FOOTNOTES:
[1]: Name of one of the author’s other works.
[2]: Other works of his.
[3]: Second Book in the translation.
[4]: The chapters in one of the author’s books are called “Dog Post Days,” for a reason therein explained.
[5]: This means, in German, one who pays no fare. Puns which are not translatable must be “explained,” or else the sentence left out.
[6]: This is how all these pieces were really arranged in the first, unimproved edition; but I am sure Pauline won’t be offended that, in the second edition (so strikingly improved) I have adverted more to the entire German empire, and arranged them very differently.
[7]: I earnestly beg that section of the public the description of which is here levelled at the head of the shopkeeper-captain not to suppose it is meant for them; they must see that I am only joking, and my intention, of course is clear.
[8]: The Koran says, the devils were compelled to serve and obey Solomon. After his death he was stuffed, and, by means of a stick in his hand, and another propping him up about the os coccygis, kept on such an apparent footing of being alive, that the devils themselves were taken in by it, until the hinder axis of him was eaten by worms, and the sovereign rolled over topsy-turvy.—See Boysen’s Koran in Michaelis’ ‘Orient. Bibl.’
[9]: Untranslatable pun.
[10]: Or “Poor’s Advocate” (more literally). The appointment so named, exists, or lately existed, in Scotland.
[11]: The “Grandfather Dance” is equivalent to the English “Sir Roger de Coverley.”
[12]: Wilhelm’s ‘Recreations in Natural History. Insects.’ Vol. i.
[13]: Siebenkæs means “seven cheeses.”
[14]: Sky-blue is the colour of the order of the Jesuits, as also of the Indian Krisna, and of anger. The hypothesis of the natural philosopher Marat, that blue and red together make black, should be experimented upon, by mixing the cardinal’s red with the Jesuit’s blue. Ho himself, subsequently, during the French Revolution, produced from blue, red, and white the most beautiful ivory black, or the Indian ink with which Napoleon afterwards painted.
[15]: He styles mankind his brethren, as many monks, princes, and religious persons are given to do to each other, and perhaps he is right in so doing, seeing that he treats these brethren of his just as many eastern princes treat theirs, and, in fact, more kindly, beheading, blinding, and cutting them up in a spiritual sense only, not in corporeal.
[16]: The same robbing, strangling paw is masked in both under the likeness of the track of a man.
[17]: ‘Sp.’ 547, N. Tr.
[18]: The Heimlicher of Freyburg is inviolable for three years during his tenure of office, and for three years after it expires.
[19]: It consisted chiefly of curious coins, vicariat-dollars, &c.
[20]: Plato likens our lower passions to animals kicking inside us.
[21]: He happened to have the case of one to defend, just then.
[22]: The book was published in 1789, by Beckmann of Gera, and was entitled, ‘Selections from the Devil’s Papers.’ I shall venture to express my opinion on these satires further on.
[23]: The fashionable waistcoats of those days had animals and flowers upon them.
[24]: For the next six pages or so the original literally bristles with untranslatable puns and plays upon words.—Translator.
[25]: Mosheim’s ‘Ecclesiastical History.’
[26]: Gold in leaves, of two colours, used by bookbinders.
[27]: According to Klüber’s notes to Delacurne de Sainte Palaye on Chivalry, this was the title of the official who superintended the tourney, or gymnastic practices and exercises. There are at the present day certain private tutors in aristocratic families who are feeble imitations of him.
[28]: In this last speech Lenette makes use of several of the obsolete forms of verbs referred to in a previous chapter as “religious antiquities out of Luther’s Bible.” I cannot give English equivalents. Of course what follows would be unintelligibly without this explanation.—Translator.
[29]: The French academician, N. Beurion, made out that Adam was 123 feet 9 inches high, and Eve 118 feet 9-3/4 inches. The rest is related by the Rabbin, that Adam went through the ocean after his fall.
[30]: The members of this celebrated sect went to church without any clothes on them.
[31]: It seems almost to indicate a crossing of the breeds between the grave tiger and the playful ape, that the Place de Grève in Paris is the place where malefactors are executed, and where the populace assemble for fêtes—that on the selfsame spot horses tear a regicide to pieces and citizens celebrate the accession of a new king; the fire wheels of the fireworks and of the people who are broken on the wheel whirling at the selfsame time and place. Frightful contrasts! we may not adduce others lest we should get to imitating those whom we have here found fault with.
