ADDITIONAL NOTES TO "TITAN."
Reluctant to encumber the pages of a romance with more Notes than seemed absolutely necessary, the present translator, in giving to the public his version of Titan, was (he has had reason to think) too chary of helps to the reader. Having, moreover, gained new light himself on some points since that translation was made and printed, he ventures to insert here (having a little spare space) a few explanatory or illustrative (occasionally corrective) Notes, principally to the first volume of Titan, which has generally proved more difficult than the second.
[The translator's reason for giving such Notes here, rather than in a (possible) third edition of Titan, is that a great many more of the buyers of the first editions of that work will also (may it not be presumed?) buy Hesperus than would be likely to see a third edition of Titan; and therefore the present way of furnishing the additional matter seemed to be the fairest to all parties.]
INTRODUCTORY AND GENERAL NOTE.
In a note to Vol. II. p. 174, occurs an allusion to certain Comic Appendices to Titan. There is a special good reason for recalling the reader's attention to that subject, inasmuch as that appended matter contains, slyly hid away by the waggish J. P., what is generally regarded as an important part of a work. These Comic Appendages contain apparently nothing essentially connected with the story of Titan, but only satirical hits at men and things in connection with the names of persons and places that occur in the work. For the sake, however, of one interesting thing found there (beside the aforesaid Preface), we will simply state that the "Comic Appendix to Titan" consists of two (so-called) little volumes, the first of which ends with a "Preface to Titan," and after the second follows, as an "Appendix to the First Comic Appendix of Titan," a "Clavis Fichtiana, seu Leibgeberiana" (Key to Fichte, or Leibgeber,—Leibgeber, alias Siebenkäs, alias Schoppe, being so much a quiz of the philosopher Fichte in the Titan itself).
The "Preface" is as follows:—
"PREFACE TO TITAN.
"I write it last, in order that it may not be read first. I will here leave the world free again, after I have had it in my service barely 2 hours 33 minutes and 36 seconds longer,[[212]] seeing that I have been in its service just so many years and months. Let it not begrudge me three words more; that is to say, seven last ones.
"The first is my joy in the fact that the readers, like children, have been obliged to eat the bread, which they would not bite at the table, afterward. With a similar stroke of art I shall drive them into my future flogging-cellars. For from this time forth no book of mine will appear without such an Appendix,—unless I send it out first and the work itself afterward.—Has not everything on this Anglicized comet-ball its appendix [or -dage],—the Universal German Library the dearest, the Almanac the cheapest?—has not Robespierre his queue,—the comet of 1769, a tail of forty million miles,—the Predicaments,[[213]] four Postpredicaments,—and Kant, his Fichte?
"The second last word is to beg the reader that he will not quite yet—as I have hardly made a feeble beginning in my deliveries of Titan—draw two or three hundred conclusions therefrom, but wait for the twentieth volume. The opus desires to be judged like the moon, which rises bay-colored and swollen and cloudy, and which one needs to allow half a night's time before expecting to find her on her high-climbed pathway pure, white, and radiant. Modern romances easily get themselves into the greatest repute on the appearance of their very first volume, because they take no thought for the next morning (i. e. for the next volume), but enjoy the present; because they have not so much a plan—and thereby, too, the pauses in the same, the episodes, are avoided—as ten thousand plans, which they carry out one after the other; so that the work, when one gets it at length from the bookbinder, then and not till then, produces a good effect and represents a whole; just as the army-worm appears to the vulgar to roll itself along magnificently in a length of twelve ells, although it amounts only to an inch-deep procession of mere gnat-larvæ (Larvæ tipulæ). My infusorial, on the contrary, is entire, and yet is fed till it grows to a giant-snake,—but that is quite as wonderful.
"Third word. In every epic history there lie whole volumes full of morals, more than in a fable; but not otherwise than in actual history, which is not the daughter of moral philosophy, but the mother, of whom every one can beget such a daughter as he pleases. I find in the biographies which the Infinite One writes more poetry, more poetic justice and justification by motives, than in those which the heroes of the former, like poor fools, send to the press. A divine biography is, besides, not only a little work of art, but also a part of an infinitely great one; and we are all so bound to our paths that one must be able, from the diurnal arc of his life's epicycloid of the 988th power, to calculate the ellipse which humanity describes around the immovable Infinite; in other words, one can (bold as it may sound) from the incidents of his forenoon infer much with regard to the next that will appear in the newspaper.
"Fourth last word. They still continue in Jena, Wenigen-Jena, Jena-Priesnitz, and the surrounding localities, to moot the proposition, that a poet must, like a fly, travel along on transparent gauze-wings, and not on any heavily bedizened pinions of the bird of paradise. The reader, they continue without metaphor, cannot at once fly and carry; Pegasus cannot be a packhorse; still less may a poetic pinion like that of the angel alluded to have eyes, which at most can belong to the peacock's tail.—Thereto I lately, while attending Mozart's Zauberflöte, came out with the striking answer, namely, the question: 'But the opera, good people?—Must not here, 1st, the genial interworking of all the instruments, as well as, what is quite as great, of all the actors; 2dly, the optical, and, 3dly, the acoustic imitation; then, 4thly, the poetic composition itself; and finally and 5thly, the splendor of the decoration,—be all comprehended and enjoyed at once? A building in the five orders of architecture is easier for you than one with gorgeous foliaceous ornamentation? The five wise virgins at once leave you wiser than one foolish one?—Say, Jenaite! But no; write on, and a happy journey home to you in this infernal cold!'
"Since one word begets another, and accordingly the fifth begets the sixth, I give my word with both, that to-day, on which I say my last word and this next, is to me no day of finding a cross, but of taking down from one. Is not to-day Virgil's day, and are not the first volume of this work and the first and last winter months over?—For to-morrow there blooms for me the morn of spring; namely, the first of February, the Sunday eve (Sonnabend) of Candlemas. Already must many a freezing German have with me found in February the aurora of spring, at least in the rapid lengthening of the days. Hovers not already in the cold ether out there the first vernal song, the first fluttering lark? Does not the wren climb and glide up along a black bough, dripping in the sunshine, and chirp, warmly gilded with bright rays, his winter-solo? Does not the returning sun re-bind my manuscript books with gilt edges? and has not my neighbor shoved up the slides of his beehives, that the merry bee-tribe may joyously fling themselves forth from the narrow, sultry prisons upon the fresh green, variegated, not with flowers, but with sunbeams, and creep about over it with vigor?—Virgil, whose anniversary is to-day celebrated, on thy grave they break now only fictitious laurel-twigs; but on the graves of the seasons ever fresh ones bloom after.—
"To-day shall, after a long satirical ice-month of quarrelling, reconcile me again to the times. Let my last and seventh word be, Peace! as He also said it who spake the seven words on a more painful wood than my writing-table is.
"Peace be with the age!—one should often exclaim to himself.[[214]] As an annoying day does not put us out in the hopes of our life, so neither should a suffering century deprive us of that hope wherewith we paint the far future. The pyramid of the age seems, like an Egyptian one, to lift itself up, either to a narrow and sharp apex, or into completeness; but when one climbs it, the summit proves to be a roomy level.
