is 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.--L. 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.--T. Dibdin, _What Next?_

_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 splendor "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).

_Sharp_ (_Timothy_), the "lying valet" of Charles Gayless. His object is
to make his master, who has not a sixpence in the world, pass for a man
of wealth in the eyes of Melissa, to whom he is engaged.--Garrick, _The
Lying Valet_ (1741).

=Sharp-Beak=, the crow's wife, in the beast-epic called _Reynard the Fox_
(1498).

=Sharpe= (_The Right Rev. James_), archbishop of St. Andrew's, murdered by
John Balfour (a leader in the covenanters' army) and his party.--Sir W.
Scott, _Old Mortality_ (time, Charles II.).

=Sharper= (_Master_), the cutler in the Strand.--Sir W. Scott, _Peveril of
the Peak_ (time, Charles II.).

=Sharpitlaw= (_Gideon_), a police officer.--Sir W. Scott, _Heart of
Midlothian_ (time, George II.).

=Shawonda'see=, son