Tityre Tus (long u), the name assumed in the seventeenth century by a clique of young blades of the better class, whose delight was to break windows, upset sedan-chairs, molest quiet citizens, and rudely caress pretty women in the streets at night-time. These brawlers took successively many titular names, as Muns, Hectors, Scourers, afterwards Nickers, later still Hawcubites, and lastly Mohawks or Mohocks.
“Tityre tu-s” is meant for the plural of “Tityre tu,” in the first line of Virgil’s first Eclogue: “Tityre, tu patulæ recubans sub tegmine fagi,” and meant to imply that these blades were men of leisure and fortune, who “lay at ease under their patrimonial beech trees.”
Tit´yrus, in the Shepheardes Calendar, by Spenser (ecl. ii. and vi.), is meant for Chaucer.
The gentle shepherd sate beside a spring ...
That Colin hight, which well could pipe and sing,
For he of Tityrus his song did learn.
Spenser, The Shepheardes Calendar, xii. (1579).
Tityus, a giant, whose body covered nine acres of ground. In Tartărus, two vultures or serpents feed forever on his liver, which grows as fast as it is gnawed away.
Promētheus (3 syl.) is said to have been fastened to Mount Caucasus, where two eagles fed on his liver, which never wasted.
Nor unobserved lay stretched upon the marle