Guinea (Adventures of a), a novel by Charles Johnstone (1761). A guinea, as it passes into different hands, is the historian of the follies and vices of its master for the time being; and thus a series of scenes and personages is made to pass before the reader, somewhat in the same manner as in The Devil upon Two Sticks and in The Chinese Tales.
Guin´evere (3 syl.). So Tennyson spells the name of Arthur’s queen in his Idylls. He tells us of the liaison between her and “Sir Lancelot,” and says that Mordred, having discovered this familiarity, “brought his creatures to the basement of the tower for testimony.” Sir Lancelot flung the fellow to the ground, and instantly took to horse; while Guinevere fled to the nunnery at Almesbury. Here the king took leave of her; and when the abbess died, the queen was appointed her successor, and remained head of the establishment for three years, when she also died.
⁂ It will be seen that Tennyson departs from the British History, by Geoffrey, and the History of Prince Arthur as edited by Sir T. Malory. (See Guenever.)
Guiomar, mother of the vain-glorious Duar´te.—Beaumont and Fletcher, The Custom of the Country (1647).
Guiscardo, the ’squire, but previously the page, of Tancred, king of Salerno. Sigismunda, the king’s daughter, loved him, and clandestinely married him. When Tancred discovered it, he ordered the young man to be waylaid and strangled. He then went to his daughter’s chamber, and reproved her for loving a base-born “slave.” Sigismunda boldly[boldly] defended her choice, but next day received a human heart in a golden casket. It needed no prophet to tell her what had happened, and she drank a draught of poison. Her father entered just in time to hear her dying request that she and Guiscardo might be buried in the same tomb. The royal father
Too late repented of his cruel deed,
One common sepulchre for both decreed;
Intombed the wretched pair in royal state,
And on their monument inscribed their fate.
Dryden, Sigismunda and Guiscardo (from Boccaccio).