"Where a goal appears to us divine, there must the road also have been so; because this was once that, and that will become this. Well may we all be nearer to Thee, O Infinite One, than we know:—for Thou only canst know how near we are; and we live in Thee, not merely from Thee, just as our earth moves in the midst of the atmosphere of the sun's globe,[[215]] while it seems only to revolve far off around his light."
EXPLANATION OF TITLE.—As regards the title of TITAN, the translator has been strongly tempted to fall back upon his first idea, that Jean Paul hardly meant, after all, anything more definite by it than to express the magnitude of his aspiration in undertaking the work; and that, as Mr. Longfellow's "Hyperion" hints at a book of the beautiful, so Titan, like Hesperus, has a corresponding, more moral than mythological reference, and signifies that this was to be the author's Titanic work.
NOTES TO VOL. I.
Page xi.—By some slip or confusion of memory, the first and second editions were made to say, in the note, that Louisa, one of the four reigning sisters to whom Titan is dedicated, lived in the Liberation War. This mistake probably arose from mixing up the French Revolution with Körner's august apostrophes to Louisa as guardian genius of her people in the later war for freedom.
Page 2, line 8. "Wolf's tooth."—The tooth of a wolf or boar, or some other animal, was once used just as we use an ivory handle, or (sometimes) the thumb-nail, to rub down smooth the paper from which ink-marks had been erased.—Line 15. "Burning-glass" means here properly a concave-mirror (Brenn-spiegel in German,—there being another word, Brenn-glas, corresponding to our common burning and magnifying glass).—Line 18. "Cutting hollow"; concave grinding would seem a more scientific phrase, but the word hollow seemed necessary in carrying out the moral allusion.
Page 5, line 27.—The reference is probably to Wilcke, who broached a new theory about magnetism, that of two fluids. (See art. in Encyc. Britan.)
Page 5, line 31. "When it struck 23 o'clock."—The Italian clocks, though they indicate on the face up to 24, strike only to 12.
The above is a comparative table of German and Italian ways of reckoning time, adapted to the latter half of September. It is taken from Goethe's Italian Tour. He says: "The inner circle denotes our 24 hours, from midnight to midnight, divided into twice 12, as we reckon, and our clocks indicate. The middle circle shows how the Italian clocks strike at the present season (namely, up to 12 twice in 24 hours), but in such a way that it strikes 1 when it strikes 8 with us, and so on.... Finally, the outer circle shows how the 24 hours are reckoned in actual life. For example, I hear 7 o'clock striking in the night, and know that midnight is at 5 o'clock; I therefore deduct the latter number from the former and thus have 2 hours after midnight. If I hear 7 in the daytime, as I know that noon is at 5, I have 2 P. M. But if I wish to express the hour according to the fashion of this country, I must know that noon is 17 o'clock; I add the 2, and get 19 o'clock." It must have been, it would seem, then, in his mind that Albano would have "counted up the tedious strokes."
Page 6, line 16. "Juno Ludovici."—The fine colossal head known as the Lodovisi Juno (so Murray spells it) in the Villa Lodovisi.
Page 9, line 24.—"Kremnitz" is a town in Moravia. The ducats coined there were of the very finest gold.—Line 24. "More lightly on her left arm,"—and therefore the old man was not actuated purely by the pious motives which Albano gave him credit for, but by more mercenary ones,—is the connecting link to be supplied before the next clause.
Page 11, line 12.—"Micromegas,"—little giant.
Page 19, line 13.—Bouverot, here called the German Gentleman (in German, the Deutsche Herr), was in reality a Teutscher Ordensherr, or Teutonic Knight. The translator has throughout simply called him the Gentleman, merely, however, by a sort of general, parliamentary etiquette, and not, of course, as if the word defined his technical standing. The reader will please bear this in mind.
Page 19, note.—He was also nicknamed Peter de Mulieribus. He was a fine painter, Put a coarse-grained scapegrace. Was born at Haerlem in 1637. Went to Italy, and from Calvinist became Papist. Was famous for his animals and landscapes. In Italy he fell in love with a woman, and, as he already had a wife, he sent for her to come to him, and then caused her to be murdered on the road. He was arrested and sentenced to be hung, but, in the confusion consequent on the breaking out of some war, escaped, and died in 1701.
Page 20.—The translator confesses himself in the dark (with a scholarly German friend also) as to the process which may have been pursued by Don Gaspard with that German debauchee. It may simply be that Gaspard operated on the man by holding out worldly inducements to make him play the saint, and then, by disappointing them, left him to sink back again to his real character.
Page 21, line 7.—The Pasquino was a mutilated statue, so called from a cobbler who had his shop near it, and was always quizzing and caricaturing passers-by. After his death, the statue, which had come to be nearly buried in the ground, was dug up, and people said, "Here is old Pasquin come to life again!" When any one wanted to satirize a public or private enemy, he would affix his lampoon secretly to the Pasquin statue. The statue of Marforio, supposed to be that of a river-god, which, about the end of the sixteenth century, was placed near the Capitol, was made the vehicle of replying to the attacks of Pasquin.
Page 22, line 10.—If any one would see how queerly Jean Paul used his queer knowledge, what
"A sea-change
Into something rare and strange,"
the driest material "suffered" in passing over the ocean of his fantasy,—let him read the article in Bayle's Dictionary on Gaspar Scioppius. Scioppius, a German critic, philologist, and controversialist, equally remarkable for acumen and acrimony, was born in 1576; had a precocious youth; changed from a Protestant to a Catholic, and wrote bitterly against his old friends, and even against the King of England; then became equally bitter against the Jesuits; and, after a life of constant quarrelling with living and dead scholars (for he charged even Cicero with barbarous Latin), "he died," says a biographer, "universally hated and hating," in 1649. One of his opponents called him the "Grammarian Cur."—As Jean Paul makes his Schoppe call himself Titular Librarian, &c., it may be worth mentioning that the historical Scioppius had the following titles: "Patrician of Rome, Knight of St. Peter, Counsellor to the Emperor, Counsellor to the King of Spain, Counsellor to the Archduke, Count Palatine, and Count de Clara Valle" (Clairvaux).
Page 25, line 21.—Trembley led the way in the actual study from life of the Polype tribe, particularly the hydra. "Sometimes two polypes will seize on the same worm; and most amusing is it then to witness the struggle that ensues, sometimes resulting in the swallowing of the weaker polype by the stronger, which, however, is soon disgorged with no other loss than his dinner." "If the body be halved in any direction, each half grows into a perfect hydra." "When a polype is introduced by the tail into another body, the two unite and form one individual; and when a head is lopped off, it may safely be engrafted on the body of any other which may chance to want one." "A polype, cut transversely in three parts, requires four or five days in summer, and longer in cold weather, for the middle piece to produce a head and tail, and the tail part to get a body and head."—English Cyclop.
Page 26, line 23.—The pigeons spoken of are the common house-pigeons. (In German, Flug-taube: pigeons that go in flocks,—which misled the translator in the first edition to call them wild pigeons.) I am told that Jean Paul is here really picturing his own traits too. For instance, it is said he would not look in at a shop-door in passing, lest he should hold out promises which he was not going to perform.
