Dazzle and Lady Gay Spanker “act themselves,” and will never be dropped out of the list of acting plays.--Percy Fitzgerald. =Sparabel´la=, a shepherdess, in love with D’Urfey, but D’Urfey loves Clum´silis, “the fairest shepherd wooed the foulest lass.” Sparabella resolves to kill herself; but how? Shall she cut her windpipe with a penknife? “No,” she says, “squeaking pigs die so.” Shall she suspend herself to a tree? “No,” she says, “dogs die in that fashion.” Shall she drown herself in a pool? “No,” she says, “scolding queans die so.” And while in doubt how to kill herself, the sun goes down, and The prudent maiden deemed it then too late, And till to-morrow came deferred her fate. Gay, _Pastoral_, iii. (1714). =Sparkish=, “the prince of coxcombs,” a fashionable fool, and “a cuckold before marriage.” Sparkish is engaged to Alithēa Moody, but introduces to her his friend, Harcourt, allows him to make love to her before his face, and, of course, is jilted.--_The Country Girl_ (Garrick, altered from Wycherly’s _Country Wife_, 1675). =Sparkler= (_Edmund_), son of Mrs. Merdle by her first husband. He married Fanny, sister of Little Dorrit. Edmund Sparkler was a very large man, called in his own regiment “Quinbus Flestrin, junior, or the Young Man-Mountain.” _Mrs. Sparkler_, Edmund’s wife. She was very pretty, very self-willed, and snubbed her husband in most approved fashion.--C. Dickens, _Little Dorrit_ (1857). =Sparrowgrass=, pen-name of Frederic S. Cozzens, under which he depicted the blunders and mishaps of a pair of city-bred people, who set up their Lares and Penates in Yonkers, N.Y.--Frederic Swartwout Cozzens, _The Sparrowgrass Papers_ (1856). =Sparsit= (_Mrs._), housekeeper to Josiah Bounderby, banker and mill-owner at Coketown. Mrs. Sparsit is a “highly connected lady,” being the great-niece of Lady Scadgers. She had a “Coriolanian nose and dense black eyebrows,” was much believed in by her master, who, when he married, made her “keeper of the bank.” Mrs. Sparsit, in collusion with the light porter, Bitzer, then acted the spy on Mr. Bounderby and his young wife.--C. Dickens, _Hard Times_ (1854). =Spasmodic School= (_The_), certain authors of the nineteenth century, whose writings abound in spasmodic phrases, startling expressions, and words used out of their common acceptation. Carlyle, noted for his Germanic English, is the chief of this school. Others are Bailey, author of _Festus_, Sydney Dobell, Gilfillan, and Alexander Smith. ⁂ Professor Aytoun has gibbeted this class of writers in his _Firmilian_, a _Spasmodic Tragedy_ (1854).