
6. “yield at discretion”: Surrender unconditionally.
7. “Alost”: On the river Dender, nearly equidistant between Ghent and Brussels.
1. “cully”: “A man deceived or imposed upon; as, by sharpers or a strumpet” (Johnson).
2. “Bohemians”: Either natives of Bohemia or Gypsies.
3. “Bourrique”: Female ass (Fr.).
4. “Balaam and his ass”: See Numbers 22–24. Balak, the king of the Moabites, sends two delegations to ask Balaam, a soothsayer, to curse the Israelites, who threaten his kingdom. Balaam, doing God’s bidding, refuses the first delegation. He agrees to go with the second when God allows it. As Balaam is traveling to the court with the delegation sent by the king, an angel of the Lord appears to Balaam’s ass three times, causing the ass to turn from the way. Each time Balaam beats his ass. After Balaam strikes his ass for the third time, the ass speaks to Balaam. While his ass is speaking to him, a terrified Balaam sees the angel of the Lord, who tells him that he must speak only what God instructs him to say. Despite Balak’s instructions, Balaam subsequently blesses the Israelites and prophesies that “there shall come a Star out of Jacob, and a Sceptre shall rise out of Israel, and shall smite the corners of Moab, and destroy all the children of Sheth” (Numbers 24:17).
5. “pas”: “Precedence; right of going forward” (Johnson).
6. “Hecuba”: In Euripedes’s play of that name, Hecuba, queen of Troy and widow to Priam, discovers that her youngest son, Polydorus, has been killed by the Thracian Polymnestor. Priam had sent Polydorus to Polymnestor for safe-keeping, but Polymnestor kills his guest once he learns of the fall of Troy. Hecuba and her women entrap Polymnestor and his two sons, killing the children and gouging out Polymnestor’s eyes. Polymnestor then prophesies that Hecuba will be transformed into a bitch. A translation of Euripedes’s play had recently appeared. See Hecuba. Translated from the Greek of Euripedes (London, 1749).
1. “innocent as the child unborn”: See chap. 14, n. 5.
2. “doxy”: A beggar’s mistress; also, “a whore, a loose wench” (Johnson).
3. “hydrophobia”: One medical dictionary notes that the symptom of fear of water is not restricted to the disease caused by the bite of a mad animal, “for we meet with several Instances of Fevers accompany’d with a Dread of Water” (Robert James, A Medicinal Dictionary, 2 vols. [London, 1743–45], vol. 2, s.v. “hydrophobia”). Chambers notes that in some cases where the disease is caused by the bite of a mad dog, the “effects frequently do not discover themselves till after the cause is forgot; the wound itself closing and healing like any other common wound. But, some time after, direful symptoms ensue . . . in about forty days; sometimes in sixty, sometimes not till six months, and sometimes not till a year, or even two.” Those infected with the disease sometimes “bark and snarl like dogs.” They are said to suffer from “a particular kind of inflammation of the blood, accompanied with . . . a tension and driness of the nervous membranes, and . . . an elasticity and force of the fluid with which they are filled.” Chambers lists a number of cures, including “frequent and sudden plunging of the patient over head and ears in the salt sea water.” He dismisses as a popular error application of the hair of the dog that bit the patient and notes that such application could even make the patient worse (s.v. “hydrophobia”).
4. “system of nerves”: Roy Porter writes that by the beginning of the eighteenth century, the “best theory came to regard body disorders as funnelled through nerve fibers to the brain, where they were experienced as pain and disturbance” (Mind-Forg’d Manacles: A History of Madness in England from the Restoration to the Regency [London: Athlone, 1987], 48). Porter shows that the earlier humoral explanation for mental disturbances gave way to a “mechanical” model, which involved the stimulation of the nerves rather than an imbalance in the body’s four humors. The physician’s claim to originality here is thus suspect. During this time, there was much discussion of the role of fear—especially fear of damnation—in religious manias (73–81).
5. “Venienti occurrite morbo”: “Meet the disease as it comes” (Persius Satires 3.64).
6. “liquidum nervosum”: Nervous fluid or animal spirits, which are carried by the nerves.
7. “spiculated”: “Furnished with sharp points or spikelets” (OED).
8. “virus”: “Signifies strictly any Poison” (John Quincy, Lexicon Physico-Medicum: or, a New Medicinal Dictionary, 6th ed. [London, 1749], 468).
9. “either from his slaver or his sword”: Perhaps echoing Pope in An Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot: “Of all mad Creatures, if the Learn’d are right,/It is the Slaver kills, and not the Bite” (lines 105–6). Chambers notes that the disease can be transmitted when the saliva of an infected animal—including an infected person—comes in contact with the skin.
10. “nature . . . moral sense”: The debate between Jolter and the doctor mirrors that between those who believed that human actions are motivated by self-interest and those who believed that our actions are governed by universal and ultimately disinterested moral affections. Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) and Bernard Mandeville (1670–1733) came to represent the belief that human nature is inherently selfish; Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury (1671–1713), and Frances Hutcheson (1694–1746) represented the benevolent side of the debate. The doctor espouses the view associated with this latter pair, especially with regard to the moral sense. Hutcheson writes: “We have some secret Sense which determines our Approbation without regard to Self-Interest; otherwise we should always favour the fortunate Side without regard to Virtue, and suppose our selves engaged with that Party” (An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, ed. Wolfgang Leidhold [Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2004], 92). Shaftesbury’s and Hutcheson’s views were modified and developed by David Hume (1711–76) and Adam Smith (1723–90). See chap. 29, n. 4; and chap. 47, n. 13.
11. “St. Antonio de Padua”: St. Anthony of Padua (1195–1231), of Lisbon, Portugal, originally of the Augustinian order, joined the Franciscans when he saw bodies of Franciscan martyrs being returned from north Africa. He was renowned for his teaching, and he is sometimes represented as preaching to the fishes.
12. “Eleazar’s ring”: The story is found in Josephus, The Antiquities of the Jews: “I saw one Eleazar, a Country Man of mine, dispossessing of People in the Presence of Vespasian, and his Sons, Officers, and Soldiers: And his Way was this; he applied a Ring to the Nostrils of the Persons possest, with a Piece of Root conveyed under the Seal of it, being a Secret of Solomon ’s. The Demoniack did but smell to’t, and the Devil was drawn out by the Nose. The Spirit threw the Man down; but Eleazar adjur’d it never to trouble him any more: Making frequent Mention of Solomon’s Name in the Time of the Operation, and reciting Charms and Incantations of his Invention. Eleazar, after this, was willing to shew the Company a Master-piece: So he set a Cup, or a Basin of Water, at a little Distance from a Man that was possessed, and adjur’d the Devil to overturn this Basin at leaving the Man, as a Token to the Company that he had quitted him. This being done, no Body doubted of the admirable Knowledge and wisdom of Solomon” (A Collection of the Genuine Works of Flavius Josephus [London, 1740], bk. 8, chap. 2, 329–30). Smollett’s translation of Gil Blas provides the following note about Eleazar: “Eleazar, a famous magician, who cast out devils, by tying to the nose of the possessed, a certain mystical ring, which the daemon no sooner smelled, than he overturned and abandoned the patient. He performed before the Emperor Vespasian, and in order to shew the power that he had over the devil, commanded him to overset a pitcher of water. This the daemon immediately complied with, to the astonishment of all present” (325).
13. “two madmen . . . swine”: Matthew 8:28–34.
14. “Æsculapius”: See chap. 14, n. 8.
15. “Cleopatra”: In arguing that Smollett’s model for Pallet was Hogarth, Ronald Paulson notes that Hogarth had begun to paint historical scenes after 1736. Paulson sees in this mention of Cleopatra an allusion to Hogarth’s “Moses brought to Pharoah’s Daughter, on display in the Foundling Hospital gallery since 1746.” See “Smollett and Hogarth,” 356.
16. “jordan”: See chap. 6, n. 6.
17. “the pretender”: Charles Edward Stuart (1720–88), grandson of the exiled Stuart king James II (1633–1701) and son of the Old Pretender, James Francis Edward Stuart (1688–1766). Bonnie Prince Charlie, as he was affectionately called and who was also known as the Young Pretender, led the Jacobite rebellion of 1745.
18. “Gadsbodikins”: A corrupt or minced form of the oath “God’s body” (OED).
19. “compos mentis”: Lat., of sound mind; that is, other than a lunatic.
20. “seize, fetter and convey . . . rules of art”: An accurate description of the treatment prescribed for the insane at the time. External discipline was intended to substitute for the self-control lost to the person who had succumbed to the superior force of his mania. See Andrew Scull, who, observing that treatment for madness remained unchanged until late in the eighteenth century, writes: “The madman’s ferocity must be tamed, by a mixture of discipline and depletion designed to put down ‘the raging of the Spirits and the lifting up of the soul’” (“The Domestication of Madness,” Medical History 27 [1983]: 238). The interpolated quotation is taken from Thomas Willis, The Practice of Physick: Two Discourses Concerning the Soul of Brutes (London, 1684).
21. “Dender”: See chap. 59, n. 7.
1. “Brussels”: At this time the capital of the province of Brabant and the Austrian Netherlands. According to Nugent, it was “rebuilt to a great advantage” after bombardment in 1696. He finds it an impressive town: “The air of Brussels is very good, being situated in a pleasant fruitful country. The streets are of a convenient breadth and well paved, the houses large and commodious, the public and private building both uniform and elegant” (1:216–17).
2. “stadthouse”: The town hall, located on the “great market-place . . . one of the beautifullest squares in Europe.” Nugent calls it a “noble building”: “In this town-house there is also an apartment where the states of Brabant meet, which is one of the best adorned of any in Europe. There are three large rooms, where the history of the resignation of Charles V. is wrought in tapestry to such perfection, that hardly any painting, nor any thing at the Gobelins at Paris, can come up to it” (1:218). Nugent appears to have borrowed the description of the town hall from John Macky, A Journey Through the Austrian Netherlands (London, 1725), 29–30.