Page 27, line 22.—"Snow-ball." (In German, Kugel: globe,—ball being the word used where the snow-ball of the schoolboys is meant.)
Page 31, line 10.—Gold wedges,—"the golden wedge of Ophir." In the first edition the word Stufen was rendered steps. But it has also a technical meaning of ore in masses or strata.
Page 35, line 32.—Otto Guerike, who was born at Magdeburg in 1602, and died in 1686, invented the air-pump and the barometer. The Wetter-männchen was a little man on the top of the clock, for instance, who came out in fair weather and went in in foul; or one in a bottle with a skin cover, who rose and sunk according to the pressure of the atmosphere. (See the Bubbles of Nassau.)
Page 38, line 13.—If Gaspard was simply a Knight of the Fleece, Jean Paul would seem to have taken a liberty in decorating him. "The decoration of the Grand Master is a chain composed of alternate flints and rays of steel, with the golden fleece fastened in the middle. The Knights wear a golden fleece on a red ribbon."—Line 17. Dragons and basilisks are both amphibia in the strict sense, only the two dwelling-places of the former are air and land, and of the latter water and land. The basilisk has a membranous bag on the back of his head which can be filled with air at pleasure, and also a spinal fin along his back, which adapt him to swimming.
Page 43, line 16.—The flower on behind the stag is the hunter's name for tail.
Page 44, line 11.—-"Bed-tail" does not mean here, as an English reader might imagine, the foot-board, but the cord hanging down like a bell-rope before the nose of the sleeper, by which old or feeble persons (in Germany) used to raise themselves out of bed. In the Eighth Dog-Post-Day of Hesperus, Victor is represented as raising himself slowly by the bed-tassel out of bed, which he usually left with a spring. One would think it would need mechanical aid to hoist the fevered frame from under a German feather-bed.
Page 47, line 25.—The piping of Schoppe was simply with his windpipe; the whistle one is said to wet when he drinks.
Page 48, line 14.—"Dissolving" is not quite strong enough. The idea is, that, as ships have their bolts drawn out by the lodestone and fall apart, so the senses fall apart as man sinks to slumber.
Page 52, line 24.—After-Stimme means, strictly, mock-voice.
Page 59, line 10.—"Cellini's History"; i. e. probably Goethe's translation of Benvenuto's Autobiography.
Page 60, line 18.—"Dog-Post-Day" is the title of the chapters of Hesperus, a former work of Jean Paul's, which he pretends to have composed on an island in some Indian Ocean, the materials being brought to him by a dog who swam over from the mainland with the basket containing them in his teeth; and the days of the dog's arriving with fresh material were called Dog-Post-Days.
Page 61, line 19.—The "chiffre banal" is the common cipher.
Page 62, line 15.—"Veimers,"—so Jean Paul spells it. "Vehmic (or Fehmic) courts were secret tribunals, established in Germany in the Middle Ages, terrible from the secrecy with which they carried on their proceedings, as well as from their organization and the extent of their authority. The members, who at one time are said to have amounted to not less than one hundred thousand, were bound by a horrible oath to secrecy, and to obey and carry out the laws of the order. These tribunals are said to have originated with Charlemagne; but it was not till the thirteenth century that they reached their greatest prominence. The lawlessness and anarchy which prevailed at that time gave them work to do, and they gathered strength in the performance of it. They were professedly established to support virtue and honor; but there is no doubt they were often perverted to the gratification of private malice and tyranny. Westphalia was the great centre of their jurisdiction, and was hence termed the Red Land." See Wigand's Fehmgerichte Westphalens, 1827. A very good popular account of this court may also be found in Markham's History of Germany, Chap. XXI. (Supplement).—Line 17. "Pointeurs." See note to p. 221.
Page 63, line 12.—The author refers here to a process of slipping off the outer coating of the quill by soaking it in boiling water.
Page 64, line 12. "Wooden legs."—Spindle-shanks would better express the author's slur.—Line 26. The cul de Paris is what is technically called the bishop or bustle.
Page 76, line 26.—"Flying [i. e. transient] teachers" (journeymen).
Page 80, line 32. "Ah, what bliss," &c.—Compare a passage in Faust (p. 58 in Brooks's translation), beginning, "O for a wing," &c.
Page 82, line 17. "Fatal."—This German word is hard to translate here. Perhaps plaguy or confounded would help give the idea.
Page 84, line 14.—"The lost son" means of course the Prodigal Son.
Page 86, line 5. "Diabolically possessed,"—"des Teufels auf Bänder." Literally, "the Devil on ribbons"; or, as we should say, death on ribbons.
Page 87, line 2.—Jean Paul may well have recalled his own sore experience on the subject of queues. See his biography, as referred to in Carlyle's article on Richter.—In the next paragraph, "the everlasting rogue" is, in German, the persistent Mæcenas,—alluding to Albano's lavishing of his patronage on the blind girl.—In the next paragraph, the translator is responsible for the play on the word monkey; Jean Paul having simply Capuchinades.
Page 92, line 7.—A music-pen is an instrument for ruling five parallel lines at once.
Page 93, line 28.—"Real territion" (or terrification) is explained in a note to Vol. II. p. 1.
Page 95, line 1.—The special kind of floor which Jean Paul's fancy calls up is the threshing-floor.—Line 7. In regard to the "leather aprons," it may be proper to mention that miners, to whom the musicians had been compared on the previous page, wear them behind.
Page 98, line 30.—"The new commission"; i. e. the newly appointed tutor, Falterle.
Page 100, line 15.—"Pump-chambers" is a figurative expression here for top-boots.—Line 21. The word rendered "chub" may mean tadpole.
Page 101, line 23.—A "pike au four" (four meaning oven) is simply a baked pike.
Page 102, line 6.—"Shop-keeper" here does not mean the man who keeps shop, but an article that keeps the shop; i. e. remains on the shelf as unsalable lumber. "Keep" is used in the same sense as when we say one keeps his bed or keeps house when sick.—"Paste-eels" are minute creatures found on scraping away the paste from under the binding of an old book.
Page 103, line 13. "St. John."—See Mrs. Jameson's Poetry of Legendary Art, Vol. I. p. 168. "St. John had a tame partridge, which he cherished much; and he amused himself with feeding and tending it. A certain huntsman, passing by with his bow and arrows, was astonished to see the great Apostle, so venerable for his age and sanctity, engaged in such an amusement. The Apostle asked him if he always kept his bow bent. He answered, that would be the way to render it useless. 'If,' replied St. John, 'you unbend your bow to prevent its being useless, so do I thus unbend my mind for the same reason.'"
Page 107, line 18. "Wehmeier's."—Jean Paul uses here the old-fashioned double genitive. Wehmeier's seiner (Wehmeier's's) like our antiquated hissen, which we still sometimes hear from the lips of old people.
Page 111, line 26.—"The history of countries"; i. e. of individual countries,—the beginning, e. g., with that of one's own country as a centre, and going backward.
Page 112, line 25.—Kanstein was the founder of a Bible-establishment for the printing and diffusion of the Scriptures.
Page 113, line 9.—Foundery, or perhaps a gallery of casts.