[32]: This is an allusion to ‘Hesperus.’
[33]: Jocular discourses were delivered on Easter Sunday in the middle-ages, and went by the name of “Christian Easter-Merriment.”
[34]: In the 3rd part of the Lichtenberg Philosophical Magazine,’ the case is mentioned of a woman, who, while smelling at a flower, inhaled a worm into her brain, which tormented her with delirium, headache, &c., till it came out at her nose again, still alive.
[35]: Voltaire proves that a person who is 23 years old, has only lived 3½ years in the proper sense of the word.
[36]: The poisonous Boa Upas, beneath which one loses one’s hair in a few minutes.
[37]: The musicians among the ancients wore them. Bartholin de Tib. Vet. iii. 4.
[38]: The common German dinner-time then.—Translator.
[39]: So do men forget it, though in a lesser degree. Suppose a man who does ninety things every day, accurately remembering them, should once or twice forget a ninety-first thing, he’ll go on forgetting that afterwards, though he remembers all the rest. There’s no remedy for this unless some person happens to come in, or something chances to occur just at the instant of forgetting, and recalls the ninety-first thing to his mind. If he once forgets to forget, he won’t forget any more.
[40]: According to the Rabbin, the pains of the damned are intermitted on the Sabbath; the Christians hold that the same was the case during the descent into Hades.
[41]: In Bern and the Pays-du-Vaud, two male witnesses, or four female, are necessary for a legal proof.
[42]: The sand-glass is upright during the time the torture goes on.
[43]: We cannot say, however, that it is by carrying away noxious vapours that the wind purifies the air, since while it blows my noxious emanations to the person behind me, it brings me those of the person before me; and because stagnant water does not become putrid solely because there is no current to carry away decaying matter.
[44]: A woman finds it much easier to yield and say nothing when she is in the right than when she is in the wrong.
[45]: Heller = half-a-farthing.
[46]: I.e. a sum which people pay to the exchequer for permission to leave the country.
[47]: Jews were formerly obliged to stand with bare feet on pig’s-skin when they took oath.
[48]: Animals may not carry anything on the Schabbes; even the lappets which fowls sometimes have tied to them as marks of distinction, have to be taken off on that day; and the Jews must get non-Jews to milk for them; they may not even wipe off dust or moisture from their persons.
[49]: Prizelius trained war-horses to stand the beating of the drums in battle, by strewing oats on the tops of drums, and beating on the lower side of them while the horses ate the oats as they jumped about on the top.
[50]: There is no plant with eleven stamens.
[51]: Two holes in a hazel-nut show that the beetle which gnawed away its kernel, in the shape of a little larval worm, has crept out in its transformed state.
[52]: Allusion to the fable that the male birds of paradise hatch the eggs on the backs of the females up in air.
[53]: Particularly on cold bright winter mornings and evenings. I (and Siebenkæs for the same reason) have been troubled with this complaint for more than twenty years, and I have had an attack of it on this coldest of Christmas eves, just as I was describing it. It is nothing but a passing paralysis of the nerves of the lungs—particularly of the nervus vagus—and in course of time (for you see even twenty years have not been enough), lends to that pulmonary apoplexy which Leville in Paris, und recently Hohnbaum, have held to be a new form of the disease, and which, perhaps, after the precedent of “Miller’s Asthma,” may receive the name of “Siebenkæsian,” or “Jean Paulish apoplexy.”
[54]: Buffon.
[55]: The husband should always play the lover by rights—and the lover the husband. It is impossible to describe the amount of soothing influence which little acts of politeness and innocent flatteries exercise upon just the very people who usually expect, and receive, none—wives, sisters, relations—and this even when they quite understand what this politeness really amounts to. We ought to be applying this emollient pomade to our rude rough lips all day long, even if we have only three words to speak,—and we should have a similar one for our hands, to soften down their actions. I trust that I shall always keep my resolution never to flatter any woman, not even my own wife, but I know I shall begin to break it four months and a-half after my betrothal, and go on breaking it all my life.
[56]: Sander, on “The Great and Beautiful in Nature.”
[57]: The anchor proof consists in casting the anchor forcibly down upon a deep hard bottom.
[58]: Servants were called “knaves” of old, and deserve the name pretty often at the present day.