3. “park and arsenal”: According to Nugent, the park was behind the palace where the governor of the Austrian Netherlands resided. He calls it “a beautiful park well stocked with deer, and planted with trees like that of St. James’s at London. Here is a surprising echo, which makes twelve distinct replies. Its fine alleys form one of the pleasantest walks about the city.” The armory was opposite the palace, and it contained “several sorts of antique arms and furniture for tournaments, besides ancient suits of armour. . . . In the same place they have taken care to preserve the memory of three illustrious horses, by gluing their skins on artificial horses of the same stature with the originals” (1:219, 220). See also Macky, Journey, 31–32.
4. “cabinet of curiosities”: Kees van Strien identifies the bookseller as “Emmanuel or Pierre-Joseph de Grieck, ‘au coin de la Monnaie,’ whose collection comprised Queen Christina of Sweden’s writing cabinet, ‘elegantly adorned with precious stones’” (“Peregrine Pickle in the Low Countries,” English Studies 92 [2011]: 277). Forerunners to the modern museum, cabinets of curiosities first appeared during the late Renaissance. They contained objects that were rare, exotic, or merely of interest to the collector, from insects to intaglios. Freaks of nature were especially valued, as were exotic flora and fauna from the Americas and the Orient. The contents and the organizations of the collections, at first truly idiosyncratic and reflective of the personality of the collector, became increasingly standardized over the course of the eighteenth century as the modern museum emerged. See Arthur MacGregor, “The Cabinet of Curiosities in Seventeenth-Century Britain,” in The Origins of Museums: The Cabinet of Curiosities in Sixteenth-and Seventeenth-Century Europe, ed. Oliver Impey and Arthur MacGregor (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 147–58. The description of the contents of the cheesemonger’s cabinet of curiosities in chapter 69 can be taken as typical, after a satiric fashion. Nugent notes that Brussels’s nobility have “collections of original paintings. . . . There are also several private gentlemen, who have some curious collections, which they shew very willingly to strangers” (1:220).
5. “Italian opera”: Nugent mentions the “opera-house . . . one of the noblest and largest in Europe. It was built by the duke of Bavaria in 1700, after the Italian manner, with rows of lodges or closets, most of them with chimneys, which the nobility hire by the winter for the conveniency of their families and friends, and keep the keys themselves” (1:220–21). See also Macky, Journey, 33. Smollett wrote to Alexander Carlyle on 1 October 1749: “I am but a week returned from having made a Tour thro’ part of France, Flanders and Holland, which has only served to Endear my own Country to me the more” (Letters, 12). He might very well have attended the opera during his sojourn in the Low Countries, which probably began in the summer of 1749 (Knapp, 86). Giovanni Francesco Crosa (c. 1700–c. 1771) brought the Italian comic opera to the King’s Theatre in the Haymarket in September 1748. During the summer and autumn of 1749, Crosa and his troupe traveled to Brussels to perform in the Théâtre de La Monnaie. He returned to England for the 1749–50 season before debt forced him to flee to Holland, where he is next found performing in Amsterdam in August 1750. See Richard G. King and Saskia Willaert, “Giovanni Francesco Crosa and the First Italian Comic Operas in London, Brussels and Amsterdam, 1748–50,” Journal of the Royal Musical Association 118 (1993): 248, 255–56, 264. Smollett would have had opportunity to see Crosa in London, Brussels, and perhaps Amsterdam.
6. “Prince Charles of Lorrain”: Charles Alexander of Lorraine (1712–80), field marshal and brother-in-law to Maria Theresa, Holy Roman empress. In 1744 he married Marianne of Austria, sister to Maria Theresa, who appointed the couple joint governors of the Austrian Netherlands. Prince Charles remained governor until his death in 1780. According to the eleventh edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, “His government of the Austrian Netherlands during the peace of 1749–1756 was marked by many reforms, and the prince won the regard of the people by his ceaseless activity on their behalf” (5:934). A biography, The Life of His Serene Highness, Charles, Prince of Lorrain, was published in January 1746. See Gentleman’s Magazine 16 (1746): 48.
1. “Spa”: A town in eastern Belgium about eighty-five miles east of Brussels. Nugent writes: “It is situated in a small plain, surrounded with mountains, so that you cannot see it till you are almost in it. . . . The town is resorted to by strangers from all parts of Europe, on account of its mineral waters, famous in ancient as well as in modern history” (1:261).
2. “mere”: Absolute or perfect (OED).
3. “strong waters”: “Any form of alcoholic spirits used as a beverage” (OED).
4. “She-Argus”: See chap. 42, n. 5.
5. “the night at odds with morning”: An echo of Lady Macbeth’s reply to her husband’s query, “What is the night?”: “Almost at odds with morning, which is which” (Macbeth, 3.4.125–26).
1. “Antwerp”: Trading center approximately twenty-four miles north of Brussels, described by Nugent as “a large beautiful city, built in the form of a crescent, in a low fenny ground, about seven miles in circumference, surrounded, with a beautiful wall, and bastions faced with stone. . . . The streets are broad and regular, the buildings magnificent; and the whole so beautiful and uniform, that it is usually and justly compared to Florence” (1:206–7).
2. “upon the anvil”: See chap. 3, n. 3.
3. “marlinspike”: An iron pin used to separate strands of rope for knotting or splicing. It usually measures between six and twelve inches in length.
4. “carriages”: Wheeled sledges that support the cannon (Falconer).
5. “salt eel”: “A rope’s end used for flogging” (OED).
6. “oakum”: See chap. 56, n. 3.
7. “benefit of the law . . . infidelity”: Divorce for adultery took the form most often of “judicial separation,” or divorce à mensa et thoro, “from bed and board.” The husband (most often) would bring suit in an ecclesiastical court. If his suit was successful, he would not have to pay his wife alimony. The marriage, however, was not dissolved, and neither spouse could remarry. A divorce that allowed for remarriage could be granted by Parliament. Between 1700 and 1749 in England, there were thirteen parliamentary divorces. Most parliamentary divorces were sought by titled husbands against their wives on the grounds of adultery. Lawrence Stone writes that “during this half-century, the object of granting Parliamentary divorces was thus exclusively the preservation of the patrilineal descent of property in the legitimate male blood line” (Road to Divorce: England, 1530–1987 [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990], 321, see also 192–97, 319–22).
8. “Tour de jeunesse”: Youthful frolic.
9. “Prince Charles”: See chap. 62, n. 6.
1. “Parnassus”: A mountain in Greece north of Delphi, home to the spring of Castalia, sacred to Apollo and the Muses; a symbol of poetic inspiration, sometimes used as a figure for a suspect enthusiasm, as in Alexander Pope’s Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot (1735): “The Dog-star rages! nay ’tis past a doubt,/All Bedlam, or Parnassus, is let out” (lines 3–4).
2. “Pindar”: See chap. 47, n. 16.
3. “honey of the Hybla bees”: Hybla, a Sicilian town, renowned since antiquity for its honey. Thus, Hyblæan means “sweet, mellifluous” (OED). Pliny identifies Hymettus and Hybla as places with the best honey (Natural History 11.13). In Julius Caesar, Cassius says to Antony: “Your words, they rob the Hybla bees,/And leave them honeyless” (5.1.34–35).
4. “Hippocrene”: Literally, “fountain of the horse,” said to have been produced by Pegasus’s striking a spot on Mount Helicon, sacred to the Muses; figuratively, poetic inspiration.
5. “harmonious nine”: The Muses. According to Hesiod, they are the daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne, providing song for the gods (Theogony 35–62). They were closely associated with Apollo and Dionysus and thus were given the gifts of prophecy and poetry, respectively. The names of the nine are Calliope (epic poetry), Euterpe (lyric poetry), Erato (erotic poetry), Melpomene (tragedy), Thalia (comedy), Polyhymnia (sacred hymns), Terpsichore (choral song and dance), Clio (history), and Urania (astronomy). They are commonly regarded as the source of inspiration for all artists and writers.
6. “my Cleopatra”: See chap. 61, n. 15.
7. “Homer’s head”: Portraits of Homer were relatively commonplace. Charles Jervas (1675–1739) designed the portrait that served as frontispiece to volume 1 of Pope’s translation of the Iliad. He wrote to Pope on 20 August 1714: “I have done Homer’s head, shadow’d and heighten’d carefully; and I inclose the outline of the same size, that you may determine whether you wou’d have it so large, or reduc’d to make room for feuillage or laurel round the oval, or about the square of the Busto? Perhaps there is something more solemn in the Image itself, if I can get it well perform’d” (The Correspondence of Alexander Pope, ed. George Sherburn, 5 vols. [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956], 1:244). Pope describes other portraits of Homer in “An Essay on the Life, Writings, and Learning of Homer,” which preceded his translation of the Iliad (1715–20). Copies of medals featuring Homer’s head adorned the beginning of the essay. About them, Pope writes: “The most valuable with respect to the Largeness of the Head is that of Amastris, which is carefully copied from an Original belonging to the present Earl of Pembroke” (Alexander Pope, The Iliad of Homer, ed. Maynard Mack [London: Methuen; New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1967], 7:55).
8. “sacrifice a cock to Æsculapius”: For Aesculapius (Aesclepius), see chap. 14, n. 8. The cock was a traditional offering to Aesculapius. Associated with the dawn and light, the cock was believed to ward off evil spirits. At the end of the Phaedo, just before he dies, Socrates tells Crito, “We owe a cock to Aesculapius. Pay it and do not neglect it” (108a7–9).
9. “το καλον [τòκαλòν]”: See chap. 47, n. 12.
10. “Cloacina”: Roman goddess of the sewers.
11. “Playtor”: Plato.
12. “hollow”: See chap. 2, n. 59.
13. “paid you both scot and lot”: See 1 Henry IV, 5.4.114. Scot and lot means literally “a tax levied by a municipal corporation in proportionate shares upon its members for the defraying of municipal expenses”; figuratively, it means “to pay out thoroughly, to settle with” (OED).