Page 114, line 12.—His thoughts fell upon the Middle-mark. This was one of the three Marches (hence the words Marquis and Marchioness),—Alt-Mark, Neu-Mark, and Mittel-Mark,—in which last Berlin was, and Frederick lived.
Page 114, line 16.—Christoph Scheiner, a German mathematician and astronomer, eminent for being one of the first who discovered spots on the sun (in 1611, a few months after Galileo), was born at Wald, near Mundelheim, in Swabia, in 1575, and died in 1660.
Page 115, line 9. "Partner."—In the German, Moitistinn, a somewhat hard word, apparently of Jean Paul's own coining, from the French moitié.
Page 123, line 25.—Aldert van Everdingen, a celebrated Dutch painter of wild and rugged landscapes, was born at Alkmaar in 1621, and died in 1675. "Some of his fine forests are extremely true and picturesque."—John van Huysum, born at Amsterdam in 1682, "was the most eminent painter of flowers and fruits in the eighteenth century. Every term of panegyric that language can furnish has been lavished, and with justice, on his productions. He seems to have dived into the mysteries of Nature, to represent the loveliest and most brilliant of her creations with all the magic of her own pencil. His flowers, however, are more beautiful and true to nature than his fruits."
Page 124, line 33. "Leaves of her heart."—Literally, however, heart-leaves, a technical term in botany.
Page 134, line 17.—That is, by this course which he had now adopted, he put himself beyond the reach of those severe censors.
Page 135, line 11.—"Murmuring" is hardly strong enough here to give the force of the many-meaning German word brausend. "Roaring" would come nearer to it.
Page 136, line 17:—
"'T is better to have loved and lost,
Than never to have loved at all."
Tennyson.
"'O, in this chilly world, too fast
The doubting fiend pursues our youth!
Better be cheated to the last
Than lose the glorious hope of truth!"
Fanny Kemble.
Page 141, 2d note.—The meaning seems to be, that strips of gold-foil were hung up to flutter round and frighten the birds, just as our farmers hang up strips of tin for scarecrows.
Page 146, line 3. "She kept," &c.—There is something very obscure here. For the German reads that the old Princess made this comparison "im Wahne der Verschwisterung" (under the illusion or in a fancy of relationship). Now Eleonore knew that this was her son Albano; because, in the letter she wrote to him that day and laid up (see Vol. II. p. 493), she says, "To-day I have seen thee again," &c. May the meaning be, then, that Eleonore tried to imagine by looking at the children that Albano might be a relative of hers? Or had Richter forgotten that Eleonore knew who Albano was, and does the bonus Homerus dormitat here?
Page 157, line 33.—The cane; more exactly, the pike.
Page 159, line 20.—"Adopt" is rather too strong a word. "Take an interest in them" is all the original requires.
Page 164, line 4.—We use the phrase "within four walls" as synonymous with "in a room"; and in this case there would be three rooms or twelve walls (one of J. P.'s trivial niceties).
Page 168, line 21.—The fat-eye (exophthalmy it was wrongly rendered in the first editions) means such little globules of fat as show themselves, for instance, on the surface of bouilli, or marrow boiled down.
Page 169, line 7.—As army-cloth shrinks when wet, so Malt grows thin and falls away under the soaking of his tears.
Page 176, line 2. "It is a sin," &c.—There is a degree of obscurity in this sentence arising from the elliptical and allusive style Jean Paul employs; but the "innocent conditions" seems to mean the extent to which one may safely go in certain pleasures. Surgeons attend at the rack to tell how far torture may be carried without producing death;[[216]] but no physician is at hand to tell the poor prince how much he may enjoy without killing himself.
Page 177, line 11.—"Scholar-like"; more properly, tyro-like. The Germans hardly have a word corresponding to our scholar as meaning a scholarly man. Their Schüler means a learner, not one who is learned.
Page 178, line 7.—"Sprinkled him with rose-vinegar"; i. e. gently rebuked his moral indifference.
Page 178, line 9.—Luigi's father was lying on the coffin-board (or bier); and L. himself was in that state of stupidity, thick-headedness, and brazen-facedness which the proverb describes: "Er hat ein Bret vor dem Kopf."
Page 181, line 28.—"Fire-mounds," or, more exactly, fire-moles; described in the German works as feuer-rothe Muttermäler (fiery-red marks inherited from a mother).
Page 184, line 7.—"Leading-hounds,"—or pointers, which gives rather more effect to the surprise produced by saying, after the dash, instead of noses,—ears.—The allusion to le Cain of course has a double meaning, referring not only to the actor, but to the wicked and murderous brother.
Page 188, line 12.—"Chap-sager," sap-sago,—derived from two words, meaning scraped cheese.
Page 188, line 21.—When children in Germany are set at a little side-table, they are said to "sitzen am Katz-tische." These expressions come from the custom of giving the cat a side-bit while the dinner is going on.—Line 31. The Ephraimite was a coin named after one Ephraim, a Jew, who alloyed the legal coin of the Empire. The counterfeit was readily to be detected by suspending the piece in wine, the acid of which acted upon the spurious element, and turned the metal black.
Page 197, line 2. "Ten Persecutions."—In allusion, of course, to the number the Christians are estimated to have suffered under the Roman Emperor.
Page 203, line 25. "The gossiping letter."—Gevatter's-brief (godfather's letter), a request to her to stand as godmother.
Page 211, line 1.—A Spanish wall means a temporary partition put up to make two rooms of one.
Page 213, line 27.—"Sun-path," used here in the astronomical sense and figuratively. "Sweet moon, I thank thee for thy sunny beams!" says Pyramus.—In line 12 occurs again that peculiar word fatal, which does not bear exactly our sense, but means ugly, disagreeable, &c.
Page 215, line 15.—"He can't count more than five," is a proverb expressing dulness or stupidity.
Page 217, line 17.—"Conditions"; i. e. apprentices, hires.
Page 218, line 3,—"A box of letters" i. e. a case of type.
Page 219, line 3. The time of the Indiction among the Romans was that wherein the people were summoned (indicted) to pay a certain tribute.—The Romish or Papal Indiction, which is that used in the Pope's bull, begins on the first of January.
Page 221, bottom. (Faro is said to derive its name from Pharaoh, whose image was formerly on one of the cards.)—"The banker turns up the cards from a complete pack, one by one, laying them first to his right for the bank, and then to his left for the punter (or player, so called from the Italian puntare), till all the cards are dealt out. The banker wins when the card equal in points to that on which the stake is set turns up on his right hand, but loses when it is dealt to the left."
Page 224, line 13. "A round pearl."—Zahl-perle means strictly a pearl that is counted, not weighed.
Page 225, line 31.—The translator was not sure whether the abbreviative H. prefixed to these names meant Heilige or Herrn; and he chose the former, merely because the author calls them disciples.
Page 242, line 11.—Hirschfeld (erroneously translated deer-field) is a proper name, of a writer quite obsolete now, who lived from 1742 to 1792, and wrote a work on country life. Richter says that Lilar is not like a page out of Hirschfeld (made to order).
Page 243, line 23.—Of the "wild Germander," old Thomas Johnson says in his Historie of Plants, 1633, "The floures be of a gallant blew colour, standing orderlie on the tops of the tender, spriggy spraies."
Page 246, line 3.—Castor and Pollux were brothers of Helen; and, according to one tradition, all were born at once, being children of Zeus and Leda. Horace calls them
"Fratres Helenæ, lucida sidera."
Carm. 1. 3.
Page 248, "43a cycle."—It was apparently an oversight of Jean Paul's, making two 43d cycles, and it was left so in all the editions.
Page 252, line 19. "Sad-cloak."—A butterfly called the Trauermantel, or mourning mantle.
Page 262, line 26.—Blazing sea is a bold figure. Perhaps boiling would be more appropriate to the outer element, though not to Albano's inner emotion.
Page 267, line 4.—"Voice" means here vote.
Page 272, line 22.—There is a trick of language here, which cannot be given in translation, but only in explanation. The idea is that Schoppe was turning (or rather twisting) something similar to what the children were making; namely, an imaginary nose. Now in English we have no concise expression for that symbolic art of pressing the thumb to the nose and stretching the fingers into the air with a whirling motion, to convey the idea of having outwitted the person pointed at. The gesture is described very elaborately in one of Marryatt's novels; and Bon Gualtier, in his parody of Locksley Hall, speaks of "coffee-milling care and sorrow, with a nose-adapted thumb."
Page 284, line 7.—"Shut up," literally crooks up, as a prisoner is doubled up by fetters.
Page 285, line 9.—The "Charles" referred to is Charlemagne. "Sacramentarian" is strictly the English of Sacramentierer; but the word Schoppe uses is Sacramenter, which may mean one who says Sacrament! (a vulgar oath). Or it might be translated here "a poor curse."
Page 286, second note.—Subscription is called in German prænumeration, because the subscribers are numbered, or the money counted out, beforehand.
Page 291, line 6.—This does not fully express the ceremony, which consisted in breaking the helmet in pieces, and flinging them in upon the coffin.
Page 298, line 17.—"Awaiting his sword," which he had been obliged to leave behind on entering.
Page 299, line 11. "Paper dragon."—The German name for a child's kite.
Page 301, line 31. Properly rendered, "What will he—you?"—The mechanic, thinking at first he was addressing one of his own class, used the familiar "he," then, recognizing his mistake, he changed it to the more respectful "you."
Page 306, line 9.—"Whipped" is too strong an expression. The meaning is, that, the punishment having been commuted to a mere grazing of the neck with a rod (twig), the penitent had died under the stroke by the effect of imagination;—as is said to have actually occurred in the case of a beadle at a German university, whom the students, after a mock-trial, pretended they were going to execute, and, having laid his head on the block, simply struck it with a sausage, when to their horror he died of pure fright.
Page 312, line 4.—It was not a chocolate mill, but a twirling stick to stir chocolate.—Line 8. "Support"; i. e. to lay paper on for writing.
Page 312, line 33.—Richter has, not "Russia," but Saanen.
Page 327, line 7.—"Bleeds" to death, is the force of the original.
Page 329, line 32. "Just then," &c. Compare a passage in Richter's "New Year's Night of an Unhappy Man."
Page 335, line 10.—Jordan- or paper-almonds are those of which the shell is scraped to the thinness of paper.
Page 387, line 15.—The "touching ambiguity" spoken of cannot be expressed in the English translation. It lies in the fact that Albano's last three words, es seines wird, may mean either "When it becomes his," or "When his is so"; i. e. my heart will be happy when his is so.
Page 390, line 2.—The "English horsetails" are the Bobtails.
Page 391, line 2. "Overstrained image."—Rather the stretched pictures (as pictures are stretched in framing).
Page 392, line 5.—"Thickness" is a proper name; but the translator has not been able to learn anything of him, or of the fact here adduced on his authority.
Page 393, line 18. "To dream and enjoy."—Instead of geniessen, some editions have genesen, to get well.
Page 405, line 12.—The Schneider's skin is the Schneiderian membrane, so called from its discoverer, Conrad Victor Schneider, who was born in 1610, was Professor of Medicine and Physician to the Elector, and in 1660 wrote a treatise, "De Catarrhis," in six books, devoted chiefly to an anatomical description of the cavities of the nose.
Page 429, line 14.—The literal meaning of this bold figure is, "It struck epileptically, till they bled, the limbs of the inner man."
Page 436, line 22.—The time-keeper means the metronome.
Page 465, line 18.—The "seven pleasure-stations" allude to the stations in the Catholic Church, which are a series of pictured scenes in the life of Christ, before which the devotee successively pauses. They correspond here to the "Point of View, No. 1," "Point of View, No. 2," and so on, which one meets in the neighborhood of certain great wonders of Nature, such as Niagara Falls.
Page 469, line 7. "The wain."—Query, Charles's Wain.
Page 475, line 24. "The golden splendor of the strings of joy."—One edition has Der goldene Seiten- [instead of Saiten-] glanz der Freude,—"The golden side-glance of joy."
Page 479, line 16. "The fiery rain," &c.—One edition has Wagen instead of Regen,—the fiery chariot.
NOTES TO VOL. II.
Page 74, line 25. "The laughter-plant."—"The Illyrium Crow-foot," says Thomas Johnson, in his "History of Plants," p. 953, "in Greek, may be that kind of crow-foot called Apium risus, and [Greek: γελωτοφυη, gelotophuê] [laughter-producing]; and this is thought to be that Gelotophyllis of which Pliny maketh mention in his 24th Booke, 17th chapter, which being drunke, saith he, with wine and myrrhe, causeth a man to see divers strange sights, and not to cease laughing till he hath drunk Pineapple kernels with pepper in wine of the Date-tree (I think he would have said untill he be dead), because the nature of laughing Crow-foot is to kill laughing, but without doubt the thing is clean contrary; for it causeth such convulsions, cramps, and wringings of the mouth and jaws, that it hath seemed to some that the parties died laughing, whereas in truth they have died in great torment."
Page 487, line 20.—Hemsterhuis, a Dutch critic and philologist, of remarkable precocity, was born in Groningen in 1685, entered the University at fourteen, and at nineteen became Professor of Mathematics and Philosophy at Amsterdam. He died at Leyden in 1766.
Page 499, line 29.—Saint Alban is said to have been the first martyr for Christianity in Britain. He renounced Paganism in Rome, and suffered martyrdom during the persecutions under Dioclesian. A monastery was built in his memory, and around it grew up the town of St. Alban's.
Page 500, line 1.—Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy, founded the order of el toysón de oro, on occasion of his marriage with the Princess Isabella of Portugal, January 10, 1430.
Page 508, line 4.—Nicholas Jerome Gundling, a learned and in his day noted professor of law and eloquence, was born near Nuremberg, and died in 1729 at Halle, where he had been Rector of the University. He left many works, among them "Otia, or a Collection of Discourses on Physical, Moral, Political, and Historical Topics," in 3 vols., 8vo.
FOOTNOTES:
[1]: See Titan, Vol. I p. 38.—Tr.
[2]: The Greek Polus (in Aulus Gellius, Book VII. Chap. V.), who, having to enact Electra with the bones of Orestes, took instead the ashes of his own son, who had just died, and uttered real sorrow.—Tr.
