O’erwhelmed me ... that of the height all hope I lost.
Dantê, Inferno, i. (1300).
Wolf (To cry), to give a false alarm.
Yöw-wâng, emperor of China, was greatly enamoured of a courtezan named Pao-tse, whom he tried, by sundry expedients, to make laugh. At length he hit upon the following plan:--He caused the tocsins to be rung, the drums to be beaten, and the signal-fires to be lighted, as if some invader was at the gates. Pao-tse was delighted, and laughed immoderately to see the vassals and feudatory princes pouring into the city, and all the people in consternation. The emperor, pleased with the success of his trick, amused his favorite over and over again by repeating it. At length an enemy really did come, but when the alarm was given no one heeded it, and the emperor was slain (B.C. 770).
Wolf duke of Gascony, one of Charlemagne’s paladins. He was the originator of the plan of tying wetted ropes round the temples of his prisoners, to make their eye-balls start from their sockets. It was he also who had men sewn up in freshly stripped bulls’ hides, and exposed to the sun till the hides, in shrinking, crushed their bones.--L’Epine, Croquemitaine, iii.
Wolf of France (She-), Isabella la Belle, wife of Edward II. She murdered her royal husband “by tearing out his bowels with her own hands.”
She-wolf of France, with unrelenting fangs,
Thou tear’st the bowels of thy mangled mate.
Gray, The Bard (1757).
Wol´fort, usurper of the earldom of Flanders.--Beaumont and Fletcher, The Beggars’ Bush (1622).