1. “pensionaire”: Boarder (OED).
2. “menage”: “The management of a household” (OED).
1. “Mechlin”: City in the Austrian Netherlands famous for its lace midway between Brussels and Antwerp on the river Dyle, northeast of Brussels. Nugent notes: “They brew likewise very good beer in this city, which they sell to the other provinces” (1:215).
2. “birth place of Rubens”: Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640), one of the greatest painters of the age, was actually born at Siegen, Westphalia, and lived his early life in Cologne, about fifty-six miles to the west of Siegen. His father, Jan Rubens, a native of Antwerp, fled to Cologne to escape religious persecution in 1568 and was imprisoned for adultery, subsequently released, and placed under house arrest in Siegen, where the painter was born. Until about 1877, both Cologne and Antwerp claimed the honor of being Rubens’s birthplace. See Emile Michel, Rubens: His Life, His Work, and His Time, trans. Elizabeth Lee, 2 vols. (London: W. Heinemann, 1899), 1:1–3. A recent biographer suggests that Rubens and his siblings concealed their true birthplace because of their father’s imprisonment in Siegen for adultery with Anne of Saxony, princess of Orange. Rubens’s father died in 1587, and soon thereafter the family returned to Antwerp. See Christopher White, Peter Paul Rubens: Man & Artist (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1987), 2–3.
3. “Mussulman”: Moslem.
4. “apply . . . a committee”: The lord chancellor, who is the chief judge of the kingdom and presides over the Court of Chancery, from which are issued “commissions of lunacy,” charged to determine whether a person is of sound mind and thus able to govern himself and his property.
5. “stiled μἑλιττα, or the bee”: Sophocles “was called the New Syren, the Flower of Poets, and the Bee, from the Sweetness of his Speech” (Biographia Classica: The Lives and Characters of All the Classic Authors, 2nd ed., 2 vols. [London, 1750], 1:78).
6. “his own children . . . domestic concerns”: Cicero relates the story about Sophocles’s children carrying him before a magistrate in his De senectute 7.22.
7. “Oδιδιπουζ επι κολωνω [Oίδίπονζέπὶκολῳνώ]”: Oedipus at Colonus, tragedy by Sophocles (496–406/405 BC) written shortly before his death and first produced posthumously in 401 BC.
8. “disciples . . . teacher”: Pliny relates this anecdote about Porcius Latro in his Natural History 20.57. Porcius Latro (fl. late first century BC) was a renowned rhetorician. Ovid was one of his pupils.
9. “Virtuosi”: Those “skilled in antique or natural curiosities; . . . studious of painting, statuary, or architecture” (Johnson); often used pejoratively.
10. “the great church”: The Cathedral of Our Lady, begun in 1352 and completed in the sixteenth century. The cathedral contains Rubens’s works Raising of the Cross, Descent from the Cross, Assumption of the Virgin, and Coronation of the Virgin. It is described in Nugent, 1:207–8.
11. “tomb of Rubens”: Rubens’s tomb is located not in the Cathedral of Our Lady but in the Church of St. James (Sint-Jacobskerk), less than a mile to the east.
12. “Paul preaching at Athens”: The subject of one of the ten tapestry cartoons commissioned by Pope Leo X, Raphael’s patron, to serve as models for the creation of tapestries to hang below the fifteenth-century fresco cycle in the Sistine Chapel. Seven of the ten cartoons were acquired by Sir Francis Crane for Charles I (then Prince Charles) in 1623. From 1699 to 1763 the cartoons could be viewed in Hampton Court in a special gallery designed by Sir Christopher Wren. Richard Steele writes about the cartoons in Spectator, no. 226 (19 November 1711). About St. Paul preaching, he writes: “With what wonderful Art are almost all the different Tempers of Mankind represented in that elegant Audience? You see one credulous of all that is said, another wrapt up in deep Suspence, another saying there is some Reason in what he says, another angry that the Apostle destroys a favourite Opinion which he is unwilling to give up, another wholly convinced and holding out his Hands in Rapture; while the Generality attend, and wait for the Opinion of those who are of leading Characters in the Assembly” (Bond ed., 2:379–80). See The Raphael Cartoons, introduction by John Pope-Hennessy (London: Her Majesty’s Stationer’s Office, 1966), 5–7.
13. “Oter tems, oter tems”: “Some other time.”
14. “schelling”: “A silver coin formerly current in the Low Countries, of the value of 6 stivers or from 5d. to 7–1/2d. sterling” (OED).
15. “Fire and faggots!”: The phrase refers to the practice of burning heretics (OED).
16. “famous descent from the cross”: Centerpiece of a triptych painted by Rubens in 1612–14. The work was commissioned by the Antwerp Guild of Arquebusiers, led by burgomaster Nicolaas Rockox. The left wing of the triptych is the Visitation, and the right wing is the Presentation in the Temple. In his mention of the painting, Nugent expresses the common opinion of the day: “The picture of taking our Saviour down from the cross, the figures of which are all as big as the life, is reckoned a master-piece” (1:208).
17. “two ancient painters . . . grapes”: Zeuxis and Parrhasius (fl. fifth century BC), whose competition is related in Pliny Natural History 35.36.
18. “portraits . . . family”: It is likely that Rubens’s wife, Isabella Brant, served as a model for Mary Magdalen in the centerpiece and for the pregnant Virgin in the Visitation of the left wing. Michel speculates that Isabella’s parents served as models for Elizabeth and Joseph, though he also entertains the idea that Rubens’s own mother served as a model for Elizabeth. His patron, Nicolaas Rockox, appears in the Presentation of the right wing (Rubens, 1:162–63). For the suggestion that Isabella Brant served as model for Magdalen and the Virgin, see Eugene Fromentin, The Masters of Past Time, trans. Andrew Boyle; excerpted in John Rupert Martin, ed., Rubens: The Antwerp Altarpieces (New York: Norton, 1969), 83–84. Assertions that Rubens put himself into the painting have not been found.
19. “in the attitude . . . appears”: Hamlet, 1.4.
20. “Rubens . . . house”: Located at Wapper 9–11 along a canal that had once been part of Antwerp’s fortifications. The original house was quite grand, in the Italian Renaissance style that Rubens had known during his years of apprenticeship in Italy. After buying the house, he added a studio, a triumphal arch, a pavilion in the form of a temple in the garden, and a room to house his collection. A seventeenth-century commentator described the collection room as “circular . . . with only a round skylight in the ceiling, similar to the Pantheon in Rome, so as to achieve the same perfectly even light” (qtd. in White, Rubens, 67).
1. “noddy”: “Any of several terns . . ., mostly tropical and with dark plumage”; also, a simpleton (OED); “a simpleton, an idiot” (Johnson).
2. “Death is a debt . . . song”: A common proverb: death is a way “to pay one’s debt to nature,” and “I owe God a death” (Tilley, A Dictionary of the Proverbs, D168, G237). See also John Gay, The Beggar’s Opera, 3.11, air 57: “For death is a debt,/A debt on demand,” sung by Macheath as he is being led to the gallows.
3. “set foot to foot”: To engage in close combat with (OED).
4. “go to pot”: Be ruined or killed.
5. “Longobards”: Lombards; “a person belonging to the Germanic people . . . who conquered Italy in the sixth century, and from whom Lombardy received its name” (OED).
6. “Pickle . . . observations”: In his Travels, Smollett devotes an entire letter to “the absurd and pernicious custom of duelling.” He recommends banishment for those who challenge others to duels; death to those who kill their adversaries; and for those killed in a duel public display of their bodies, which are subsequently to be given to the surgeons for dissection, as were the bodies of those who suffered capital punishment (131–38). See chap. 44, n. 16.
7. “armour of Charles the fifth . . . duke of Parma”: Charles V (1500–1558), Holy Roman emperor (1519–56) and king of Spain as Charles 1 (1516–56); and Alessandro Farnese (1545–92), duke of Parma, governor-general of the Netherlands (1578–92), and brilliant general who served Philip II, Charles V’s son. Farnese’s funeral was held in Brussels, though he is buried in Parma. Nugent directs the visitor to Brussels to the site: “At the farther end of the park, there is a pleasure-house built by the emperor Charles V. called the emperor’s palace, where among other things the cradle of that emperor is preserved. Opposite to the palace, on the other side of the square, is the armory, which is a large gallery full of several sorts of antique arms and furniture for tournaments, besides ancient suits of armour of several emperors, kings, archdukes, and other great men, with many of their statues on horseback as well as on foot” (1:219–20).
8. “cap-a-pee”: From Middle French (de) cap a pé, “from head to foot: in reference to arming or accoutring” (OED).
9. “Pila and Parma”: Roman military javelin and small round shield used by light troops.
10. “′Eκθεν . . . ἀρεταĩζ [ἐκ θεν . . . ἀρεταιˆζ]”: Pindar Pythian Odes 1.41: “From the gods come all the means for human achievements.”
11. “Spolia Opima”: “Spoils of honor”; arms taken by a Roman general who has killed the enemy commander in single combat.
1. “′Oσσα . . . ἀΐοντα [ὅσσα . . . ἀΐοντα]”: Pythian Odes 1.13–14: “But those creatures for whom Zeus has no love are terrified/when they hear the song of the Pierians [Muses].”
2. “Marathon . . . Persian empire”: According to Herodotus, the Athenians, led by Miltiades and accompanied by the Plataeans, fought a superior Persian force led by Hippius on the plain of Marathon in 490 BC. They defeated the Persians, killing 6,400 while losing only 192 of their own men, and thus saved Athens from Persian rule (History 6.102–17).
