He’ll watch the horologe a double set,
If drink rock not his cradle.—Othello, act ii. sc. 3.
Drayton calls the cock the country horologe.
Rabelais thus capriciously ridicules the use of the clock: “The greatest loss of time that I know, is to count the hours. What good comes of it? Nor can there be any greater dotage in the world, than for one to guide and direct his course by the sound of a bell, and not by his own judgment and discretion.” In similar exuberance has this gay satirist said: “There is only one quarter of an hour in human life passed ill, and that is between the calling for the reckoning and paying it.”
With more serious purpose has Sir Walter Scott, in his “Lay of the Imprisoned Huntsman,” thus anathematised the clock and the dial:
I hate to learn the ebb of time
From yon dull steeple’s drowsy chime,
Or mark it as the sunbeams crawl
Inch after inch along the wall.
Richard II., in the dungeon of Pomfret Castle, soliloquises more solemnly: