He [St. Paul] in peril of the wilderness, that is of wild beasts; they [rich men] not only of the wild beast called the sycophant, but of the tame beast too, called the flatterer.—Andrewes, Sermon preached at the Spittle.
Sanders, that malicious sycophant, will have no less than twenty-six wain-load of silver, gold, and precious stones to be seized into the king’s hands by the spoil of that monument.—Heylin, History of the Reformation, 1849, vol. i. p. 20.
Symbol. The employment of ‘symbol’ in its proper Greek sense of contribution thrown into a common stock, as in a pic-nic or the like, is frequent in Jeremy Taylor, and examples of it may be found in other scholarly writers of the seventeenth century.
The consideration of these things hath oft suggested, and at length persuaded me to make this attempt, to cast in my mite to this treasury, my symbolum toward so charitable a work.—Hammond, A Paraphrase on the Psalms, Preface.
Christ hath finished his own sufferings for expiation of the world; yet there are ‘portions that are behind of the sufferings’ of Christ, which must be filled up by his body the Church; and happy are they that put in the greatest symbol; for ‘in the same measure you are partakers of the sufferings of Christ, in the same shall ye be also of the consolation.’—Bishop Taylor, The Faith and Patience of the Saints.
There [in Westminster Abbey] the warlike and the peaceful, the fortunate and the miserable, the beloved and the despised princes, mingle their dust and pay down their symbol of mortality.—Id., Holy Dying, c. i. § 2.
Table. The Latin ‘tabula’ had for one of its meanings picture or painting; and this caused that ‘table’ was by our early writers used often in the same meaning.
The table wherein Detraction was expressed, he [Apelles] painted in this form.—Sir T. Elyot, The Governor, b. iii. c. 27.
You shall see, as it were in a table painted before your eyes, the evil-favouredness and deformity of this most detestable vice.—Homilies: Against Contention.
Learning flourished yet in the city of Sicyon, and they esteemed the painting of tables in that city to be the perfectest for true colours and fine drawing, of all other places.—North, Plutarch’s Lives, p. 843.