Chapter Overreach to Ozair of O by Brewer's Readers Handbook

warnings to retreat, but the warnings were not heeded, and a mountain of ice fell on him. “Lord, Thou canst save!” he cried as the ice fell, and the solid mountain became like dust, and did sir Owen no harm. He next came to a lake of fire, and a demon pushed him in. “Lord, Thou canst save!” he cried, and angels carried him to paradise. He woke with ecstasy, and found himself lying before the cavern’s mouth.—Southey: St. Patrick’s Purgatory (from the Fabliaux of Mon. le Grand).

Owen Meredith, Robert Bulwer Lytton, afterwards lord Lytton, son of the poet and novelist (1831–1891).

Owl (The), sacred to Minerva, was the emblem of Athens.

Owls hoot in B b and G b, or in F and A t.—Rev. G. White: Natural History of Selborne, xlv. (1789).

Owl a Baker’s Daughter (The). Our Lord once went into a baker’s shop to ask for bread. The mistress instantly put a cake in the oven for Him, but the daughter, thinking it to be too large, reduced it to half the size. The dough, however, swelled to an enormous bulk, and the daughter cried out, “Heugh ! heugh ! heugh !” and was transformed into an owl.

Well, God ’ield you! They say the owl was a baker’s daughter.—Shakespeare: Hamlet (1596).

Owl-glass. (See Eulenspiegel, p. 343.)

Own Times (My). Burnet, bishop of Salisbury, published, in 1724, a work called History of My Own Times. It is chit-chatty, but one-sided. He was a strong anti-Jacobite, and intimate with William III., whose accession to the throne he strenuously defended. Of course, the Jacobites violently attacked the book.

Ox (The Dumb), St. Thomas Aquinas; so named by his fellow-students on account of his taciturnity (1224–1274).

To gather in piles the pitiful chaff
That old Peter Lombard thrashed with his brain,
To have it caught up and tossed again
On the horns of the Dumb Ox of Cologne.
   —Longfellow: The Golden Legend.

An ox once spoke as learned men deliver.—J.Fletcher: Rule a Wife and Have a Wife, iii. 1 (1640).

St. Thomas was also called “The Great Sicilian Ox.”—Alban Butler: Lives of the Saints.

We call him the “Dumb Ox,” but he will give one day such a bellow as shall be heard from one end of the world to the other.—Alban Butler (Albertus).

Ox. The black ox hath trod on his foot, he has married and is hen-pecked; calamity has befallen him. The black ox was sacrificed to the infernals, and was consequently held accursed. When Tusser says the best way to thrive is to get married, the objector says—

Why, then, do folk this proverb put,
“The black ox near trod on thy foot,”
If that way were to thrive?
   —Wiving and Thriving, Ivii. (1557).

The black oxe had not trode on his or her foote;
But ere his branch of blesse could reach any roote,
The flowers so faded, that in fifteen weekes
A man might copy the change in the cheekes
Both of the poore wretch and his wife.
   —Heywood (1646).

Oxford (John earl of), an exiled Lancastrian. He appears with his son Arthur as a travelling merchant, under the name of Philipson.

The son of the merchant Philipson is sir Arthur de Vere.

The countess of Oxford, wife of the earl.—Sir W. Scott: Anne of Geierstein (time, Edward IV.).

Oxford (The young earl of), in the court of queen Elizabeth.—Sir W. Scott: Kenilworth (time, Elizabeth).