Quickly, Mistress.—Merry Wives of Windsor, Shakespeare. A serving woman to Dr. Caius, a French physician. She is the go-between of three suitors for “sweet Anne Page,” and with perfect disinterestedness wishes all three to succeed.
Quickly, Mistress Nell.—Hostess of a tavern in Eastcheap, frequented by Harry, Prince of Wales, Sir John Falstaff, and all their disreputable crew.
Quidnunkis.—Title and name of hero in a fable found or written by Gay in 1726. This hero was a monkey which climbed higher than its neighbors, and fell into a river.
Quilp (kwilp).—Old Curiosity Shop, Dickens. A hideous dwarf, cunning, malicious, and a perfect master in tormenting. Of hard, forbidding features, with head and face large enough for a giant, he lived on Tower hill, collected rents, advanced money to seamen, and kept a sort of wharf, calling himself a ship-breaker.
Quintus Fixlein.—Title of a romance by Jean Paul Richter and the name of the principal character.
Quirk, Gammon, and Snap.—A firm of rascally, scheming, hypocritical solicitors in Warren’s Ten Thousand a Year.
R
Raby, Aurora.—In Byron’s Don Juan. She was a rich, noble English orphan, “a rose with all its sweetest leaves yet folded.”
Radigund.—Faërie Queene, Spenser. Queen of the fabled Amazons. Having been rejected by Bellodant “the Bold,” she revenged herself by degrading all the men who fell into her power by dressing them like women, and giving them women’s work.
Ramayana [(rä´-mä´yȧ-nȧ); Rāma-ayana, the goings or doings of Rama].—One of the two great epics of India, the other being the Mahabharata. It is ascribed to a poet, Valmiki, and consists at present of about twenty-four thousand stanzas, divided into seven books. It is the production of one man, though many parts are later additions, such as those in which Rama is represented as an incarnation of Vishnu, all the episodes in the first book, and the whole of the seventh. It was at first handed down orally, and variously modified in transmission, and afterward reduced to writing.