3. “glorious testimony . . . inscriptions”: In “Smollett and Akenside,” Buck credits Alexander Dyce with the discovery that the passage is a paraphrase of Akenside’s note to a line from his poem An Ode to the Right Honourable the Earl of Huntingdon ([London, 1748], 12). Akenside’s note reads: “Cimon the Athenian erected a Trophy in Cyprus for two great Victories gain’d on the same Day over the Persians by Sea and Land. Diodorus Siculus has preserved the Inscription which the Athenians affixed to the consecrated Spoils, after this great Success; in which it is very remarkable that the Greatness of the Occasion has rais’d the Manner of Expression above the usual Simplicity and Modesty of all other ancient Inscriptions” (24). The account of Cimon’s victory over the Persians can be found in Diodorus Siculus Library of History 11.60–63.
4. “such an army . . . Leonidas”: Xerxes assembled a huge army to conquer Greece, but his army sustained great losses at the battle of Thermopylae (480 BC), where Leonidas, king of Sparta, inflicted severe losses on the Persians before he and his three hundred Spartans were killed in battle. According to Herodotus, the Persian forces numbered 2,641,000 (History 7.184–85). Leonidas’s resistance allowed Athens to prepare for a decisive naval victory against the Persians at Salamis. For Herodotus’s account of the battle of Thermopylae, see History 7.202–33.
5. “Scheld”: The river Scheldt, 270 miles long, originates in northern France and flows through Belgium and the Netherlands before emptying into the North Sea.
6. “Rotterdam”: Port city in the southeastern Netherlands on the river Meuse. Nugent calls it “a large and populous city, of a triangular figure, handsomely built of brick, the streets wide, and well paved” (1:126).
7. “Maeze”: The Meuse (Dutch Maas) flows from northeastern France for about 560 miles, forming part of the border between Belgium and the Netherlands. It forms a common delta with the Rhine and empties into the North Sea. Canals connect the river to Ghent and Rotterdam.
8. “pleasure-yacht”: “As the principal design of a yacht is to accommodate the passengers, it is usually fitted with a variety of convenient apartments, with suitable furniture, according to the quality of number of the persons contained therein” (Falconer).
9. “mackerel breeze”: A strong breeze, or “a breeze that ruffles the water, so as to favour the catching of mackerel.” This passage is cited in the OED as an example of the term’s usage.
10. “lee-gunwale”: The upper edge of a ship’s side on the leeward side (away from the wind) (OED).
11. “blessed himself from”: “To guard oneself (with God’s help) from” (OED).
12. “bomb-keys”: Boompjes, at Rotterdam, described by Nugent:
The Boom-keys lies delightfully along the Maese, which is here near a mile and a half broad. The street is above half a mile long, extending from the new to the old head or point, the two places where the water of the Maese enters the city. On the one side of it there is a magnificent row of trees and houses, and on the other the river, with ships continually sailing up or down, or at anchor. This key is the general resort of people of condition, whom it serves instead of a mall. (1:127–28)
The source from which Nugent appears to have borrowed his description of the Boom-quay adds: “For Variety of pleasing Objects, and the noble Prospect, it is, I believe, the plesantest Walk in the World” (A Description of Holland [London, 1743], 313–14).
13. “deal-board”: “A thin board of fir or pine” (OED).
14. “chafing-dish”: “A vessel to hold burning charcoal or other fuel, for heating anything placed upon it” (OED).
15. “Chimeras”: See chap. 46, n. 31.
16. “the Dutch cast”: Simon Schama has shown that much of the English prejudice against the Dutch, which resulted in the creation of national stereotypes, originated at the time of the Anglo-Dutch wars of the 1660s. The “Dutch cast” was molded by the country’s geography and climate, which, in turn, determined their physical, mental, and vocational traits. Nugent remarks on the national tendency toward corpulence, observing that “both men and women have the grossest shapes that are to be met with any where” (1:40). Physical heaviness found its counterpart in behavior, again according to Nugent: “The passions of both sexes run lower and cooler here than in any other country: their tempers being not airy enough for joy, or any unusual strains of pleasant humour; nor warm enough for love. . . . [T]hey hardly allow themselves any other entertainment than eating and drinking; except in the rigorous season of the year, when they divert themselvs with skeating [sic]” (1:44–45). For further discussion of the British image of the phlegmatic Dutch cast, see Simon Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age (New York: Knopf, 1987), 263–65.
17. “cabinet of curiosities”: See chap. 62, n. 4. Van Strien identifies the owner of this collection as Jan Bisschop (1680–1771) although according to van Strien Bisschop was a cloth merchant, not a cheesemonger. Thomas Pennant visited Bisschop’s cabinet in 1765 and described his holdings thus: “His pictures are all of the Flemish school, small but finished with a most exact neatness; his china is of immense value, his Japan works incomparable. Besides these he has fine carvings in Ivory . . . and numberless other curiosities to a vast value. There are two staircases worse than those to any Belfry and exceeding difficult of ascent” (Tour on the Continent, 1765, ed. G. R. de Beer [London: Ray Society, 1948], 151–52). Van Strien bases his identification on the presence of the dark staircases in each account, though it is clear that Pennant was far more impressed with Bisschop’s holdings than Peregrine and his party (“Peregrine Pickle in the Low Countries,” 279–80).
18. “mynheer Sloane”: Sir Hans Sloane (1660–1753), physician, naturalist, and collector born in Ireland whose collections of books, manuscripts, and objects of natural history, some of which he accumulated when he traveled to France and the West Indies and some of which he acquired by buying other collections, became the core collection of the British Museum. His will stipulated that, provided certain conditions were met, his collections should be left to the nation. Shortly after his death, the British Museum was established by an act of Parliament, in accordance with his will, on 7 June 1753. Sloane’s former curator, James Empson, estimated the collection to be worth “some £80,000 if not £100,000” (ODNB).
19. “Saltero’s coffee-house”: Don Saltero’s Coffee House and museum of curiosities, 18 Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, was located just east of Monmouth House, Smollett’s residence; Smollett himself was a patron and frequented the establishment until 1763 (Knapp, 111–12). James Salter (d. c. 1728), the first proprietor and one-time servant of Sir Hans Sloane, who contributed to his collection, opened his coffeehouse in 1695. Sir Richard Steele described Salter and his coffeehouse in the Tatler, no. 34 (28 June 1709). After his death, the coffeehouse was continued by his daughter until about 1759 (ODNB). By 1750 A Catalogue of the Rarities to Be Seen at Don Saltero’s Coffee-House in Chelsea was in its fifteenth edition. In this edition of the catalog, 505 items are listed, from animals and parts of animals to “Several Pieces of the Holy Cross, in a Glass Frame” (2). The collection remained in place until the end of the century. When the contents of the house were sold at auction in 1799, they brought the owners about £50.
20. “Treckskuyt”: “A canal-or river-boat drawn by horses, carrying passengers and goods, as in common use in Holland” (OED, s.v. “trekschuit”). Nugent gives more detail: “The usual way of travelling in Holland . . . is in Treck-scoots, or Draw-boats, which are large covered boats, not unlike the barges of the livery companies of London, drawn by a horse at the rate of three miles an hour; the fare of which does not amount to a penny a mile; and you have the conveniency of carrying a portmanteau, or provisions; so that you need not be at any manner of expence at a publick house by the way” (1:48).
21. “the Hague”: Capital of the Dutch Republic nine miles northwest of Rotterdam and two miles east of the North Sea, according to Nugent. The Hague, Nugent writes, “for extent, number of people, and opulence, may be ranked among the best cities of Europe” (1:105).
22. “princess . . . prince”: Anne of Hanover (1709–59), daughter of George II and his wife, Caroline; and William IV (1711–51), prince of Orange-Nassau. William was elected stadholder in 1747, and he and Anne moved to the Binnenhof, the stadholder’s residence. Anne lived at the British court from 1714 until her marriage in March 1734. Handel was one of her teachers, and he performed for her at The Hague in 1750 (ODNB).
1. “Foundery”: Most likely “the magazine or military store-house. It is a lofty building, principally designed for founding cannon, and was built in one year, during the War with England in the Time of Charles II. It has a Latin inscription, which is in substance, That for the sake of obtaining and preserving peace, their High Mightinesses the states-general of the United Netherlands has caused this magazine to be erected” (Nugent, 1:111).
2. “Stadthouse”: “Near the great market stands the Stadhuys, or town-house. It was formerly but an ordinary building, but is now rebuilt in a modern taste. It fronts the great church: the space between them is used for public executions. A scaffold is erected on such occasions before the windows of the town-house, where the magistrates sits [sic], and sees the sentence executed. The building is plain and handsome, so that it differs nothing from a private house: however, the bench on which the judges sit, is finely gilt and carved; and over it there is a mythological painting on the administration of justice, exquisitely well done” (Nugent, 1:115).
3. “Spinhuys”: “House of correction for such young women as have made a false step. . . . It is so called, because many of them are confined for a certain number of months, or years, and are obliged to spin, sew, or do any other work for their livelyhood. Every body is admitted to see them, paying two pence to the porter; so that they are made a public show; which makes them worse instead of growing better” (Nugent, 1:114).
4. “Vauxhall”: Perhaps a “public garden, in imitation of VAUX HALL” on the road to Count Bentinck’s gardens (see n. 5, below), and described by Jonas Hanway in An Historical Account of the British Trade over the Caspian Sea, 2 vols. (London, 1754), 2:49 (see also van Strien, “Peregrine Pickle in the Low Countries,” 278). Given Peregrine’s love for the high life, another possibility is
the Voorhout, the most celebrated part of the Hague; it consists of the mall and two ways for coaches on each side; beyond which are two parallel rows of magnificent houses, chiefly occupied by persons of the first quality: the mall is railed on both sides, and is almost the same thing here as St. James’s park in London. The taste of this place is quite changed; in former times there was a fine appearance of coaches perpetually driving round this spot, and the mall was crouded with the beau monde on foot. But this diversion, which was formerly so captivating, is no longer pursued: excessive gaming has succeeded, and is now become the reigning passion of the place. (Nugent, 1:110)
5. “Count Bentinck’s gardens”: At the family estate at Zorgvliet, located near The Hague, in the vicinity of the village of Scheveling (Scheveningen), “a place usually first visited by the curious traveler.” The gardens were designed by Hans Willem Bentinck, 1st Earl of Portland (1649–1709), advisor to William III, and a designer of gardens in England as well as in Holland. The gardens are briefly described in Nugent: “About half a mile on the left-hand lie Portland’s Gardens, to which a short avenue leads: they are well worth seeing. There is no house here except the gardener’s. There is a seat here, where king William and queen Mary used to rest themselves, when they took a walk without attendants. There is a very good orangery, the fruit of which, at least for its colour, is not inferior to that of Spain” (1:117–18).
