Falconer,
The Shipwreck
, iii. 4 (1756).
Elis'abat, a famous surgeon, who attended Queen Madasi'ma in all her solitary wanderings, and was her sole companion.—Amadis de Gaul (fifteenth century).
Élisabeth ou Les Exilés de Siberie, a tale by Madame Cottin (1773-1807). The family being exiled for some political offence, Elizabeth walked all the way from Siberia to Russia, to crave pardon of the Czar. She obtained her prayer, and the family returned.
Elisabetha (Miss). "She is not young. The tall, spare form stiffly erect, the little wisp of hair behind ceremoniously braided and adorned with a high comb, the long, thin hands and the fine network of wrinkles over her pellucid, colorless cheeks, tell this." But she is a gentlewoman, with generations of gentlewomen back of her, and lives for Doro, her orphan ward, whom she has taught music. She loved his father, and for his sake—and his own—loves the boy. She works for him, hoards for him, and is ambitious for him only. When he grows up and marries a lowborn girl,—"a Minorcan"—and fills the old home with rude children, who break the piano-wires, the old aunt slaves for them. After he dies, a middle-aged man, she does not leave them.
"I saw her last year—an old woman, but working still."—Constance Fennimore Woolson, Southern Sketches (1880).
Elise (2 syl.), the motherless child of Harpagon the miser. She was affianced to Valère, by whom she had been "rescued from the waves." Valère turns out to be the son of Don Thomas d'Alburci, a wealthy nobleman of Naples.—Molière, L'Avare (1667).
Elis'sa, step-sister of Medi'na and Perissa. They could never agree upon any subject.—Spenser, Faëry Queen, ii. 2 (1590).
"Medina" (the golden mean), "Elissa" and "Perissa" (the two extremes).