Mary Garth, his daughter; sensible and true woman, with few graces of person and no affectations.—George Eliot, Middlemarch.
Gas´abal, the ’squire of Don Galaor.
Gasabal was a man of such silence that the author names him only once in the course of his voluminous history.—Don Quixote, I. iii. 6 (1605).
Gascoigne (Sir William). Shakespeare says that Prince Henry “struck the chief justice in the open court;” but it does not appear from history that any blow was given. The fact is this:
One of the gay companions of the prince being committed for felony, the prince demanded his release, but Sir William told him the only way of obtaining a release would be to get from the king a free pardon. Prince Henry now tried to rescue the prisoner by force, when the judge ordered him out of court. In a towering fury, the prince flew to the judgment seat, and all thought he was about to slay the judge; but Sir William said very firmly and quietly. “Syr, remember yourselfe. I kepe here the place of the kynge, your sovereigne lorde and father, to whom you owe double obedience; wherefore I charge you in his name to desyste of your wylfulnes.... And nowe for your contempte goo you to the pryson of the Kynges Benche, whereunto I commytte you, and remayne ye there prisoner untyll the pleasure of the kynge be further known.” With which words the prince being abashed, the noble prisoner departed and went to the King’s Bench.—Sir Thomas Elyot, The Governour (1531).
Gashford, secretary to Lord George Gordon. A detestable, cruel sneak, who dupes his half-mad master, and leads him to imagine he is upholding a noble cause in plotting against the English Catholics. To wreak vengeance on Geoffrey Haredale, he incites the rioters to burn “The Warren,” where Haredale resided. Gashford commits suicide.—C. Dickens, Barnaby Rudge (1841).
Gaspar or Casper (“the white one”), one of the three Magi or kings of Cologne. His offering to the infant Jesus was frankincense, in token of divinity.
⁂ The other two were Melchior (“king of light”), who offered gold, symbolical of royalty; and Balthazar (“lord of treasures”), who offered myrrh, to denote that Christ would die. Klopstock, in his Messiah, makes the number of the Magi six, not one of which names agrees with those of Cologne Cathedral.
Gaspard, the steward of Count De Valmont, in whose service he had been for twenty years, and to whom he was most devotedly attached.—W. Dimond, The Foundling of the Forest.
Gas´pero, secretary of state, in the drama called The Laws of Candy, by Beaumont and Fletcher (1647).