The great winding-sheets, that bury all things in oblivion, are two, deluges and earthquakes. As for conflagrations and great droughts, they do not merely dispeople and destroy. Phaeton’s car went but a day; and the three years’ drought, in the time of Elias, was but particular, and left people alive.—Bacon, Essays, 58.
Fye on’t; O fye! ’tis an unweeded garden,
That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature
Possess it merely.
Shakespeare, Hamlet, act i. sc. 2.
Mess. This used continually to be applied to a quarternion, or group of four persons or things. Probably in the distribution of food to large numbers, it was found most convenient to arrange them in fours, and hence this application of the word. A ‘mess’ at the Inns of Court still consists of four. A phrase-book published in London in 1617 bears this title, ‘Janua Linguarum Quadrilinguis, or A Messe of Tongues, Latine, English, French, and Spanish.’
There lacks a fourth thing to make up the mess.—Latimer, Sermon 5.
Where are your mess[19] of sons to back you now?
Shakespeare, 3 Henry VI. act i. sc. 4.
Amongst whom [converted Jews] we meet with a mess of most eminent men; Nicolaus Lyra, that grand commentator on the Bible; Hieronymus de Sanctâ Fide, turned Christian about anno 1412; Ludovicus Carettus, living in Paris anno 1553; and the never sufficiently to be praised Emmanuel Tremellius.—Fuller, A Pisgah Sight of Palestine, part ii. b. 5.