[3]: Julius did not become blind till his twelfth year, and had therefore conceptions of the face.
[4]: See the blind girl's song in Bulwer's "Last Days of Pompeii."—Tr.
[5]: Planets with their moons.
[6]: Literally, He only thinks us, when we think Him.—Tr.
[7]: Here ended Jean Paul's second volume.—Tr.
[8]: Professor Hofmann as a throne-stormer, and his magazine, wherein at the beginning of the Revolution he took every free-thinker captive, are to be sure long since forgotten; but one may substitute for him any the nearest and newest German ultra.
[9]: Literally, "What time o' day it was."—Tr.
[10]: I. e. a poltroon.—Tr.
[11]: Hence in Athens it was allowed to ridicule the gods, but not to deny them.
[12]: Literally, was handselled or overhauled (as young sailors on first crossing the line).—Tr.
[13]: Literally, "knocked him into April."—Tr.
[14]: Satyr means a satyr, and satyre, satire.—Tr.
[15]: Emprosthotonos is the cramp which bends men forward. Opisthotonos bends them backward.
[16]: "Sed magis amica veritas!"—Tr.
[17]: See the weekly, called "The Jew," page 380, e. g. according to the Book Lebusch Atteret Sahaph, a man with a beast's head is a human first-birth, but not so an insect, an entire beast.
[18]: Anatomical term for a passage connecting with the uterus. Tr.
[19]: That is, as an army is put on a movable footing or in marching order for battle.—Tr.
[20]: So the spinners call the decayed part of the cotton-wool.
[21]: The bellows' treader or blower.—Tr.
[22]: Bristles.—Tr.
[23]: One of the seven stars in the tail of the Lion, named for the wife of Ptolemy III., whose hair was stolen from the Temple of Venus, where she had placed it in fulfilment of a vow.—Tr.
[24]: From the connection, these books would seem to have been certain antidotes to melancholy, or Cheerful Companions, well known at that day.—Tr.
[25]: Servants dressed in the costume of Hungarian soldiers.—Tr.
[26]: Pier-glasses.—Tr.
[27]: Household plate.—Tr.
[28]: Probably a ward or school of the city.—Tr.
[29]: The hands of the Medicean Venus are new and restored.
[30]: Chief-Physician.—Tr.
[31]: For Vandyk's Sebastian is said to resemble the painter himself.
[32]: A furnace for destroying galleries of mines, invented by Belidor, a French military mathematician, born in 1697.—Tr.
[33]: "But it is myself I forget in pardoning you."
[34]: According to the common opinion; for I am inclined to the other, which calls them Ator, Sator, Peratoras. These names distinguish the kings wholly from the shepherds, who were called Milati, Acheel, Cyriacus, and Stephanus, and who also preceded them, all which I copy here out of Casaub. Exercit. ad Ann. Baron., II. 10, because I am not at all ashamed to know anything useless, provided a Casaubon is not, and provided it is something learned too.
[35]: The reference is all along to the years 1792-93.
[36]: Who would take a hand at nine-pins on coming out of a battle won or lost.—Tr.
[37]: See Titan, Vol. II. p. 1, note.—Tr.
[38]: A liquor made of sulphuric acid, alcohol, sorrel-juice, and water, once much used for gun-shot wounds.—Tr.
[39]: Voetii Select. Disputat. Theol., P. I. p. 918.
[40]: Papin was a physicist and machinist, who invented a machine for softening bones to make a digestible food.—Tr.
[41]: Writers on natural history deny that serpents do drink. But this may allude to some legend.—Tr.
[42]: He calls Death, and the state, a pavior, though in different senses.
[43]: The name given to a high rocky pyramid beside Mont Blanc, containing a hole through which one sees the heavens. It is to me a tender fancy to represent to myself beside the highest mountain, which takes in as much of heaven as of earth, a smaller one, which opens into a narrow prospect offering to our eye a blue telescope, out of which our hope builds the arch of heaven.
[44]: After the death of the Emperor, a wax image of him was kept for seven days in the palace, where it received as his representative ceremonious visits, and, among the rest, of course from the physicians.—Tr.
[45]: Meaning her body. See p. 78.—Tr.
[46]: Or neck (of a violin, for instance).—Tr.
[47]: Vorrede being the German for Preface.—Tr.
[48]: To turn over the strong-box means to count the cash.—Tr.
[49]: Outlawry of debts after five years.—Tr.
[50]: Hell-stone, or lunar caustic.—Tr.
[51]: The district in which Voltaire's Ferney lay.—Tr.
[52]: Probably some vade-mecum of Jean Paul's time.—Tr.
[53]: Contribution levied on subjects when the sovereign's daughter is to be portioned.—Tr.
[54]: Knave.—Tr.
[55]: Ballet-dancer.—"The brisk locomotion of Columbine." (Johnson's ghost in "Rejected Addresses.")—Tr.
[56]: 1700-1763. A famous, extravagant German statesman attached to Augustus III. of Saxony.—Tr.
[57]: Heads of short, frizzled hair, modelled after the busts or portraits of Titus.—Tr.
[58]: A small Cologne coin, so named from the image of a little fat man or monk (some thinking fettmännchen a corruption for fettmönchchen) stamped on it.—Tr.
[59], [60], [61]: The one word butterfly is expressed by three different words here in German: Schmetterling, Phaläne, and Zweifalter.—Tr.
[62]: The crape hat.
[63]: Because courtiers herein also resemble the first Christians, who destroyed only such statues as had received adoration in the place of God.
[64]: Doctrine of kissing.—Tr.
[65]: Carl Gottlob Cramer, who died in 1817, was a very prolific, and in his day popular, romance-writer.
[66]: In miners' language the men of the quill are the superintendents, clerks, &c., in the Mining-office; those of leather are those who wear the hind aprons of that stuff for sliding down into the mines; those of fire are the men that smelt the metal.
[67]: That is to say, in the years of Lucinda, the anti-Herders, &c.
[68]: Jean Paul reminds us in the Preface to "Quintus Fixlein" that "Flying Dogs" is a name for Vampyres.—Tr.
[69]: John David Michaelis (knighted by the King of Sweden) planned, in 1756, a journey to the East, in the cause of biblical and philological science, for which he prepared a series of questions.—Tr.
[70]: From the iron-forges and colliers' huts.
[71]: See Apocrypha: Tobit viii. 8.
[72]: It was when he spoke with his father in the arbor in behalf of Clotilda's union with Flamin,—and when he proposed to himself, before the event, to renounce even her friendship.
[73]: Frascati was a summer residence of the Roman Emperors in the Campagna, on the Tusculan Mount, eight miles from Rome.—Tr.
[74]: Architectural term.—Tr.
[75]: Real-schule: practical school, for the learning of things. "Res, non verba, quæso," was Spurzheim's motto.—Tr.
[76]: This Institute is of course out of Jean Paul's brain; the others are historical. The one at Schnepfenthal (in Thüringen) was founded by Salzman, who died in 1811.—Tr.
[77]: Septleva (Sept-le-va) is an old French term applied to the case in the game of faro where the player gains seven times the number he laid down.—Tr.