6. “French comedy”: “In the Casuari-street, near the Princess Graft, stands the French play-house, which is neither so large nor so fine as might be expected at such a place as the Hague, being far inferior to the theatre at Brussels. The actors generally come from France and other parts to the Hague, and are chiefly supported by the court, by foreign ministers, and by officers. There are no seats in the pit here, so that you are obliged to stand during the whole representation, which is very tiresome: the pit is one gilder, the boxes of the first row four shillings, and the rest in proportion” (Nugent, 1:111–12). According to Nugent, one gilder was worth about two shillings (1:51).
7. “noted Harlequin”: This person has not been certainly identified. The Whitehall Evening Post or London Intelligencer for 8 February 1750 contains the following notice of a performance at The Hague: “Mons. Terodak, the French Harlequin, who is arrived here with his Company from Paris, has met with great Applause at our Theatre, their Royal Highnesses the Prince and Princess of Orange having honoured them with their Presence at the Playing the Comedy of L’Embarras des Richesses, and the Court has given Order for the Comedie of Harlequin Savage to be performed next.” Terodat is an anagram for Cadoret (fl. 1740–52), who debuted at the Comédie-Italienne in 1737 and again in 1740. He appeared at Haymarket Theatre on 14 November 1749 in Les amans réunis (Philip H. Highfill, Jr., Kalman A. Burnim, and Edward A. Langhans, A Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Actresses, Musicians, Dancers, Managers & Other Stage Personnel in London, 1660–1800, 16 vols. [Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1973–93], 14:401). Clifford directs the reader to J. Fransen, Les comédiens français en Hollande au xviie et xviiie siècles (Paris: Librairie Ancienne, 1925), who notes that a French theatrical troupe under the direction of a Monsieur Hébert leased the theater on Casuariestraat and played there after Easter 1750. The season was a failure, and Hébert left without paying his debts (302).
8. “British embassador”: Robert D’Arcy, 4th Earl of Holderness (1718–78), was appointed minister-plenipotentiary to the Dutch Republic by George II in 1749. He was resident at The Hague from June 1749 to July 1751 (ODNB).
9. “famous story of Scipio’s continence and virtue”: Publius Cornelius Scipio (236/235–183 BC), later called Africanus after defeating Hannibal in 202 BC, led the Roman legions against the Carthaginians in Spain when he was just twenty-four years old. Having besieged and taken the fortified town of New Carthage, Scipio worked to pacify the Spanish population through humane treatment of the hostages who had been kept in the city. Among these hostages was “a grown maiden of a beauty so extraordinary that, wherever she went, she drew the eyes of everyone” (Livy History of Rome 26.50.1). When Scipio learns that she is betrothed, he sends for her lover, a Celtiberian prince named Allucius, and after confessing his attraction to the beautiful young woman returns her to Allucius, asking in exchange only that Allucius support the Roman occupiers. He also gives Allucius a “nuptial gift,” gold and treasure that he had received from the young maiden’s family in gratitude for his returning her to her lover. Allucius travels back to his people, full of praise for Scipio, musters 1,400 horsemen, and subsequently rejoins the young Roman general. At least two plays in seventeenth-century France treated this story. Jean Desmarets’s (1595–1676) Scipion, a tragicomedy, was first performed in 1638 and published in 1639. Dutch translations appeared in 1651 and 1657. Desmarets’s Scipion features the incident related in Livy and adds a couple to complicate the plot. One historian has called its plot “romantic, but . . . partly devoted to the exaltation of Scipio in what was subsequently to be known as the Cornelian manner.” Scipion l’Africain by Jacques Pradon, a prolific writer of tragedies, enjoyed sixteen performances in 1697 but was never performed again. This play draws on the earlier version by Desmarets and transfers the action to Carthage proper. The same historian calls it an “absurd play.” The Celtiberian prince in the former play is called Lucidan; in the latter he is named Lucejus. See Henry Carrington Lancaster, A History of French Dramatic Literature in the Seventeenth Century, 5 pts. (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins; London: Oxford University Press, 1940), 2:216–19, 4:366–67. Scipio Africanus, by Charles Beckingham (1699–1731), was performed at Little Lincoln’s Inn Fields on 18 February 1718, with Quin in the title role of Scipio (ODNB). Phillip Zweerts’s Scipio, Treurspel was published in Amsterdam in 1736. See van Strien (“Peregrine Pickle in the Low Countries,” 285), who has identified the probable source of Smollett’s description as Jean-Baptiste Dubos, Critical Reflections on Poetry, Painting and Music, trans. Thomas Nugent, 3 vols. (London, 1748): “You may see Scipio smoaking a pipe of tobacco, and drinking a pot of beer in his tent” (1:345).
10. “Batavian”: The Dutch, from “Batavi, an ancient people who dwelt on the island Betawe, between the Rhine and the Waal, in part of what is now Holland” (OED).
11. “Celtiberian”: “Of or pertaining to Celtiberia, an ancient province of Spain lying between the Tagus and the Ebro, or to its inhabitants, the Celtiberi, a union of Celts with Iberians” (OED).
12. “Livy describes”: History of Rome 26.50. See n. 9, above.
13. “Ya frow”: “Miss,” from the Dutch juffrouw.
14. “Mynheer Allucio”: Allucius, the Celtiberian prince, n. 9, above.
15. “Spuyl or musick-houses”: Nugent calls them “famous” and writes: “These are a kind of taverns and halls where young people of the meaner sort, both men and women, meet two or three times a week, for dancing. Here they only make their rendezvous, but the execution is done elsewhere. Those who choose to satisfy their curiosity . . . should take care to behave civilly, and especially not to offer familiarities to any girl that is engaged with another man, otherwise the consequence might be dangerous, for the Dutch are very brutish in their quarrels” (1:83).
16. “coffee-house of Moll King”: Moll (Mary) King (1696–1747) and her husband, Tom (1694–1739), ran a celebrated and infamous coffeehouse in Covent Garden Market. Unlike the coffeehouses that catered to literary, political, or business clientele, Moll’s coffeehouse was the destination of seekers after pleasure and adventure. Fielding mentions it in the prologue to Covent-Garden Tragedy (1732) and in Pasquin (1736), and Hogarth portrayed it in The Four Times of the Day (1738), where it figures prominently in Morning. Roderick Random visits Moll King’s, where one of his companions “kicked half a dozen of hungry whores” (chap. 46). See E. J. Burford, Wits, Wenchers and Wantons: London’s Low Life: Covent Garden in the Eighteenth Century (London: Robert Hale, 1986), 53–64; Bryant Lillywhite, London Coffee Houses: A Reference Book of Coffee Houses of the Seventeenth, Eighteenth, and Nineteenth Centuries (London: G. Allen and Unwin, 1963), 596–97; H. B. Wheatley, Hogarth’s London (London: Constable and Company, 1909), 133–36, 287; Ronald Paulson, Hogarth’s Graphic Works, 2 vols. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1965), 1:178–79; and The Life and Character of Moll King (London, 1747?).
17. “Bucks of Covent-Garden”: The OED notes that this term, which usually means a “dashing fellow” in the eighteenth century, carried the connotation of “‘spirit’ or gaiety of conduct.” According to A New Canting Dictionary, the word was “sometimes used to signify a forward daring Person of either Sex.”
18. “sarabrand”: Variant of saraband, a “slow and stately Spanish dance in triple time” (OED).
19. “Skuyt”: Treckskuyt. See chap. 69, n. 20.
20. “Haarlem”: According to Nugent’s calculations, Haarlem was seven miles west of Amsterdam and four miles east of the ocean (1:90).
21. “Leyden”: Nugent locates Leyden “six miles east of the ocean, twelve north of Haerlem [sic], nineteen south of Amsterdam. . . . This is esteemed one of the neatest and pleasantest towns in the Netherlands, and the largest in Holland next to Amsterdam. . . . But what distinguishes this city more than any thing else, is the famous university founded here by the states-general, a year after the dreadful siege in 1573, to make the inhabitants amends for their losses, and the hardships they had undergone” (1:95, 101).
22. “partie”: Although the OED defines this word as “a game, esp. a game of piquet; a match in a game,” and cites the occurrence in chap. 105, below, here the meaning seems closer to “a select assembly” (Johnson).
23. “visited . . . hall”: Of the university, Nugent writes: “It is far from being an extraordinary structure. It consists of a large pile of brick buildings three stories high” (1:101). In the physic garden
a great number of rarities are to be seen in the gallery. . . . Among other things there is an ape, and a cat, which came into the world with wings; the hand of a mermade; a stare [starling] with long ears; a vegetable Priapus, which is a curious plant; a monster issued out of a hen’s egg; and several other curiosities. . . . The anatomy hall is an octagon. . . . Here you may see a vast number of skeletons of men and beasts, besides a great many remarkable curiosities, as plants, fruits, animals, arms, strange habits, pictures, urns, mummies, idols, &c. (1:102)
24. “Helvoetsluys”: “A sea-port town . . . esteemed the safest harbour in the country. . . . The English packet-boat sets off from hence for Harwich twice a week, that is Wednesdays and Saturdays” (Nugent, 1:148).
1. “interesting”: See chap. 29, n. 2.
2. “self-sufficient”: “In an unfavourable sense: Having excessive confidence in oneself, one’s powers, etc.; characterized by overweening or self-conceited opinion or behaviour” (OED).
3. “Mem.”: Abbreviation of “memorandum.”
4. “hither horse . . . hind-leg”: Jolter is describing a disease that attacks a horse’s legs, usually in the heel area, characterized by inflammation of the sebaceous follicles of the skin and resulting in lesions that are difficult to heal. The pastern is the part of the horse’s leg between the heel and the fetlock.
5. “staled”: Urinated.
6. “twenty-four sol piece”: A sol is a French coin and is the equivalent of four liards, or one English halfpenny. Nugent reports denominations of one, one and a half, two, six, twelve, and twenty-four. The last is valued as “about the same as a shilling English” (4:16).
7. “liard”: See chap. 43, n. 7.
8. “bleeding freely at play”: Losing money carelessly at cards.
9. “Smite my cross-trees!”: Cross-trees are horizontal timbers on the masts of a sailing vessel. They form the structural support of the “top” or platform, which rests on the lower mast. The top contains materials for extending the sails on the top mast (usually a single tree or pole that extends the lower mast) and is also used as a lookout. In ships of war, sailors were stationed on the top in order to fire down upon the enemy (Falconer).
10. “Odds my timbers!”: An oath. For timbers, see chap. 37, n. 5.
11. “upon the stocks”: The framework on which a ship or boat is supported while in the process of construction; figuratively, a reference to the conception or beginning of anything (OED).
12. “patereroes”: See chap. 2, n. 12.
13. “hornpipe”: See chap. 18, n. 15.
14. “anabaptists”: A word applied loosely and often pejoratively to religious dissenters; in strict sense, those who believed in adult rather than infant baptism, a sect emerging in Switzerland in the first quarter of the sixteenth century. Anabaptists were feared and subject to periodic repression.
1. “buckled”: The OED cites Smollett’s usage of this word again in his translation of Don Quixote, bk. 4, chap. 4: “Take my advice, and marry in the first place where we can find a curate; or make use of our friend the licentiate, who will buckle you handsomely” (The History and Adventures of the Renowned Don Quixote, trans. Tobias Smollett, ed. Martin C. Battestin and O M Brack, Jr. [Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2003], 223).
2. “apply for a warrant . . . without his privity or consent”: Before Lord Hardwicke’s Marriage Act (1753), persons under the age of twenty-one could make a valid (if illegal) marriage even though they lacked parental consent, as stipulated by Canon 100 of the Church of England: “None shall Marry, or contract Matrimony, under the Age of 21 Years, without the Consent of their Parents or Guardians.” The civil law also forbade marriage without parental consent (Giles Jacob, A Treatise of Laws [London, 1721], 522, 301). Lawrence Stone has observed that the English government
in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries abandoned most of such powers as they still possessed over reproductive behaviour, and before 1753 made few serious attempts to suppress either clandestine or contract marriages. . . . [A] secret contract, or . . . a clandestine marriage which was binding but illegal, . . . carried out without parental consent, were options very much open to young people in England. In many cases, it was a successful pre-emptive strike by the young couple, in order to secure their own choice of a spouse in defiance of their parents and the courts. (Road to Divorce, 56–57)
3. “birth”: See chap. 8, n. 12.
4. “brought up”: To have been brought to anchor or to a standstill (OED).
5. “capstans”: A capstan is a large cylinder or barrel on a vertical axis turned round by means of handles inserted in holes around the top of the cylinder; on a ship it is used especially to weigh or haul up the anchor.
6. “viol-block”: The viol or voyal is a “large rope used to unmoor, or heave up the anchors of a ship, by transmitting the effort of the capstern to the cables.” One end of the voyal is attached to the cables and the other to the capstan. The voyal, being more pliant than the cables, makes easier the job of weighing anchor. The viol is sometimes passed through a block or pulley when the fore-capstan rather than the main capstan is not used to weigh anchor (Falconer, s.v. “voyal”). The OED cites this passage as an example of the term’s usage.
7. “Pike of Teneriff”: Well-known conical-shaped mountain in the Canary Islands proverbial for its height and for a time described as the highest point on earth.
8. “surrender at discretion”: See chap. 59, n. 6.
1. “season at Bath”: The famous resort, about 107 miles west of London, known for its mineral waters, its assembly rooms, and the opportunity it provided for the elites and middle orders to mingle in its social spaces. By 1750 there were two seasons, spring and autumn. See John Wood, An Essay towards a Description of Bath, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (London, 1749), 1:85. Bath was a favorite locale for Smollett the novelist. Roderick Random travels to Bath to advance his fortunes (chaps. 53–60), and Matthew Bramble’s company visits the resort. Early social historians of Bath drew upon Smollett’s descriptions of the town and its habitués in Humphry Clinker.
2. “Tunbridge”: Famous watering spot, thirty-four miles south-southeast of London, known for its chalybeate spring and its fashionable walks. During the middle of the eighteenth century, it was a resort for the London beau monde and literary world.
3. “company of sharpers”: From the very beginning of its history as a resort, Bath was synonymous with gambling. One historian notes that everyone took part, not least of all Richard “Beau” Nash (1674–1761), the master of ceremonies at Bath from 1707 to 1761 (and Tun-bridge Wells from 1735 to 1761, when Bath was out of season in July and August): “Gambling went on at Bath as in London, that is to say, immoderately and incessantly. Unscrupulously, too, we are bound to add” (A. Barbeau, Life & Letters at Bath in the XVIIIth Century [London: Heinemann, 1904], 97). R. S. Neale notes that gambling was outlawed in 1745 and thereafter vigorously prosecuted (Bath, 1680–1750: A Social History [London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981], 28).
4. “trade upon his own bottom”: To act for himself without financing or support from anyone else (OED).
5. “knowing-ones”: “Much used c 1750–1820 for a person professing to be well up in the secrets of the turf or other sporting matters” (OED).
6. “prostituting themselves . . . prosecution”: Just what sort of prosecution is intended here is not clear. Although recent historians of sexuality have made strenuous arguments for a fully self-conscious lesbian identity in eighteenth-century England, they have also noted that legal records of prosecution for same-sex relations between women are extremely scanty, perhaps because it was not as threatening as sexual relations between men, which were made a capital crime by the statute against sodomy. The statute did not include sexual relations between women. See, for example, Julie Peakman, Lascivious Bodies: A Sexual History of the Eighteenth Century (London: Atlantic Books, 2004), 193–94; and Rebecca Jennings, A Lesbian History of Britain: Love and Sex between Women since 1500 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood World Publishing, 2007), 1. In November 1746 appeared Henry Fielding’s pamphlet The Female Husband, which recounts the story of Mary Hamilton, alias George Hamilton, who was convicted of fraud for impersonating a man and marrying Mary Price. For punishment, the pamphlet reports, she was “whipt four several times” (22). The pamphlet hopes that such punishment “will be sufficient to deter all others from the commission of any such foul and unnatural crimes” (23). The anonymous Satan’s Harvest Home (London, 1749) calls attention to the “Game of Flatts,” the origin of which the author attributes to Sappho, who “not content with our [i.e., the male] Sex, begins Amours with her own, and teaches the Female World, a new Sort of Sin, call’d the Flats, that was follow’d not only in Lucian’s Time, but is practis’d frequently in Turkey, as well as at Twickenham at this Day” (18). The pamphlet retells the story of a Turkish woman who fell in love with another woman after seeing her at the public baths. She disguised herself as a man and married the object of her affection. When the imposture was discovered, she was condemned to be drowned (60–61).
1. “piddle”: “To be busy about trifles” (Johnson, s.v. “peddle”).
2. “cast”: “A permanent twist or turn, esp. to one side; a warp” (OED).
3. “mast”: “A kind of heavy cue, of which the broad end was used for striking” (OED).
4. “hazards”: The holes or pockets in the sides of a billiard table; also “a stroke by which one of the balls is driven into a pocket” (OED). In the common game of billiards, “the making of a hazard, that is putting the adversary’s ball in at the common game, reckons two in favour of the player” (Connoisseur, Annals of Gaming; or, the Fair Player’s Sure Guide [London, 1775], 87–88).
5. “who played the partie”: The player in the match or game. See chap. 70, n. 22.
6. “bite”: “A cheat; a trick; a fraud: in low and vulgar language” (Johnson).
7. “company of foot”: “A sub-division of an infantry regiment commanded by a captain” (OED). See chap. 33, n. 9.
1. “set all the ladies by the ears”: “To set quarrelling” (OED).
2. “long-room”: “An assembly room in a private house or public building” (OED). Barbeau reports two long or assembly rooms before 1771 in Bath (Life & Letters, 59). The assembly rooms were used daily and throughout the day for lectures, concerts, tea drinking, and general congregating (Wood, An Essay, 2:438, 442–44).
3. “physicians . . . so many ravens”: In this scene, Smollett, a practicing medical man until about 1752 (Knapp, 142), takes aim at the medical profession, especially its competition for patients and its disagreements over diagnoses. Roy Porter notes that distrust of physicians “was as old as the profession itself” and that a “peck of proverbs warned the public that death and the doctors were as thick as thieves.” Those whom Smollett calls “gaunt ministers of death” were feared and accused of ignorance and greed. See Dorothy and Roy Porter, Patient’s Progress: Doctors and Doctoring in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989), 54–58. In Letter 4 of The New Bath Guide (London, 1766), Christopher Anstey satirizes physicians who are called to a consultation but who are more interested in discussing politics than their patient’s condition.
4. “scullers at Hungerford-stairs”: Watermen who solicited fares at the stairs leading to the Thames near Charing Cross. One historian writes that “the Thames waterman . . . was deemed to be wild, uncultivated, surly and rough of speech” (Peter Ackroyd, Thames: Sacred River [London: Chatto & Windus, 2007], 166). Writing in 1725, César de Saussure describes the scene as watermen solicit fares: “As soon as a person approaches the stairs they run to meet him calling out lustily ‘Oars, oars,’ or ‘Sculler, sculler.’ They continue this melodious music until the person points with his finger to the man he has chosen, and they at once unite in abusive language at the offending boatman” (qtd. in Gavin Weightman, London’s Thames: The River That Shaped a City and Its History [New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2005], 31).
