Chapter Ring a Ding-ding to Rivals of R by Brewer's Phrase & Fable

in lieu of this half-sovereign and ten shillingsworth of silver.” This is done, and, of course, the barmaid loses ten shillings by the transaction.

Ringing Island The Church of Rome. It is an island because it is isolated or cut off from the world. It is a ringing island because bells are incessantly ringing: at matin and vespers, at mass and at sermon- time, at noon, vigils, eves, and so on. It is entered only after four days' fasting, without which none in the Romish Church enter holy orders.

Ringleader The person who opens a ball or leads off a dance (see Hollyband's Dictionary, 1593). The dance referred to was commenced by the party taking hands round in a ring, instead of in two lines as in the country dance. The leader in both cases has to set the figures. One who organises and leads a party.

Riot To run riot. To act in a very disorderly way. Riot means debauchery or wild merriment.

“See, Riot her luxurious bowl prepares.”
Tableau of Cebes.

Rip (A). He's a regular rip. A rip of a fellow. A precious rip. Applied to children, means one who rips or tears his clothes by boisterous play, carelessness, or indifference. Anglo-Saxon ryp[an], to spoil, to tear, to break in pieces.
   He is a sad rip. A sad rake or debauchee; seems to be a perversion of rep, as in demirep, meaning rep, i.e. rep-robate.

“Some forlorn, worn-out old rips, broken-kneed and broken-winded.”- Du Maurier: Peter Ibbetson, part vi. p. 376.

Rip To rip up old grievances or sores. To bring them again to recollection, to recall them. The allusion is to breaking up a place in search of something hidden and out of sight. (Anglo-Saxon.)

“They ripped up all that had been done from the beginning of the Rebellion.”- Clarendon.

Rip Van Winkle slept twenty years in the Kaatskill mountains. (See Winkle .)

Ripaille I am living at Ripaille- in idleness and pleasure. (French, faire Ripaille.) Amadeus VIII., Duke of Savoy, retired to Ripaille, near Geneva, where he threw off all the cares of state, and lived among boon companions in the indulgence of unrestrained pleasure. (See Sybarite .)

Riphean or Rhipæan Rocks. Any cold mountains in a north country. The fabled Rhiphæan mountains were in Scythia.

“Cold Riphæan rocks, which the wild
Russ Believes the stony girdle of the world.” Thomson: Autumn.

The poet here speaks of the Weliki Camenypoys (great stone girdle) supposed by the early Russians to have girded the whole earth.

Ripon True as Ripon steel. Ripon used to be famous for its steel spurs, which were the best in the world. The spikes of a Ripon spur would strike through a shilling-piece without turning the point.

Riquet with a Tuft from the French Riquet à la Houppe, by Charles Perrault, borrowed from The Nights of Straparola, and imitated by Madame Villeneuve in her Beauty and the Beast. Riquet is the beau- ideal of ugliness, but had the power of endowing the person he loved best with wit and intelligence. He falls in love with a beautiful woman as stupid as Riquet is ugly, but possessing the power of endowing the person she loves best with beauty. The two marry and exchange gifts.

Rise To take a rise out of one. Hotten says this is a metaphor from fly-fishing; the fish rise to the fly, and are caught.

Rising in the Air In the Middle Ages, persons believed that saints were sometimes elevated from the ground by religious ecstasy. St. Philip of Neri was sometimes raised to the height of several yards, occasionally to the ceiling of the room. Ignatius Loyola was sometimes raised up two or three feet, and his body became luminous. St. Robert de Palentin was elevated in his ecstasies eighteen or twenty inches. St. Dunstan, a little before his death, was observed to rise from the ground. And Girolamo Savonarola,