Of even stature and of equal pride,
Sons of the wind, or some more speedy thing,
To his fair chariot all abreast were tied.
Beaumont, Psyche, ix. 176.
I like the smugness of the Cathedral (Winchester), and the profusion of the most beautiful Gothic tombs.—Walpole, Letters, i. 442 (1755).
Snail. It is curious what different objects men will be content for long to confuse under a common name. Thus in some provincial dialects of Germany they have only one name, ‘padde’ (compare our ‘paddock’), for frog and toad. So too ‘snail’ (cochlea) and ‘slug’ (limax) with us were both to a comparatively recent period included under the former name. ‘Slug’ indeed, in the sense of slothful, is an old word in the language; but only at the end of the seventeenth or beginning of the eighteenth century was it transferred to that familiar pest of our gardens which we now call by this name. Indeed up to the present day in many of our provincial dialects slugs and snails are invariably both included under the latter name; the snail proper being sometimes distinguished from the other as the ‘shell-snail’ (see Holland’s Plutarch, p. 212). See an interesting discussion in the Philological Society’s Transactions, 1860-1, pp. 102-106.
There is much variety even in creatures of the same kind. See these two snails. One hath a house, the other wants it; yet both are snails, and it is a question whether case is the better. That which hath a house hath more shelter, that which wants it hath more freedom.—Bishop Hall, Occasional Meditations.
Snails, a soft and exosseous animal, whereof in the naked and greater sort, as though she would requite the loss of a shell on their back, nature near the head hath placed a flat white stone. Of the great grey snails I have not met with any that wanted it.—Sir T. Browne, Vulgar Errors, b. iii. c. 13.
Snub. To check or cut short; now never used save in a figurative sense and in familiar language; but this was not always so.
If we neglect them [the first stirrings of corruption] but a little, out of a thought that they can do no great harm yet, or that we shall have time enough to snub them hereafter, we do it to our own certain disadvantage, if not utter undoing.—Sanderson, Sermons, 1671, vol. ii. p. 241.