5. “correspondents in London”: Barbara Brandon Schnorrenberg comments on this practice and finds other examples of London physicians referring their patients to colleagues at Bath (“Medical Men of Bath,” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 13, ed. O M Brack, Jr. [Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984], 197–98). Smollett’s reflections here suggest a much less defensible practice of “intelligence gathering” in order to increase the profit of the Bath physicians.
6. “pump-room”: Opened in 1706 and enlarged in 1751, the place where visitors went to drink the mineral waters. Barbeau writes: “Visitors assemble there in déshabille to drink the three glasses of hot water generally ordered, to listen to the band, and to watch the bathers in the King’s Bath just below the windows” (Life & Letters, 56). Smollett immortalized it in the opening pages of Humphry Clinker. His description is generally recognized as the most detailed description of the room in eighteenth-century fiction.
7. “male practice of a surgeon . . . unfortunate amour”: Malpractice. In A New Treatise of the Venereal Disease (London, 1736), Nicholas Robinson warns the patient about the choice of physician in the treatment of venereal disease: “It, therefore, greatly concerns the Patient, to be well apprized of the Abilities of the Person, under whose Care he entrusts the Guardianship of his Constitution; for very often his future Health and Welfare greatly depends upon the Usage he meets with, while under Cure; for, in my Time, I have known many a brave Constitution worked down to the lowest Ebb of Life through the Ignorance of those vile Quacks that set up for infallible Directors, in the Cure of this Disease” (260).
8. “sons of Æsculapius”: See chap. 14, n. 8.
9. “obstinate Arthritis . . . confirmed pox . . . inveterate scurvy”: Although there were attempts to distinguish arthritis from gout, the former was used popularly and indiscriminately for the latter. Johnson defines it as “any distemper that affects the joints, but the gout most particularly.” Under Arthritis, Chambers merely refers the reader to Gout. According to a recent history of gout, it “became a high-profile condition” during the eighteenth century, spawning “treatises, . . . popular health manuals, . . . [and] quack remedies” (Roy Porter and G. S. Rousseau, Gout: The Patrician Malady [New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998], 50). Pox, without a qualifier (i.e., not the small pox), was the general term for venereal disease. Scurvy, according to Chambers, “is not any particular disease, but a legion of diseases. . . . The cure is very difficult; and when the disease is rooted, next to impossible. It sometimes goes off in a flux by stool, sometimes by the hæmorrhoids, and sometimes by urine; but more often degenerates into a dropsy, atrophy, apoplexy, epilepsy, or convulsions” (s.v. “scorbutus”).
10. “tye-periwig”: See chap. 46, n. 5.
1. “jack”: Mechanical device for turning a spit.
2. “spits were turned by dogs”: When meat was to be roasted over a fire, it was put on a “spit-wheel,” which was turned by dogs running inside the wheel (OED).
3. “pack-thread”: “Strong cord or twine used for sewing or tying up packs or bundles” (OED).
4. “strong waters”: Alcoholic spirits for drinking.
5. “Hector”: See chap. 44, n. 8.
6. “His visits were, therefore, promiscuous”: In the sense of mixed or indiscriminate. Peregrine did not single out any one woman for his particular attentions.
7. “put”: “A stupid or foolish person, a blockhead” (OED); “a country put, an ignorant aukward clown” (Grose).
8. “congés”: “A bow; originally at taking one’s leave; afterwards also in salutation, at meeting, etc.” The OED cites this usage of the word.
9. “rotten medlar”: Fruit of the medlar, a tree related to the hawthorn. Similar in appearance to a small brown apple, it is edible only when it begins to rot (OED). The phrase “rotten medlar” appears in Measure for Measure, 4.3.174, where it refers to a woman who had lost her virginity and become pregnant.
10. “old Hirco”: “Old goat,” from hircus (Lat.).
11. “Pug”: “A kind name of a monkey, or anything tenderly loved” (Johnson).
12. “switch me”: Apparently an oath. The OED lists the phrase “I’ll be switched” to indicate surprise, but it is identified as a nineteenth-century North American colloquialism. No other instance of this usage has been located.
13. “stap my breath”: An oath, which the OED traces to Vanbrugh’s The Relapse (1696), where Lord Foppington pronounces a for o.
14. “Cadwallader Crabtree”: No original has been suggested in print for this misanthropic character. Cadwallader was the name of several Welsh heroes, the most famous being Cadwaladr ap Cadwallon (d. 664/82). He was called Cadwaladr Fendigaid and is the “last-named king of Gwynedd in the . . . Historia Brittonum.” A legend exists as early as the tenth century that he saved the Britons from English rule (ODNB). In Smollett’s period, Horace Walpole claimed descent from this illustrious king (see Walpole, 9:69). Johnson defines “crab” as “a wild apple” and “a peevish morose person.”
15. “lower house”: House of Commons in the British Parliament.
16. “ships of the line”: Battleships, heavily armed.
17. “artificial alphabet . . . fingers”: The manual alphabet in England can be traced back to the seventeenth century, specifically to John Bulwer’s (fl. 1648–54) Chirologia (London, 1644) and Philocophus (London, 1648). What was to become the standard manual alphabet was published in an anonymous pamphlet, Digitilingua (London, 1698). A “greatly improved” version of this alphabet appeared in The History of the Life and Adventures of Mr. Duncan Campbell (London, 1720), 38–39, a work that had been attributed to Daniel Defoe but that is now thought to have been written by William Bond. See P. N. Furbank and W. R. Owens, Defoe De-attributions: A Critique of J. R. Moore’s Checklist (London: Hambledon Press, 1994), 126. For a brief history of sign language in Britain, see Raymond Lee, ed., A Beginner’s Introduction to Deaf History (Feltham: British Deaf History Society Publications, 2004), 17–21.
18. “losses they had sustained during the war”: The War of the Austrian Succession, 1740–48, concluded by the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle on 18 October 1748. England’s naval power was superior to France’s throughout the war. Smollett would later comment on England’s naval successes in his summary condemnation of the terms of the peace: “When the British fleet had trampled on the naval power of France and Spain, intercepted their supplies of treasure, and cut off all their resources of commerce; the British ministers seemed to treat, without the least regard to the honour and advantage of their country. . . . What then were the fruits which Britain reaped from this long and desperate war? A dreadful expence of blood and treasure, disgrace upon disgrace, an additional load of grievous impositions, and the national debt accumulated to the enormous sum of eighty millions sterling” (Complete History, 4:700). See also chap. 50, n. 4.
1. “Marshalsea”: Prison in Southwark, London, originally attached to the Court of the Marshalsea, which had jurisdiction over offenses committed by those who lived within the verge of the royal court, or within twelve miles of the king’s residence. After the Restoration, it was used primarily as a prison for debtors. Smollett describes conditions in the prison in Roderick Random, chaps. 61–64.
2. “act . . . insolvent debtors”: In order to be freed from jail, the debtors had to swear that they had assigned and delivered all goods and property to their creditors. Different acts had various thresholds and stipulations. See, for example, 21 Geo. 2, c. 31 (1748), where debtors owing the Crown, or owing one individual more than £500, were denied the benefits of the act.
3. “leave nothing undone . . . ought to have done”: An echo of the general confession made at both morning and evening prayers, from the Book of Common Prayer: “We have left undone those things which we ought to have done; And we have done those things which we ought not to have done.”
4. “Westminster-hall”: Originally part of the royal residence, in the eighteenth century the hall housed the Courts of Chancery and King’s Bench, the office of the Exchequer, and the House of Commons. Stalls to purchase books, wigs, and other paraphernalia could also be found there.
5. “Newgate”: Famous London prison founded in the reign of Henry I (1100–1135) and modified or rebuilt in 1422, 1666, and 1780. It was notorious for the corruption of its warders and degeneracy of its inmates.
6. “Old Baily”: See chap. 51, n. 2.
7. “bills of mortality”: The weekly account of deaths, first started at the end of the sixteenth century and lasting until 1836, submitted by the clerks of the 109 parishes in and surrounding London. The term came to denote the London metropolitan area.
8. “round-house”: “A lock-up; a place of detention for arrested persons” (OED).
9. “Temple-bar”: Gate that divided the genteel Strand from the mercantile Fleet. After the Great Fire of 1666, a new gate designed by Christopher Wren was built. Heads of traitors were mounted atop Temple Bar until 1772.
10. “ridiculed my leek on St. David’s day”: March 1, day of St. David, patron saint of Wales, on which the leek is worn; see Henry V, 4.7.98–103: “The Welshmen did good service in a garden where leeks did grow, wearing leeks in their Monmouth caps, which, your Majesty know, to this hour is an honorable badge of service; and I do believe your Majesty takes no scorn to wear the leek upon Saint Tavy’s day.”
11. “Lettre de Cachet”: An order of imprisonment or exile without trial under the French king’s private seal (OED).
12. “Royal Society”: Founded in 1660 and granted a royal charter in 1662, this society promoted scientific investigation by its members and published reports in its Philosophical Transactions. By 1750 forty-six volumes of the publication had appeared. The society, its members, and its journal were frequent targets of the Augustan satirists.
13. “Le pauvre diable! la tete lui tourne.”: “Poor devil, he’s lost his wits.”
14. “mad north . . . hand-saw”: Hamlet, 2.2.378–79: “I am but mad north-north-west. When the wind is southerly I know a hawk from a hand-saw.”
15. “Auto da Fe”: Act of faith. Auto da fe in “the Romish church, is a solemn day held by the inquisition, for the punishment of heretics, and the absolution of the innocent accused. . . . Those condemned to death, are . . . surrendered up to the secular power. . . . If they persist in their supposed errors, they are burnt alive” (Chambers, s.v. “act of faith”).
