[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.