[59]: Lack of money and of health.
[60]: One continued until fainting supervenes.
[61]: Persons condemned by the secret tribunals were so styled.
[62]: The former plant opens after eight in the morning, the latter at eleven.
[63]: It is explained in a long note in the original, that she could do this even before being married.
[64]: The Silhouette took its name from the Controller-General so called. In Paris, an empty, blank physiognomy is called a face “à la silhouette.”
[65]: Which are called “weavers’ ships” in German.
[66]: In Engelhardszell, for instance, the Austrian custom-house officers unbutton paunches to see whether they be fat—or cloth.
[67]: We have all read in the newspapers that at the Vienna balls a paper lantern is carried through the rooms, with the inscription “Supper ready.” This may be called Vienna lanterning.
[68]: Alas! that the English word “friend” is such a poor representative of the German original. Yet I cannot hit upon any other.—Tr.
[69]: Death sends sleep, Heaven the dream.
[70]: In all this discussion what we are talking of is not that practical love of our fellow men, and of our enemies, which expresses itself in action, and in refraining from revenge (and which must be easy to every properly constituted person), but that feeling of misanthropy, or of philanthropy (as the case may be), over which the moral sense has but little power—of inward love, as distinct from actions; of secret indignation with sinners and fools. It is easier to sacrifice one’s self for people than to love them—easier to do good to our enemies than to forgive them. The longing of love, as well as its seldomness, have had but one painter—F. Jakobi: we do not need a second.
[71]: A paper, printed with symbols, &c., in which the present for a godchild is wrapped.
[72]: Part which a player selects as a specimen of his powers.
[73]: A Frenchman vowed he could not abide the English: “Parce qu’ils versent du beurre fondu sur leur veau rôti.”
[74]: ‘Pomp. Mel. de S. O.’ i. 18.
[75]: Switzerland and Holland.
[76]: Which was so altered in appearance after his death by innumerable wounds, that they masked it as effectually us the iron one had done.
[77]: There is a kind of sea-bird which sleeps on the wing, or floats up and down; and the motion of the sea is often what awakes it.
[78]: This vetch has some of its flowers and fruit above ground, but most of them under it; though the latter are white.—Linnæus.
[79]: At page 163 of the ‘Pocket-Book for Watering Places, and Visitors to them,’ it is stated that while the ladies are lying bolted into their baths, young gentlemen sit on the covers and entertain them while they are under water. Against which arrangement Reason certainly can urge no valid objection, for the wood of the baths is quite as thick as silk; and when all is said, Everybody is, if covered at all, always in some covering inside of which he or she is altogether devoid of covering—though perhaps Fancy, and Imagination may urge this objection, that a bed-quilt a quarter of a yard thick would not be quite so becoming, or close-fitting a ball-dress as a gauze. If once the Innocence of the imagination be offended, there is no other to spare; the senses cut neither be innocent nor the contrary.
[80]: The white-flowering sort would weep—the red-flowering sort would storm, as the pale moon indicates rainy weather, and the red moon high wind. (Pallida luna pluit, rubicunda fiat.)
[81]: In the neighbourhood of Comorn (Windisch’s ‘Geography of Hungary’). Buchan mentions a similar twin-birth in Scotland.
[82]: There was a superstition that the Headsman’s sword moved, of itself, before cutting off somebody’s head.
[83]: Who distinguished himself by painting thistles as much as Swift by writing them.
[84]: There is nothing more unreasonable, uncontrollable, and inexplicable, than this feeling of repugnance to the unclean—this inconsistent alliance between the will and the coats of the stomach. Cicero says, “the modest do not willingly use the word ‘modesty’” (a transcendental form of disgust with the impure)—and those who feel the repugnance in question deal with it in a similar manner, particularly as bodily and moral purity are neighbours (which the chaste and cleanly Swift exemplified in his own person). Even physical loathing (of which the subject-matter is mental, more than physical), affects the moral sense more than is supposed. Cross the street with undigested food, or antimonial wine, in your stomach, and you will feel a stronger distaste to a score of faces (and for more books when you come home) than at ordinary times.
[85]: A beggar in England who keeps a shop full of crutches, eye-plaster, false legs, &c., which every one who wants to be lame, blind, &c., must be supplied with. ‘Britt. Annal.’