[78]: In German, Muck! like the snapping noise of the dog when flies torment his sleep.—Tr.
[79]: Most women are not gallows-paters [confessors] properly, gallows-maters and female barrack-preachers, until they are full of the Devil, as Sterne had the most conceits when he was not well.
[80]: Sixth and fifth months of the French Republican calendar.—Tr.
[81]: February changed to August.—Tr.
[82]: A grated Place in Paris, where they expose the dead found during the night, that every one may find his relative.
[83]: Great is the soul which, like him, with none but enemies around him, renounces all power,—greater is the people, before which one could venture to do it. Another people would have anticipated Sulla's lice. [Alluding to a loathsome disease which beset him late in life, called the morbus pediculosus.—Tr.]
[84]: Victor took for his union ten persons, perhaps because exactly that number is required to make a riot. Hommel, Rhapsod. observat. CCXXV.
[85]: The 4th of August, 1789, was the memorable night in which all the represented upper estates formally renounced their old privileges.—Tr.
[86]: Literally brain-borer.—Tr.
[87]: Job xxxvi. 21: "Take heed, regard not iniquity; for this hast thou chosen rather than affliction."—Tr.
[88]: For there is no great event from a little cause, but only great events from a million little causes, of which one always assigns the last as the mother of the great result. Is then the priming the charge of the cannon?
[89]: Thistle-knobs.—Tr.
[90]: That is to say, no sculptor could make a second nose to fit this statue,—for the first had been broken off. At last, after four hundred years, a child found in a great fish the marble one which belonged to it. Labat's Travels, Fifth Part.
[91]: Old designation of a Russian or Polish Prince.—Tr.
[92]: Dionysius the Little, a Roman abbot, invented the Christian era.—Tr.
[93]: Working-man's holiday.—Tr.
[94]: Mummies,—one of the titles of the "Invisible Lodge," given in allusion to mixing up of serious and jocose scenes and ideas, as the Egyptians introduced a skeleton at their merry—makings.—Tr.
[95]: Financial speculators.—Tr.
[96]: According to Scheuchzer, Alps are the best remedy for constipation.
[97]: Horæ are the matins in the Catholic convents.—Tr.
[98]: Papin, the inventor of the machine for dissolving bones to make them digestible.—Tr.
[99]: Galley in which the Doge of Venice wedded the waves.—Tr.
[100]: Richter's Idyl, "The Life and Death of the contented Schoolmaster Wutz."—Tr.
[101]: "The very sense of being would then be a continued pleasure, such as we now feel it in some few and favored moments of our youth."—Shelley's Notes to Queen Mab.
[102]: Such was the name given to the park in the Abbey which Lord Horion in his romantic taste had begun but not finished, because he hit upon the Island of Union. I weave this description of it only fragmentarily in with the incidents.
[103]: Trio.—Tr.
[104]: In the "Invisible Lodge."—Tr.
[105]: Worm-shaped clots of foam.—Tr.
[106]: Originally those who bore a ticket from the Emperor recommending them to receive bread (panis) from a monastery.—Tr.
[107]: "Proper mandates of the sacred imperial majesty."—Tr.
[108]: Befehlhaberisch is the German word.—Tr.
[109]: Defined by Grimm, "a medical warm-bath prepared over ants and ant-hills."—Tr.
[110]: Readiness at turns, repartee, &c.—Tr.
[111]: A prim, affected person.—Tr.
[112]: I. e. light girls. Jean Paul uses Dingen for the dative in the first instance, and Dingern in the second.—Tr.
[113]: For not until he came back from Kussewitz did he learn on the island, from his father, Clotilda's relationship.
[114]: Complementary or completing, a musical term.—Tr.
[115]: Four points in Lotto, next to the highest.—Tr.
[116]: The Roman who wrote much on husbandry and natural history in a gossiping style.—Tr.
[117]: The spot in Mecca to which every good Mussulman turns in prayer.—Tr.
[118]: One took the silver thread rising and falling in arcs for one continuous rill trickling downward; but the arcs of several diagonally leaping fountains were set at such distances, that one became a continuation of the other.
[119]: A term for the ear-flaps.—Tr.
[120]: In the moonlight, plants secrete oxygen gas or vital air.
[121]: Third in German,—the musical division of time, not however used in our common arithmetical tables.—Tr.
[122]: Remember the Author's "Recollections of Life's fairest Hours against the last."—Tr.
[123]: "Sea-wonders" is the German expression.—Tr.
[124]: The translator feels how much he has sacrificed of the simplicity of the language in this song, in endeavoring to keep the rhyme and the silvery rhythm.
[125]: "Nerve-worm," literally.—Tr.
[126]: Pascal.
"Man's littleness is grandeur in disguise
And discontent is immortality."
Young.
[128]: Here ended Richter's third volume.—Tr.
[129]: Last-First, or the cart before the horse.—Tr.
[130]: The name given to a harpsichord which notes down everything that it plays.
[131]: The term applied to the abridged title of a book recurring at the bottom of every sheet.
[132]: The gradual sapping of logical strictness by moral freedom.—Tr.
[133]: The getting of its Eastings through the Practical Reason.
[134]: Opposition of laws. And yet antinomian is an opponent of law.—Tr.
[135]: Named after its discoverer.—Tr.
[136]: The Zwinger is originally the narrow interval between the town-wall and the town itself.—Tr.
[137]: The sensuous images of the ancient Greek philosophers.—Tr.
[138]: Flamin.—Tr.
[139]: D'Israeli, in his "Curiosities of Literature" (Art. Literary Follies), ascribes this to one Gregorio Leti, who, he says, presented a discourse to the Academy of the Humorists at Rome, throughout which he had purposely omitted the letter R, and he entitled it, "The exiled R."—Tr.
[140]: The R disbanded.—Tr.
[141]: A name given by the Romans to the slave who carried the children's school-books after them.—Tr.
[142]: "Decency adds to the pleasures of indecency; virtue is the salt of love; but don't take too much of it.—I love in woman bursts of anger, of grief, of joy, of fear; there is always in their boiling blood something which is favorable to men.—It is where finesse falls short, that enthusiasm is needed.—Women are rarely astonished at being thought weak; it is at the contrary that they are somewhat astonished.—Love always pardons love, rarely reason."—Tr.
[143]: Such was the title Stevens gave his satirical college-lectures on pasteboard heads, which half London ran after.
[144]: Lacon says: "As to time without an end and space without a limit, these are two things that finite beings cannot clearly comprehend. But ... there are two things much more incomprehensible, ... time that has an end and space that has a limit. For whatever limits these two things must be itself unlimited, and I am at a loss to conceive where it can exist except in space and time."—Tr.
[145]: Peristaltic.—Tr.
[146]: That part of the nose happens also to be called its root in German.—Tr.
[147]: The rough breathing (in Greek) which has a crooked shape, thus: (').-Tr.
[148]: The Pharisees did it,—like certain Jews, who also always walked bent, and so were called crooklings,—in order to leave a little room for God who fills the whole earth.—Ancient and Modern Judaism, Vol. II. p. 47.
[149]: Thus did Emanuel always name St. John's day, though not with perfect astronomical accuracy.
