Chapter Syddall to Syrinx of S by Brewer's Readers Handbook

craftily. His wife was the village parson’s daughter, very proud and arrogant. He tried to outwit Aleyn and John, two Cambridge scholars, but was himself outwitted, and most roughly handled also.—Chaucer: Canterbury Tales (“The Reeve’s Tale,” 1388).

Symmes’s Hole. Captain John Cleve Symmes maintained that there was, at 82º N. lat., an enormous opening through the crust of the earth into the globe. The place to which it led he asserted to be well stocked with animals and plants, and to be lighted by two under-ground planets named Pluto and Proserpine. Captain Symmes asked sir Humphry Davy to accompany him in the exploration of this enormous “hole” (*–1829). N.B.—Halley the astronomer (1656–1742) and Holberg of Norway (1684–1754) believed in the existence of Symmes’s hole.

Symonides the Good, king of Pentapolis.—Shakespeare: Pericles Prince of Tyre (1608).

Symphony (The Father of), Francis Joseph Haydn (1732–1809).

Symplegades , two rocks at the entrance of the Euxine Sea. To navigators they sometimes look like one rock, and sometimes the light between shows they are two. Hence the ancient Greeks said that they opened and shut. Olivier says “they appear united or joined together according to the place from which they are viewed.”

… when Argo passed
Through Bosphorus, betwixt the justling rocks.
   —Milton: Paradise Lost, ii. 1017 (1665).

Synia, the portress of Valhalla.—Scandinavian Mythology.

Syntax (Dr.), a simple-minded, pious, hen-pecked clergyman, green as grass, but of excellent taste and scholarship, who left home in search of the picturesque. His adventures are told by William Coombe in eight-syllable verse, in three tours: (1) The Tour in Search of the Picturesque, published in 1812; (2) The Tour in Search of Consolation, published in 1820; and (3) The Tour in Search of a Wife, published in 1821.

(Other tours were published, but Coombe was not the author.)

Dr. Syntax’s Horse was called Grizzle, all skin and bone.

Synteresis, Conscience personified.

On her a royal damsel still attends,
And faithful counsellor, Synteresis.
   —P. Fletcher: The Purple Island, vi. (1633).

Syphax, chief of the Arabs who joined the Egyptian armament against the crusaders. “The voices of these allies were feminine, and their stature small.”—Tasso: Jerusalem Delivered, xvii. (1575).

Syphax, an old Numidian soldier in the suite of prince Juba in Utica. He tried to win the prince from Cato to the side of Cæsar; but Juba was too much in love with Marcia (Cato’s daughter) to listen to him. Syphax with his “Numidian horse” deserted in the battle to Cæsar, but the “hoary traitor” was slain by Marcus the son of Cato.—Addison: Cato (1713).

Syrinx, a nymph beloved by Pan, and changed at her own request into a reed, of which Pan made his pipe.—Greek Fable.

Syrinx, in Spenser’s Eclogue, iv., is Anne Boleyn, and “Pan” is Henry VIII. (1579).