Chapter Gourlay to Gradgrind of G by Brewer's Readers Handbook

Gourlay to Gradgrind

Gourlay (Ailshie), a privileged fool or jester.—Sir W. Scott: The Antiquary (time, George III.).

Gourlay (Ailsie), an old sibyl at the death of Alice Gray.—Sir W. Scott: Bride of Lammermoor (time, William III.).

Gourmaz (Don), a national portrait of the Spanish nobility.—Corneille: The Cid (1636).

The character of don Gormaz, for its very excellence, drew down the censure of the French Academy.—Sir W. Scott: The Drama.

Gow (Old Neill), the fiddler.

Nathaniel Gow, son of the fiddler.—Sir W. Scott: St. Ronan’s Well (time, George III.).

Gow (Henry) or Henry Smith, also called “Gow Chrom” and “Hal of the Wynd,” the armourer. Suitor of Catharine Glover “the fair maid of Perth,” whom he marries.—Sir W. Scott: Fair Maid of Perth (time, Henry IV.).

Gower (The Moral), an epithet bestowed by Chaucer on John Gower, the poet (1320–1402).

Gowk Storm, a short storm, such as occurs in spring, when the gowk or cuckoo comes.

He trusted the present [disturbance] would prove but a gowk storm.—Sir W. Scott: Tales of a Grandfather, i. 49.

Gowk-thrapple (Maister), a covenanting preacher.—Sir W. Scott: Waverley (time, George II.).

A man of coarse, mechanical, perhaps rather intrinsically feeble intellect, with the vehemence of some pulpit-drumming Gowk-thrapple.—Carlyle.

Gowry, the owner of Nightmare Abbey, who thinks it most comme il faut to be melancholy.

Scythrop Gowry, his son, in love with two young ladies at the same time (Miss Marionetta O’Carroll and Miss Celinda Toobad). This is a skit on Percy Bysshe Shelley, who courted at the same time Mary Godwin and Harriett Westbrook, and told his father he intended to commit suicide. Shelley saw the allusion and took it in good part.—Peacock’s novel of Nightmare Abbey (1818).

Graaf (Count), a great speculator in corn. One year a sad famine prevailed, and he expected, like Pharaoh king of Egypt, to make an enormous fortune by his speculation, but an army of rats, pressed by hunger, invaded his barns, and then, swarming into the castle, fell on the old baron, worried him to death, and devoured him. (See Hatto.)

Graal (Saint) or St. Greal is generally said to be the chalice used by Christ at the last supper, in wh ich Joseph of Arimathea caught the blood of the crucified Christ. In all descriptions of the graal in Arthurian romances, it is simply the visible “presence” of Christ, into which the elements are converted after consecration. When sir Galahad “achieved the quest of the holy graal,” all that is meant is that he saw with his bodily eyes the visible Saviour into which the holy wafer had been transmuted.

Then the bishop took a wafer, which was made in the likeness of bread, and at the lifting up [the elevation of the host] there came a figure in the likeness of a child, and the visage was as red and as bright as fire, and he smote himself into that bread: so they saw that the bread was formed of a fleshly man, and then he put it into the holy vessel again … then [the bishop] took the holy vessel and came to sir Galahad as he kneeled down, and there he received his Saviour.—Sir T. Malory: History of Prince Arthur, pt. iii. 101, 102.

King Pelles and sir Launcelot caught a sight of the St. Graal; but did not “achieve it,” like Galahad.