Hesperus or Forty-five Dog-Post-Days. Vol. I.

"Turkey rhubarb powdered.
Starred anise-seed.
Fennel do.
Peel of green orange.
Carbonate of potash,—equal parts,—1 drachm.
Leaves of Alexandrian senna without stalks,—2 drachms.
Half an ounce of white sugar."

And the final direction may read, "Of which let him take a mixture, finely pulverized, given in sufficient quantity to produce ejection. Mark [i. e. on the paper], Wind-powders," &c.—Tr.

199: An allusion, perhaps, to the pasteboard images carried about on the heads of Italian peddlers, in which the loose-hung head bobs right and left to the spectators.—Tr.

200: The German expression for all this is too elliptical to be literally rendered. It is simply "Meinetwegen!" (For all me!)—Tr.

204: That is, he would be, when this letter arrived, for he was going to carry it.—Tr.

205: Culpepper never did him the pleasure, for which he had so often begged him, of prescribing for the Prince a clyster, which then the apothecary himself would have administered, in order just for once to get at the ruler, and transform his weak side into his own sunny side.

206: When those twins chipped the shell of Leda's egg, out of which they were born.—Tr.

209: A Greek jurist, compared by Gibbon to Bacon, of great influence in the first half of the sixth century,—dishonest, but able.—Tr.

213: "Gesegnete Mahlzeit" is the familiar phrase Richter uses; it was formerly common, at the close of dinner, to shake hands and wish "a blessing on the meal."—Tr.

"Hast thou a friend, take care to keep him,
And often to his threshold wend:
Briers and thorns o'ergrow the path
On which a man neglects to walk."—Old Saying.

Tr.

217: Thus did merely the first edition, in 1797, speak of the Viennese; a third, improved one, in 1819, acknowledges also an improved edition of them, although it retains lively shadows of their former times.

220: The author appears to have had in his mind a reminiscence of a passage in Bürger's "Lenore":—

"Like croak of frogs in marshy plain,
Swelled on the breeze that dismal strain," &c.—Tr.

222: The Jewish name for Sabbath in the Middle Ages. See Auerbach's Spinoza.—Tr.

227: The German word is Kälte, which explains the incongruity of our English heading.—Tr.

228: A word copied exactly from the German, and well enough justified by the analogy of rookery, for instance.—Tr.

230: I have wholly recast the letter N, because in the first edition I unfortunately had a good idea, which, without recollecting its first publication, I gave the world a second time, as a learned thief of my own property, in the commentary on the woodcuts. [Probably the ones illustrating the Ten Commandments, in the Campaner Thal, Jean Paul's work on Immortality.—Tr.]

232: A freethinker and Freemason, in the latter half of the eighteenth century imprisoned, for a certain comedy, in Magdeburg fortress.—Tr.

234: As an example, we have now the First Principle of Morals, and that of the Forms of Government.

237: The hysterical ball, i. e. the hysteric morbid feeling, as if a ball were rolling up into the throat.

238: Used here by Jean Paul evidently, with figurative freedom, for a Russian swing, but meaning originally a chariot-race (afterward tournament), and derived from currus solis (chariot of the sun).—Tr.

240: "The Litones were slaves among the old Saxons, who still possessed a third of their property, and could make contracts for it." Flegeljahre, No. 8.—Tr.

244: Axiom in law; named from Brocard, a Bishop of Worms, who made a collection of canons called "Brocardica Juris."—Tr.

245: Proculus and Sabinus were the founders of two rival schools of jurisprudence in Rome (Proculians and Sabinians) in the first century of our era.—Tr.

246: A term from the Pandects of Justinian, meaning liabilities to burdens or duties.—Tr.

249: Faust (meaning both fist and the Faust of story) is the word in the original.—Tr.

251: There is a play on words in the original, Hof meaning court, and also, when applied to the sun or moon, a circle round the luminary.—Tr.

252: The original has a slight pun; über die Tafel meaning both on the subject of the table and during the table (or dinner).—Tr.

253: A name given to different groups of delicate muscles in certain sensitive parts of the human body.—Tr.

"But where of ye, O tempests, is the goal!
Are ye like those within the human breast,
Or do ye find, like eagles, some high nest?"

Childe Harold.

257: The conservative or court party in the French Revolution were called the noirs (blacks), from the fact of the emigrant nobles wearing black velvet. The Ensragés was the name of a radical club.—Tr.

264: A Parisian anatomiste (b. 1719) persecuted by the profession to London, where she exhibited her wax-skeleton with success.—Tr.

266: Entertainments for the gods, at which their images were laid on couches (lecti), and food was served up to them in public.—Tr.

267: Panist from the Latin panis,—an allusion to an old class of charity scholars. It might be rendered, loafer.—Tr.

268: Alluding to the long attempts in Germany to fuse the Calvinistie and Lutheran Churches.—Tr.

269: Musicus here, not musicant, which latter means the more common performer, fiddler, or whatever else.—Tr.

271: Plutarch mentions how vain Pompey's cavaliers were of their personal appearance, and that Cæsar accordingly directed his soldiers to aim at their faces; "for Cæsar hoped that those young cavaliers who had not been used to wars and wounds, and who set a great value on their beauty, would avoid above all things a stroke in that part, and immediately give way, as well on account of the present danger as the future deformity. The event answered his expectation."—Tr.

273: I. e., O Clarissa! behold your Lovelace; let us skip the first four volumes, and, like the makers of Epics, begin with the rest!

275: These terms are adopted as the shortest correspondents of the German bürgerlich and stiftfähig.—Tr.

276: He mistakes; Leibnitz only said, everything difficult was light to him, and everything light difficult.

277: As the old fellow who carried his pipe in his boot, when his leg was shot off at the battle of Prague, grabbed at his pipe first and then at his leg. (See Old Song.)—Tr.

279: Viel-Liebe is Jean Paul's word, to match which, after the analogy of Polygamy (marriage to many), we might coin the word Polyagapy (love to many).—Tr.

280: Instead of malade imaginaire, an imaginary invalid, she was an imaginary convalescent.—Tr.

281: Adjuvans is the ingredient which strengthens the powers of the main ingredients; constituens is what gives the medicine the form of pill, electuary or mixture.

282: One weeps, one cries, one sighs, one lies, one raves, one kills, one dies,—in fine, one gives himself to all the devils, in order to have his angel.—Tr.

284: Referring to the one whose marriage to the Senior Parson's daughter Victor witnessed that night from his window.—Tr.

288: The God of sleep was attended by three beings: Phantasus, who could change himself only into lifeless things; Phobetor, who could assume and conjure up all animal forms; and Moropheus, who could, all human forms. Metamorph. Lib. II. Fab. 10.

291: Nor yet by a luxury, whose magnitude one exaggerates in comparing their outlays with our income, and which injured them only in this way, that they inherited the nations like East Indian cousins. It was that of a cobbler who has won the highest prize in the lottery; it was the squandering of a soldier after the plundering. Hence they had luxury without refinement. It could maintain its greatness only by growing greater. Had one thrown to them America with its gold bars, they might, with greater luxury, have gone on this crutch some centuries longer.

292: It is well known that the head of the poor negro is shut up in a hollow one of iron, which presses down his tongue.

294: The millionnaire presupposes the beggar, the scholar, the Helot; the higher culture of individuals is purchased by the degradation of the mass.

295: Written in 1792. At present the tempest which once stood in the heavens over all Europe lies out there in the level earth.

296: For after 400,000 years the earth's axis, as Jupiter's is now, will be perpendicular to the plane of its orbit.

END OF VOL. I.

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