Chapter Afrit or Afreet to AGNES of A by Brewer's Readers Handbook

Afrit or Afreet to AGNES

Afrit or Afreet, a kind of Medusa or Lamia, the most terrible and cruel of all the orders of the deevs.—Herbelot, 66.

From the hundred chimneys of the village,
Like the Afreet in the Arabian story [Introduct. Tale]
Smoky columns tower aloft into the air of amber.
   —Longfellow: The Golden Milestone.

Agag, in Dryden’s satire of Absalom and Achitophel, is sir Edmondbury Godfrey, the magistrate, who was found murdered in a ditch near Primrose Hill. Titus Oates, in the same satire, is called “Corah.”

Corah might for Agag’s murder call,
In terms as coarse as Samuel used to Saul.
   —Part i. 677-78.

Agamemnon, king of the Argives and commander-in-chief of the allied Greeks in the siege of Troy. Introduced by Shakespeare in his Troilus and Cressida.

James Thomson, in 1738, produced a tragedy so called; but it met with no success.

Vixere ante Agamemnona fortes, “There were brave men before Agamemnon;” we are not to suppose that there were no great and good men in former times. A similar proverb is: “There are hills beyond Pentland, and fields beyond Forth.”

Agandecca, daughter of Starno king of Lochlin [Scandinavia], promised in marriage to Fingal king of Morven [northwest of Scotland]. The maid told Fingal to beware of her father, who had set an ambush to kill him. Fingal, being thus forewarned, slew the men in ambush; and Starno, in rage, murdered his daughter, who was buried by Fingal in Ardven [Argyle].

The daughter of the snow overheard, and left the hall of her secret sigh. She came in all her beauty, like the moon from the cloud of the east. Loveliness was around her as light. Her step was like the music of songs. She saw the youth and loved him. He was the stolen sigh of her soul. Her blue eyes rolled in secret on him, and she blessed the chief of Morven.—Ossian: Fingal, iii.

Aganippe , Fountain of the Muses, at the foot of mount Helicon, in Bœotia

From Helicon’s harmonious springs
A thousand rills their mazy progress take.
   —Gray: Progress of Poetry.

Agape the fay. She had three sons at a birth, Priamond, Diamond, and Triamond. Being anxious to know the future lot of her sons, she went to the abyss of Demogorgon, to consult the “Three Fatal Sisters.” Clotho showed her the threads, which “were thin as those spun by a spider.” She begged the Fates to lengthen the life-threads, but they said this could not be; they consented, however, to this arrangement—

When ye shred with fatal knife
His line which is the shortest of the three,
Eftsoon his life may pass into the next;
And when the next shall likewise ended be,
That both their lives may likewise be annext
Unto the third, that his may be so trebly wext.
   —Spenser: Faërie Queene, iv. 2 (1590).

Agapida (Fray Antonio), the imaginary chronicler of The Conquest of Granada, written by Washington Irving (1829).

Agaric, a genus of fungi, some of which are very nauseous and disgusting.

That smells as foul-fleshed agaric in the holt [forest].
   —Tennyson: Gareth and Lynette.

Agastya , a dwarf who drank the sea dry. As he was walking one day with Vishnoo, the insolent ocean asked the god who the pigmy was that strutted by his side. Vishnoo replied it was the patriarch Agastya, who was going to restore earth to its true balance. Ocean, in contempt, spat its spray in the pigmy’s face, and the sage, in revenge of this affront, drank the waters of the ocean, leaving the bed quite dry.—Maurice.