Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction, and the Drama, Vol. 4: A Revised American Edition of the Reader's HandbookBrewer, Ebenezer Cobham
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Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction, and the Drama, Vol. 4: A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook
Brewer, Ebenezer Cobham
Allusions; Fiction -- Dictionaries; Literature -- Dictionaries
=Violet=, the ward of Lady Arundel. She is in love with Norman, the
“sea-captain,” who turns out to be the son of Lady Arundel by her
first husband, and heir to the title and estates.--Lord Lytton, _The
Sea-Captain_ (1839).
_Violet_ (_Father_), a sobriquet of Napoleon I.; also called “Corporal
Violet” (1769, 1804-1815, died, 1821).
⁂ Violets were the flowers of the empire, and when, in 1879, the
ex-empress Eugénie was visited at Chislehurst by those who sympathized
with her in the death of her son, “the prince imperial,” they were
worn as symbols of attachment to the imperial family of France. The
name was given to Napoleon on his banishment to Elba (1815), and
implied that “he would return to France with the violets”.
=Violet-Crowned City= (_The_). Athens is so called by Aristophănês,
(ιοστέφανος) (see _Equites_, 1323 and 1329; and _Acharnians_, 637).
Macaulay refers to Athens as “the violet-crowned city.” Ion (_a
violet_) was a representative king of Athens, whose four sons gave
names to the four Athenian classes; and Greece, in Asia Minor, was
called Ionia. Athens was the city of “Ion crowned its king,” and hence
was the “Ion crowned” or King Ion’s city. Translating the word Ion
into English, Athens was the “Violet-crowned” or King Violet’s city.
Of course, the pun is the chief point, and was quite legitimate in
comedy.
Similarly, Paris is called the “city of lillies,” by a pun between
Louis and lys (_the flower-de-luce_), and France is _l’empire des lys_
or _l’empire des Louis_.
By a similar pun, London might be called “the noisy town,” from
_hlúd_, “noisy.”
=Violetta=, a Portuguese, married to Belfield, the elder brother, but
deserted by him. The faithless husband gets betrothed to Sophia
(daughter of Sir Benjamin Dove), who loves the younger brother. Both
Violetta and the younger brother are shipwrecked and cast on the coast
of Cornwall, in the vicinity of Squire Belfield’s estate; and Sophia
is informed that her “betrothed” is a married man. She is therefore
free from her betrothal, and marries the younger brother, the man of
her choice; while the elder brother takes back his wife, to whom he
becomes reconciled.--R. Cumberland, _The Brothers_ (1769).
=Violin= (_The Angel with the_). Rubens’s “Harmony” is an angel of the
male sex playing a bass-viol.
The angel with the violin,
Painted by Raphael, (?) he seemed.
Longfellow, _The Wayside Inn_ (1863).
=Violin-Makers= (_The best_): Gasparo di Salo (1560-1610); Nicholas
Amati (1596-1684); Antonio Stradivari (1670-1728); Joseph A. Guarneri
(1683-1745).
⁂ Of these, Stradivari was the best, and Nicholas Amati the next best.
The following are eminent, but not equal to the names given
above:--Joseph Steiner (1620-1667); Matthias Klotz (1650-1696). (See
Otto, _On the Violin_.)
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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