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.
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.
127:
"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.
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.