Chapter Wolf duke of Gascony to Women of Abandoned Morals of W by Brewer's Readers Handbook

Wolf duke of Gascony to Women of Abandoned Morals

Wolf duke of Gascony, one of Charlemagne’s paladins. He was the originator of the plan of tying wetted ropes round the temples of his prisoners to make their eye-balls start from their sockets. It was he also who had men sewn up in freshly stripped bulls’ hides, and exposed to the sun till the hides, in shrinking, crushed their bones.—L’Epine: Croquemitaine, iii.

Wolf of France (She-). (See She-wolf, p. 994.)

Wolf’s Head. An outlaw was said to carry on his shoulders a ‘wolf’s head,” because he was hunted down like a wolf, and to kill him was deemed as meritorious as killing a wolf.

Item foris facit, omnia que dacis sunt, quia a tempore quo utlagatus est Caput Gerit Lupinum, ita ut impune ab omnibus interfici possit.—Bracton, ii. 35.

Wolves. The Greeks used to say that “wolves bring forth their young only twelve days in the year.” These are the twelve days occupied in conveying Leto from the Hyperboreans to Delos.— Aristotle: Hist. Animal., vii. 35.

Wolfort, usurper of the earldom of Flanders.—Fletcher: The Beggars’ Bush (1622).

Wolfsbane, a herb so called, because meat saturated with its juice was at one time supposed to be a poison for wolves.

Wolsey (Cardinal), introduced by Shakespeare in his historic play of Henry VIII (1601).

West Digges [1720–1786] is the nearest resemblance of “Cardinal Wolsey” I have ever seen represented.— Davies: Dramatic Miscellanies.

Edmund Kean [1787–1833], in “Macbeth,” “Hamlet,” “Wolsey,” “Coriolanus,” etc., never approached within any measurable distance of the learned, philosophical, and majestic Kemble [1757–1823].—Life of C. M. Young.

Had I but served my God, etc. (See Served My God, p. 984.)

(In the Comic History of England attributed to Cromwell.)

Woman changed to a Man.

(1) Iphis, daughter of Lygdus and Telethusa of Crete. The story is that the father gave orders if the child about to be born proved to be a girl, it was to be put to death; and that the mother, unwilling to lose her infant, brought it up as a boy. In due time, the father betrothed his child to Ianthê, and the mother, in terror, prayed for help; and Isis, on the day of marriage, changed Iphis to a man.-Ovid: Metamorphoses, ix. 12; xiv. 699.

(2) CÆneus [Se-nuce] was born of the female sex, but Neptune changed her into a man. Æneas, however, found her in the infernal regions restored to her original sex.

(3) Tiresias was converted into a woman for killing a female snake in copulation, and was restored to his original sex by killing a male snake in the same act.

(4) D’eon De Beaumont was an epicene creature, whose sex was unknown during life. After death (1810) he was found to be male.

(5) Hermaphroditos was of both sexes.

Woman-Hater (The), a tragedy by Beaumont and Fletcher (1607).