"For your reputation we keep to ourselves your not hunting nor drinking hogan, either of which here would be sufficient to lay your honor in the dust."
This passage occurs in a letter from Gray to Horace Walpole in 1737. Can any subscriber state what "hogan" was, the not drinking of which was "to lay your honor in the dust?"
HENRY CAMPKIN.
"Trepidation talk'd."
—What mean the following words in Milton, Paradise Lost, book iii. line 481?
"They pass the planets seven, and pass the fixed,
And that crystalline sphere whose balance weighs
The trepidation TALK'D, and that first moved."
By the last three words we may easily understand the primum mobile of the Ptolemaic astronomy; and trepidation is thus explained in the Imperial Dictionary:
"In the old astr. a libration of the eighth sphere, or a motion which the Ptolemaic system ascribes to the firmament, to account for the changes and motion of the axis of the world."