Wrought by the lonely maiden of the lake;
Nine years she wrought it, sitting in the deeps,
Upon the hidden bases of the hills.
Tennyson, Morte d'Arthur.
Excalibur's Sheath. "Sir," said Merlin, "look that ye keep well the scabbard of Excalibur, for ye shall lose no blood as long as ye have the scabbard upon you, though ye have never so many wounds."—Sir T. Malory, History of Prince Arthur, i. 36 (1470).
Executioner (No). When Francis, viscount d'Aspremont, governor of Bayonne, was commanded by Charles IX. of France to massacre the Huguenots, he replied, "Sire, there are many under my government devoted to your majesty, but not a single executioner."
Exhausted Worlds ... Dr. Johnson, in the prologue spoken by Garrick at the opening of Drury Lane, in 1747, says of Shakespeare:
Each change of many-colored life he drew?
Exhausted worlds, and then imagined new.
Exterminator (The), Montbars, chief of a set of filibusters in the seventeenth century. He was a native of Languedoc, and conceived an intense hatred against the Spaniards on reading of their cruelties in the New World. Embarking at Havre, in 1667, Montbars attacked the Spaniards in the Antilles and in Honduras, took from them Vera Cruz and Carthagena, and slew them most mercilessly wherever he encountered them (1645-1707).