Chapter Rally to Rape of the Lock of R by Brewer's Phrase & Fable

escapades at Strasbourg and Boulogne. In 1852 I myself saw a man commanded by the police to leave Paris within twenty-four hours for calling his dog Rantipole.

“Dick, be a little rantipolish.”- Colman: Heir-at-Law.

Ranz des Vaches Simple melodies played by the Swiss mountaineers on their Alp-horn when they drive their herds to pasture, or call them home (pour ranger des vaches, to bring the cows to their place).

Rap Not worth a rap. The rap was a base halfpenny, intrinsically worth about half a farthing, issued for the nonce in Ireland in 1721, because small coin was so very scarce. There was also a coin in Switzerland called a rappe, worth the seventh of a penny.

“Many counterfeits passed about under the name of raps.”- Swift: Drapier's Letters.

Rape (1 syl.). The division of a county. Sussex is divided into six rapes, each of which has its river, forest, and castle. Herepp is Norwegian for a parish district, and rape in Doomsday Book is used for a district under military jurisdiction. (Icelandic hreppr, a district.)

Rape of the Lock Lord Petre, in a thoughtless moment of frolic gallantry, cut off a lock of Arabella Fermor's hair; and this liberty gave rise to a bitter feud between the two families, which Alexander Pope has worked up into the best heroic-comic poem of the language. The first sketch was published in 1712 in two cantos. The machinery of sylphs and gnomes is most happily conceived. Pope, under the name of Esdras Barnevelt, apothecary, says the poem is a covert satire on Queen Anne and the Barrier Treaty. In the poem the lady is called Belinda, and the poet says she wore on her neck two curls, one of which the baron cut off with a pair of scissors borrowed of Clarissa. Belinda, in anger, demanded back the ringlet, but it had flown to the skies and become a meteor there. (See Coma Berenices .)

“Say what strange motive, goddess, could compel
A well-bred lord to assault a gentle belle;
O say, what stranger cause, yet unexplored,
Could make a gentle belle reject a lord.”
Introduction to the Poem.