[86]: The Rabbis maintain that Cain killed his brother because the latter disagreed with him when he (Cain) denied the immortality of the soul. So that the first murder was an auto-da-fe, and the first war a religious one.
[87]: According to de Luc, in the third volume of his ‘Little Journeys for Amateur Travellers.’
[88]: That is, to himself. He wishes his inheritance to be paid to himself, and not to his wife, because she might have married a rich husband in the interval; besides, he would have less trouble in knowing whether or not the Heimlicher did what he told him, and could, if necessary, carry out the threat which he is about to make.
[89]: Here follow, in the original, puns on the (German) medical names of the four stomachs of the Ruminantia, for which I am unequal to finding equivalents.—Trans.
[90]: Leibgeber means, at once, the second life (in which he does not believe), and Firmian’s continuation of his present life in Vaduz.
[91]: Plin. H. N., viii 30.
[92]: Which, like a greater Psyche, makes its nest in skulls.
[93]: King’s hearts are enshrined in golden cases.
[94]: The actor (among the Romans) who mimicked the deceased in all his gestures and movements at his funeral.
[95]: People who had been taken to be dead, and honoured with a funeral, had to go through these ceremonies.—Potter.
[96]: Augustin, Commentar. ad Johann. xxi. 23.
[97]: This name, or that of Tumulus Honorarius, was given to the empty monument which friends erected to a dead person whose body was not to be found.
[98]: Alexand. ab Alex. iii. 7.
[99]: There is a pun here in the original, where this expression means also “to hiss off” (e.g. an actor from the stage).—Trans.
[100]: I speak of 1796.
[101]: Whatever Pythagoras wrote with bean-juice on a certain mirror could be read on the moon.—‘Call. Rhodogin,’ ix. 13. When Charles V. and Francis I. were fighting near Milan, everything that happened by day at Milan could be read at night on the moon in Paris by means of a mirror of this sort.—‘Agrippa de Occ. Philos.’ ii. 6.
[102]: A long cloud, with branch-like streaks, which bodes a storm.
[103]: There is a superstition that when two children kiss without being able to speak, one of them must die.
[104]: “Therefore I foresee that Leibgeber’s Pastoral Letters in these ‘Flower Pieces’ will, for most of my readers, be insufferable letters of denunciation or defiance. Most Germans do understand a joke—it cannot be denied of them—but they do not all understand badinage—and few understand humour—least of all the Leibgeber sort. Therefore, at first—because it is easier to alter a book than a public—I thought of falsifying all his letters, and substituting pleasanter-flavoured ones. However it can always be arranged that, in the second edition, the falsified letters shall be inserted in the body of the work, and the genuine ones given at the end as an Appendix.”
This has not been found necessary. Heavens! how can first editions make such mistakes, and misunderstand such a number of readers—to whom second editions afterwards offer the warmest and sincerest apologies.
[105]: Plin. H. N. vii. 48.
[106]: She refers to the widow’s pension.
[107]: Because it was supposed to be in English verse.—Trans.
[108]: In the ranunculus, brown wort, the lower part of the stalk sinks deeper into the ground every year, to replace the root as it rots away.
[109]: In enthusiasm, the converse order of things prevails. To learn to know what your firmly established principles of morality are, with more certainty than you can from your resolves and actions, you have only to notice the joy or the sorrow which a moral claim, a piece of news, a disappointment, calls up in you with lightning speed, but which disappears again at once under the influence of reflection and self-control. What great, rotting pieces of the old Adam one finds about one still, now and then!
[110]: The wife of Pinarius, under the government of Tarquinius Superbus, was the first woman to quarrel with her mother-in-law (Plut. in Numa). German history will, perhaps, some day make honourable mention of the first married woman who did not quarrel with her mother-in-law; at least a German Plutarch should set about hunting her out.
[111]: Allusion to a certain waterfall which dashes from its rock with a sweep so wide that one can walk under it, and thus be protected front rain.—‘An Artist’s Journey in the Alps.’
[112]: A bugbear, nine feet high, made of bark and straw, with which the Mandingoes terrify and better their wives.
[113]: Walter’s ‘Physiology.’
[114]: There are one thousand millions of us crawling on this sphere.
[115]: Vanessa Antiopa gets this name in Germany.—Trans.
[116]: The purer precious stones are colder and heavier than the less perfect.
[117]: Waxen angels used to be put into the grave with the dead.