16. “convicted . . . practised”: Smollett describes the plight of Jews in Portugal in The Present State of All Nations (8 vols. [London, 1768–69]): “If a Jew pretends to be a Christian and a Roman catholic, while he is really a Jew, by going to mass, confession, &c. or if after being converted, or pretending to be converted and pardoned, he relapses into Judaism, and is discovered, the inquisition lays hold of him. In the first case, if they renounce Judaism, they are only condemned to some corporal punishment or public shame, and then ordered to be instructed in the Christian religion. In the second they are condemned to the flames without mercy” (6:235).
17. “I have learned . . . paultry province”: Robert Alter cites this passage in his Rogue’s Progress: Studies in the Picaresque Novel (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964). He argues that although Crabtree’s words “seem to catch what is most essential in the career of a picaroon,” they in fact express “a sullen, pessimistic view of the world,” a view that is opposite from the “more typical view” of picaroons, who see “life as a wide rich realm that continually invites their exploration” (58–60).
18. “High German doctor”: Defined as “a Title importing an Ostentatious Quack, or Pretender to Physick” (The High German Doctor, 2 vols. [London, 1719], 1:295). Such a figure appears as Dr. L——n in Humphry Clinker (18), identified in the notes as “Dr. Diederich Wessel Linden, a German physician who wrote extensively on balneology . . . and was involved in the ‘sulphur controversy’ of the 1750s” (344 n. 4). See also G. S. Rousseau, “Matt Bramble and the Sulphur Controversy in the XVIIIth Century: Medical Background of Humphry Clinker,” Journal of the History of Ideas 28 (1967): 577–89.
19. “jack-pudding”: “A buffoon, clown, or merry-andrew, esp. one attending on a mountebank” (OED).
1. “ring of Gyges”: Gyges (c. 685–c. 657 BC), king of Lydia. In Plato’s telling of the story, Gyges is a shepherd who found a ring that rendered him invisible when he turned the bezel to the inside of his hand. He arranges to be sent as a messenger to the palace, where he seduces the queen of Lydia and with her help kills the king and assumes his place (The Republic 2.395d). For a version of the story that lacks the magical ring, see Herodotus History 1.8–13.
1. “Swab the spray . . . top lifts”: All nautical terms used metaphorically. “Swab the spray from your bowsprit” means literally to wipe the water off the “large boom or mast, which projects over the stem, to carry sail forward, in order to govern the fore part of a ship”; “coil up your spirits” refers to the way ropes are stored on a ship, in an orderly manner; “top-lifts” are the ropes that keep the yards balanced when extending the sails (Falconer).
2. “thof”: See chap. 2, n. 20.
3. “glasses”: See chap. 2, n. 61.
4. “overhauled”: “To examine thoroughly, inspect, scrutinize” (OED).
5. “brought up”: “To bring to an anchor, or to a standstill” (OED).
6. “slip my cable”: See chap. 3, n. 7. According to the OED, the phrase became a proverbial expression for the moment of death. This passage from Peregrine Pickle is the first recorded instance of this proverbial usage in the OED.
7. “sucker of my wind-pump”: The sucker is the part of an air pump that draws in the air; here, Trunnion’s lungs. Pumps are also essential shipboard machines used to draw up and eject water that has accumulated in the lowest part of the ship’s hold, or bilge.
8. “tight”: As applied to a ship, this word means “water-tight; well-caulked and pitched; not leaky” (OED); in other words, seaworthy and in good condition.
9. “crank”: See chap. 2, n. 75.
10. “humoursome”: See chap. 2, n. 2.
11. “Nantz”: See chap. 2, n. 26.
12. “disrate”: Reduce in or remove from rank (OED).
13. “run her on board”: “To make an attack, fall, upon (a person or thing)”; here, with an obvious sexual connotation (OED).
14. “minute guns”: Guns “fired at intervals of a minute, esp. at a funeral” (OED).
15. “Renummy”: On 13 September 1747 the Dover, under the command of a Captain Shirley, took “the Renommée, a French ship of war, of thirty-two guns, and three hundred men” (Robert Bateson, Naval and Military Memoirs of Great Britain, from the Year 1727 to the Present Time, 3 vols. [London, 1790], 1:355). In November 1746 La Renommée had encountered the British fleet off the coast of France under the command of Admiral Anson. See James Pritchard, Anatomy of a Naval Disaster: The 1746 French Naval Expedition to North America (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1995), 3–4.
16. “barge”: See chap. 8, n. 1.
17. “foothook-shrouds . . . cross-trees of God’s good favour”: Foothook or futtock shrouds are ropes that join the topmast shrouds (or ropes used to stabilize the topmast) to the shrouds of the lower mast (Falconer). Foothook shrouds, which run from the outer edges of the top (supported by the cross-trees; see chap. 71, n. 9), were used by skilled sailors to climb from the mast shrouds, or standing rigging, to the top. Trunnion’s nautical figure expresses a wish to climb toward the heavens.
1. “cherish”: “To support and forward with encouragement, help, and protection; to shelter; to nurse up” (Johnson).
2. “in quality of”: In the capacity of.
3. “do his endeavour”: See chap. 24, n. 2.
4. “Pall-mall”: An elegant and spacious street that ran between St. James’s Street and the Hay-market. Its name is derived from an Italian game, palamaglio, similar to croquet, estimated to have been brought to England during the early seventeenth century. During the eighteenth century, the street featured coffeehouses and pubs that served as gathering spots for the fashionable world. Robert Dodsley (1704–64) the bookseller opened a shop there in 1735 (Wheatley, 3:8–15).
5. “jointures”: Property, often held in common by husband and wife, reserved for the use of the wife for her lifetime in the event that she survives her husband (OED).
6. “purblind”: Nearsighted.
7. “Abigail”: A conventional name for a waiting woman, from the name of a “waiting gentlewoman” in Beaumont and Fletcher’s The Scornful Lady (1616). The OED suggests that the name may refer to Abigail, a Carmelite woman who refers to herself as a “handmaid” while petitioning David to forgo punishing her husband, Nabal, for slighting David’s men (1 Samuel 25:24–31). Smollett used this name again in Ferdinand Count Fathom, 39; and Humphry Clinker, 47.
8. “citizen”: “A townsman; a man of trade; not a gentleman” (Johnson). Here, an inhabitant of the City, the old walled part of London and center of finance and trade.
9. “funds”: The public funds, defined by Chambers as “the stock of the great companies, or corporations, as the Bank, South-Sea, East-India, etc.” These companies were chartered by the king and “set on foot for the commerce of the remote parts of the world” (s.vv. “fund,” “company”).
10. “alderman”: Next in dignity to the mayor, chief officer of one of the City of London’s twenty-six wards. See chap. 1, n. 14.
1. “Hay-market”: The Opera House, also known as the King’s Theatre, built by Sir John Vanbrugh, opened on 9 April 1705. It burned on 17 June 1789. It was located opposite to “The Little Theater in the Haymarket,” where several plays by Fielding were presented. The area got its name from a market where hay and straw were sold. See Wheatley, 2:199–200.
2. “Rappee”: “A coarse kind of snuff made from the darker and ranker tobacco leaves, and originally obtained by rasping a piece of tobacco” (OED).
3. “White’s chocolate-house”: Located at 37–38 St. James’s Street, established around 1698. Having been destroyed by fire on 28 April 1733, it was reopened in 1736 as a private club, where members were charged an annual subscription fee. From the early eighteenth century, it was a favorite resort of the aristocratic gambler. By midcentury, it had become “a great supper-house, where gaming, both before and after, was carried on to a late hour and to heavy amounts” (Wheatley, 3:495–96). As late as 1750, it was still being called White’s Chocolate House in print (Lillywhite, London Coffee Houses, 641–42).
4. “duke of G——”: Clifford accepts David Herbert’s identification of Charles FitzRoy (1683–1757), 2nd Duke of Grafton, grandson of Charles II. Grafton, a courtier, held many offices until he was appointed lord chamberlain in 1724. His tenure in this office lasted until the end of his life. The ODNB credits him with being “naturally accomplished in the blandnesses of court conversation” and of having the “instincts of a shrewd courtier.” Lord Hervey offers a franker and less flattering estimate of Grafton’s character: “His Grace’s maxim was never to give a direct answer either to the most material or most indifferent question; so that the natural cloud of his understanding, thickened by the artificial cloud of his mistaken Court policy, made his meaning always as unintelligible as his conversation was unentertaining” (Some Materials Towards Memoirs of the Reign of George II, ed. Romney Sedgwick, 3 vols. [1931; repr., New York: AMS Press, 1970], 1:266).
5. “repartee of lady T——”: Clifford accepts Herbert’s identification of Ethelreda (baptized Audrey) Townshend (née Harrison), Viscountess Townshend (1708?–88), wife of Charles Townshend (1700–1764), 3rd Viscount Townshend. Formally separated from her husband around 1740 or 1741, she was notorious for her “gallantries” and her lavish entertainments. She is thought to be one of Fielding’s models for Lady Bellaston in Tom Jones (ODEP).
6. “earl of C——”: Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield (1694–1773), famous wit, bon vivant, statesman, and diplomat. Chesterfield’s reputation for learning and taste was such that Samuel Johnson addressed his Plan of a Dictionary of the English Language (1747) to him, hoping to win his support for the project. Chesterfield, however, neglected Johnson until late in 1754, shortly before the Dictionary was published (1755). In a deservedly famous letter, Johnson upbraided Chesterfield for his neglect during the former’s long years of solitary labor on the project. See “To Lord Chesterfield,” 7 February 1755, in The Letters of Samuel Johnson, ed. Bruce Redford, 5 vols. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992), 1:94–97. After his death, Chesterfield was best remembered for his Letters Written to His Son (1774). For Smollett’s quarrel with Chesterfield, see chap. 102, n. 3.
7. “surrendered to him at discretion”: See chap. 59, n. 6.