Chapter Shamhozai to Shedad of S by Brewer's Readers Handbook

Shamhozai to Shedad

Shamhozai , the angel who debauched himself with women, repented, and hung himself up between earth and heaven.—Bereshit rabbi (in Gen. vi. 2).

Harût and Marût were two angels sent to be judges on earth. They judged righteously till Zohara appeared before them, when they fell in love with her, and were imprisoned in a cave near Babylon, where they are to abide till the day of judgment.

Shandon (Captain), in Pendennis, a novel by Thackeray (1849-50).

Shandy (Tristram), the nominal hero of Sterne’s novel called The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759). He is the son of Walter and Elizabeth Shandy.

Captain Shandy, better known as “Uncle Toby,” the real hero of Sterne’s novel. Captain Shandy was wounded at Namur, and retired on half-pay. He was benevolent and generous, brave as a lion but simple as a child, most gallant and most modest. Hazlitt says that “the character of uncle Toby is the finest compliment ever paid to human nature.” His modest love-passages with Widow Wadman, his kindly sympathy for lieutenant Lefevre, and his military discussions, are wholly unrivalled.

Aunt Dinah [Shandy], Walter Shandy’s aunt. She bequeathed to him £1000, which Walter fancied would enable him to carry out all the wild schemes with which his head was crammed.

Mrs. Elizabeth Shandy, mother of Tristram Shandy. The ideal of nonentity, individual from its very absence of individuality.

Walter Shandy, Tristram’s father, a metaphysical don Quixote, who believes in long noses and propitious names; but his son’s nose was crushed, and his name, which should have been Trismegistus (“the most propitious”), was changed in christening to Tristram (“the most unlucky”). If much learning can make man mad, Walter Shandy was certainly mad in all the affairs of ordinary life. His wife was a blank sheet, and he himself a sheet so written on and crossed and rewritten that no one could decipher the manuscript.—Sterne: The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy (1759).

SHARP, the ordinary of major Touchwood, who aids him in his transformation, but is himself puzzled to know which is the real and which the false colonel.—Dibdin: What Next?

Sharp (Richard), called “Conversation Sharp” (1760–1835).

Sharp (Rebecca), the orphan daughter of an artist. “She was small and slight in person, pale, sandy- haired, and with green eyes, habitually cast down, but very large, odd, and attractive when they looked up.” Becky had the “dismal precocity of poverty,” and, being engaged as governess in the family of sir Pitt Crawley, bart., contrived to marry clandestinely his son captain Rawdon Crawley, and taught him how to live in splendour “upon nothing a year.” Becky was an excellent singer and dancer, a capital talker and wheedler, and a most attractive, but unprincipled, selfish, and unscrupulous woman. Lord Steyne introduced her to court; but her conduct with this peer gave rise to a terrible scandal, which caused a separation between her and Rawdon, and made England too hot to hold her. She retired to the Continent, was reduced to a Bohemian life, but ultimately attached herself to Joseph Sedley, whom she contrived to strip of all his money, and who lived in dire terror of her, dying in six months under very suspicious circumstances.—Thackeray: Vanity Fair (1848).

With Becky Sharp, we think we could be good, if we had £5000 a year.—Bayne.

Becky Sharp, with a baronet for a brother-in-law and an earl’s daughter for a friend, felt the hollowness of human grandeur, and thought she was happier with the Bohemian artists in Soho.—The Express