[150]: See Dr. Thomas Brown's Mental Philosophy on the subject of consciousness.—Tr.
[151]: In the second part of the second volume.
[152]: [Page 266].—Tr.
[153]: I. e. On the dial-plate of our inner life.—Tr.
[154]: Complementary parts in music.—Tr.
[155]: The sun when eclipsed by the moon is beheld by us in a crape-covered [or smoked] glass.
[156]: The seas of our earth look in the distance like the spots of the moon.
[157]: The halo round the moon.
[158]: The Upas-tree.—Tr.
[159]: Balloon (inventor of the).—Tr.
[160]: Depreciation (of money).—Tr.
[161]: Allusions to cloud filled with pictured lands and islands which one sees at morning on looking down from Mount Ætna.
[162]: A term taken from wine-making, meaning the unpressed wine, the first runnings.—Tr.
[163]: Chamberlains wear, as a decoration, three gold buttons over the right pocket-lappet.—Tr.
[164]: Preciste in the original: one nominated to a benefice in virtue of the right of first petition.—Tr.
[165]: Original: "Gotzsurthel,"—properly Gottesurtheil.—Tr.
[166]: The dragon was an old-fashioned war-machine.—Tr.
[167]: Color of burnt bones.—Tr.
[168]: The old astronomers inserted between the fixed stars and the planets a tremulous heaven, in order to have something on which to charge the slight anomalies of the latter bodies.
[169]: Nine dancing-women are strung together to make an elephant for the king. One makes the trunk; four, the legs; four, the body. History of all Travels, Vol. X.
[170]: An old German name affixed to apothecaries, in allusion to the alleged profits on their drugs.—Tr.
[171]: The little finger. The German name is kept for the sake of the allusion.—Tr.
[172]: All this is neatly summed up in the witty Frenchman's saying, "Gratitude is a keen sense of favors to come."—Tr.
[173]: These oaths of silence, as is well known, his Lordship had required of Victor, Clotilda, and her mother, with all that tragic circumstance which takes so strong a hold especially on female hearts.
[174]: Victor, Julius, Flamin.
[175]: She well knows that it was Victor.
[176]: This poison-tree stands in a bald waste, because it kills everything around it; and the malefactor journeys alone to its poison, but he seldom returns. [This has been ascertained to be fabulous. There is a poisonous valley encircled by banks emitting a fatal carbonic-acid gas, but no tree grows there, and the upas grows in the woods among other trees without harming them.—Tr.]
[177]: Lind in Kussewitz.
[178]: Around numbers of chapels (see Schlötzer's Correspondence, Part III. Vol. XVIII. 45) stand warehouses of wax limbs and animals, which they buy as ear-rings and bracelets for the saints, in order that the originals may be healed.
[179]: Of making one's self invulnerable.—Tr.
[180]: The Centaurs could not prostrate him with trees, but had to press him, as he stood erect, into the earth. Orph. Argonaut. 168.
[181]: Ankerstrœm was a Swedish regicide, born 1759, and executed, for killing Gustavus III., in 1792.—Tr.
[182]: The name given to a certain elevation above the sea, determined by Bouger, at which the mountains in all zones are covered with snow.
[183]: Blutschuld,—forfeiture of life (Schuld meaning both debt and guilt).—Tr.
[184]: Died in 1800. He was a famous and forcible writer against the French Revolution and the Jacobin clubs, from which latter he drew on himself extreme odium. He wrote "Historical Sketches and Political Observations on the French Revolution," in seventeen volumes.—Tr.
[185]: A piece of iron that made speaking impossible.—Tr.
[186]: Prime Minister to Louis XIV. in the most brilliant part of his reign;—arrogant, cruel, inflexible;—had the chief hand in revoking the Edict of Nantes.—Madame de Maintenon overthrew him.—Tr.
[187]: Tessin was an excellent Swedish count, born in 1695.—Tr.
[188]: Lit. "Spiessfolgedank." So, too, citizens who act as a military guard are called "Spiessbürger."—Tr.
[189]: "By merit raised to that bad eminence."—Tr.
[190]: At the University of Paris they still keep up the messenger from Pomerania, who annually set out for Pomerania, &c. to fetch the Paris students letters from their parents.
[191]: And even there only with reference to immortality and compensation. We feel no injustice when one being becomes a plantation-negro, another an angel of the sun; but their creation begins their claims, and the Eternal cannot, without injustice, purchase even with the sufferings of the minutest creature the joys of all better ones, if it is not made good again to the sufferer.
[192]: The white flesh of the human body and the red veins of blood.—Tr.
[193]: Name given to the believers in the dogma of the Father's suffering on the cross.—Tr.
[194]: A botanical term, meaning literally in one house, and designating Linnæus's twenty-first class of plants, of which the male and female (or barren and bearing) grow on one stock.—Tr.
[195]: A Spanish word, equivalent to Inamorata (or sweetheart).—Tr.
[196]: Feder means, in German, both feather and pen, as plume and penna, in French and Latin, mean both feather and quill.—Tr.
[197]: In the original, Nummern-vogel (numbered bird). As to the 99 [i. e. per cent.] on Zeusel, see page 368.—Tr.
[198]: Literally: Ich mache Wind.—Tr.
[199]: Spies.—Tr.
[200]: Geographical writers.—Tr.
[201]: Patchwork,—a term applied also to poems plagiarized from all quarters.—Tr.
[202]: A cap worn by those who take up hives, to defend them against stings.—Tr.
[203]: The Lutheran and Reformed:—at the Diet of Augsburg, in 1555.—Tr.
[204]: And I here with pleasure hold out to the public hope of my own biography, wherewith, when I shall have lived out a few more indispensable chapters of it, I propose to present it under the title, Jean Paul's Acts of the Apostles, or his Actions, Experiences, and Opinions.
[205]: Or lithographic, only petro is used designedly with a moral reference.—Tr.
[206]: Children of a European and an American Indian.—Tr.
[207]: Children of Terceroons, who again are children of Mulattoes and whites.
[208]: Alluding to Justinian's new statutes.—Tr.
[209]: Blutjung is the German; a vulgarism, corresponding, perhaps, to the English bloody-young,—Tr.
[210]: Gideon Ernest Laudon (Baron) was a great soldier and captain, born in 1716. The Emperor of Austria, under whom he chiefly served, had the following epitaph written for him: "Gideonis Laudoni summi castrorum præfecti, semper strenui, fortis, felicis militis et civis optimi exemplum quod duces militesque imitentur Josephus 11 Aug. in ejus effigie proponi voluit, anno 1783."—Tr.
[211]: The Swan is Giulia; the Lyre of Apollo, Emanuel; Hercules reminded one of his Lordship.
[212]: It is estimated that one can read 60 letters in a second, consequently a moderate octavo page in 16 seconds, therefore an alphabet (Printer's term for 23 sheets—Tr.) in an hour 42 minutes 24 seconds. My book I assume to be one alphabet and a half strong.
[213]: The Ten Predicaments are the various aspects or relations under which things may be considered.—Tr.
[214]: Cry into himself, is the German.
[215]: The zodiacal light manifests the dipping of the earth into the sun's atmosphere.
[216]: See Vol. II. p. 74.