Chapter Idle Worms to Iliad of I by Brewer's Phrase & Fable

Igneous Rocks Those which have been produced by the agency of fire, as the granitic, the trappean, and the volcanic. (Latin, ignis, fire.)

Ignis Fatuus means strictly a fatuous fire; it is also called "Jack o' Lantern," "Spunkie," "Walking Fire," "Will o' the Wisp," and "Fair Maid of Ireland." Milton calls it Friar's Lanthorn, and Sir Walter Scott Friar Rush with a lantern. Morally speaking, a Utopian scheme, no more reducible to practice than the meteor so called can be turned to any useful end. (Plural, Ignes fatui.) (See Friars Lanthorn.)

"When thou rannest up Gadshill in the night to catch my horse, if I did not think thou hadst been an ignis fatuus or a ball of wildfire, there's no purchase in money." - Shakespeare: Henry IV., iii. 3.

    According to a Russian superstition, these wandering fires are the spirits of still-born children which flit between heaven and the Inferno.

Ignoramus One who ignores the knowledge of something; one really unacquainted with it. It is an ancient law term. The grand jury used to write lgnoramus on the back of indictments "not found" or not be sent into court. Hence ignore. The present custom is to write "No true bill."

Ignoramus Jury (An). The Grand Jury. (See above.)

Ignorantines (4 syl.). A religious association founded by the Abbé de la Salle in 1724, for educating gratuitously the children of the poor.

Igrayne (See Igerna .)

Ihram The white cotton dress worn by Mohammedan pilgrims to Mecca. For men, two scarfs, without seams or ornament of any kind, of any material except silk; one scarf is folded round the loins, and the other is thrown over the neck and shoulders, leaving the right arm free; the head is uncovered. For women, an ample cloak, enveloping the whole person.

II Pastor Fido [the Faithful Swain ]. This standard of elegant pastoral composition is by Giovanni Battista Guarini, of Ferrara (1537-1612).

Iliad (3 syl.). The tale of the siege of Troy, an epic poem by Homer, in twenty-four books. Menelaos, King of Sparta, received as his guest Paris, a son of Priam (King of Troy), who ran away with Helen, his hostess. Menelaos induced the Greeks to lay siege to Troy to avenge the perfidy, and the siege lasted ten years. The poem begins in the tenth year with a quarrel between Agamemnon, commander- in-chief of the allied Greeks, and Achilles, the hero who retired from the army in ill-temper. The Trojans now prevail, and Achilles sends his friend Patroclos to oppose them, but Patroclos is slain. Achilles, in a desperate rage, rushes into the battle, and slays Hector, the commander of the Trojan army. The poem ends with the funeral rites of Hector. (Greek, Ilias, genitive, Iliad[os], the land of Ilium. It is an adjective, and the word means, "a poem about the land of Ilium.")
    Probably "Æneid" is the genitive of Æneas, Æneados, and means a poem about Æneas (See Æneid for another derivation.)
   Wolf, Herne, and our own Grote, believed the Iliad to be the work of several poets. R. W. Browne says: -

"No doubt was ever entertained by the ancients respecting the personality of Homer. Pindar, Plato, Aristotle, and others, all assumed this fact; nor did they even doubt that the Iliad and Odyssey were the work of one mind." - Historical Classical Literature book i. chap. iv. p. 59.

   The "Iliad" in a nutshell. Pliny (vii. 21) tells us that the Iliad was copied in so small a hand that the whole work could lie in a walnut-shell. Pliny's authority is Cicero (Apud Gellium, ix. 421). Huet, Bishop of Avranches, demonstrated the possibility of this achievement by writing eighty verses of the Iliad on a single line of a page similar to this "Dictionary." This would be 19,000 verses to the page, or 2,000 more than the Iliad contains.
    In the Harleian MSS. (530) we have an account of Peter Bales, an Englishman, clerk of the Court of Chancery in the