Chapter Triumvirate of England to Trouillogan of T by Brewer's Readers Handbook

Triumvirate of England to Trouillogan

Triumvirate of England (The): Gower, Chaucer, and Lydgate, poets.

Triumvirate of Italian Poets (The): Dantê, Boccaccio, and Petrarch.

N.B.—Boccaccio wrote poetry, without doubt, but is best known as “The Father of Italian Prose.” These three are more correctly called the “Trecentisti” (q.v.).

Trivia, Diana; so called because she had three faces, Luna in heaven, Diana on earth, and Hecate in hell.

The noble Brutus went wise Trivia to inquire,
To show them where the stock of ancient Troy to place.
   —Drayton: Polyolbion, i. (1612).

Trivia, or The Art of Walking the Streets of London, a poem in three books, by Gay. Bk. i. describes the “implements for walking and the signs of the weather.” Bk. ii. describes the difficulties, etc., of “walking by day;” and bk. iii. the dangers of “walking by night” (1712–1715).
N.B.—“Trivium” has quite another meaning, being an old theological term for the three elementary subjects of education, viz. grammar, rhetoric, and logic. The “quadrivium” embraced music, arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy, and the two together were called the seven arts or sciences.

Troglodytes (3 or 4 syl). According to Pliny (Nat. Hist., v. 8), the Troglodytes lived in caves under ground, and fed on serpents. In modern parlance we call those who live so secluded as not to be informed of the current events of the day, troglodytes. Longfellow calls ants by the same name.

[Thou the] nomadic tribes of ants
Dost persecute and overwhelm
These hapless troglodytes of thy realm.
   —Longfellow: To a Child.

Troglodytes , one of the mouse heroes in the battle of the frogs and mice. He slew Pelion, and was slain by Lymnocharis.

The strong Lymnocharis, who viewed with ire
A victor triumph and a friend expire;
With heavy arms a rocky fragment caught;
And fiercely flung where Troglodytês fought…
Full on his sinewy neck the fragment fell,
And o’er his eyelids clouds eternal dwell.
   —Parnell: Battle of this Frogs and Mice (about 1712).

Troil (Magnus), the old udaller of Zetland.

Brenda Troil, the udaller’s younger daughter, who marries Mordaunt Mertoun.

Minna Troil, the udaller’s eldest daughter. In love with the pirate—Sir W. Scott: The Pirate (time, William III.).

A udaller is one who holds his lands by allodial tenure.

Troilus, a son of Priam king of Troy. In the picture described by Virgil (Æneid, i. 474–478) he is represented as having thrown down his arms and fleeing in his chariot “impar congressus Achilli.” Troilus is pierced with a lance, and, having fallen backwards, still holding the reins, the lance with which he is transfixed “scratches the sand over which it trails.”

N.B.—Chaucer in his Troilus and Creseide, and Shakespeare in his drama of Troilus and Cressida, fol low Lollius, an old Lombard romancer, hi storiographer of Urbino, in Italy. Lollius’s tale, wholly unknown in classic fiction, is that Troilus falls in love with Cressid dau ghter of the priest Chalchas, and Pandarus is employed as a go-between. After Troilus has obtained a promise of marriage from the priest’s daughter, an exchange of prisoners is arranged, and Cressid, falling to the lot of Diomed, prefers her new master to her Trojan lover.