Literature (Father of Modern French), Claude de Seyssel (1450-1520).
Literature (Father of German), Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729-1781).
Littimer, the painfully irreproachable valet of Steerforth; in whose presence David Copperfield feels always most uncomfortably small. Though as a valet he is propriety in Sunday best, he is nevertheless cunning and deceitful. Steerforth, tired of “Little Em’ly,” wishes to marry her to Littimer; but from this lot she is rescued, and migrates to Australia.—C. Dickens, David Copperfield (1849).
Little (Thomas). Thomas Moore published, in 1808, a volume of amatory poems under this nom de plume. The preface is signed J.H.H.H.
’Tis Little—young Catullus of his day,
As sweet but as immoral as his lay.
Byron, English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809).
Little Corporal (The). General Bonaparte was so called after the battle of Lodi, in 1796, from his youthful age and low stature.
Little Dorrit, the heroine and title of a novel by C. Dickens (1857). Little Dorrit was born and brought up in the Marshalsea prison, Bermondsey, where her father was confined for debt; and when about 14 years of age she used to do needle work, to earn a subsistence for herself and her father. The child had a pale, transparent face; quick in expression, though not beautiful in feature. Her eyes were a soft hazel, and her figure slight. The little dove of the prison was idolized by the prisoners, and when she walked out, every man in Bermondsey who passed her, touched or took off his hat out of respect to her good works and active benevolence. Her father, coming into a property, was set free at length, and little Dorrit married Arthur Clennam, the marriage service being celebrated in the Marshalsea, by the prison chaplain.
Little-Endians and Big-Endians, two religious factions, which waged incessant war with each other on the right interpretation of the fifty-fourth chapter of the Blun´decral; “All true believers break their eggs at the convenient end.” The god-father of Calin Deffar Plune, the reigning emperor of Lilliput, happened to cut his finger while breaking his egg at the big end, and therefore commanded all faithful Lilliputians to break their eggs in future at the small end. The Blefuscudians called this decree rank heresy, and determined to exterminate the believers of such an abominable practice from the face of the earth. Hundreds of treatises were published on both sides, but each empire put all those books opposed to its own views into the Index Expurgatorius, and not a few of the more zealous sort died as martyrs for daring to follow their private judgement in the matter.—Swift, Gulliver’s Travels (“Voyage to Lilliput,” 1726).