Dorothy Richardson reports that in William Dunlap's 1828 farce A Trip to Niagara, the character Job Jerryson (a black waiter who claims to manage a black acting company, the Shakespeare Club) says at one point, "As I told Miss Diana Dingy, 'The service of the fair sex is my delight.'" Richardson would like further information on "Diana Dingy" and asks whether Jerryson is quoting another source.
David Olson requests information on the origin and earliest uses of "Sleep the sleep of the just." Burton Stevenson's Home Book of Quotations (sixth edition) offers "She slept the sleep of the just" (Elle s'endormit du sommeil des justes) from Racine's Abrégé de l'his toire de Port Royal (vol. iv, l. 517); can readers supply other sources?
Graham Owen would like to learn the identity of the "ancient philosopher" alleged to have said, on seeing a human corpse, "See the shell of the flown bird." That anecdote appears in William Wordsworth's "Essay upon Epitaphs," which the poet included in notes to "The Pastor," the fifth book of his long didactic poem The Excursion.
"map...more real than...land" (September-October 2004). David Olson identified D.H. Lawrence's "Study of Thomas Hardy" as the source of "Like Clym [Yeo bright], the map appears to us more real than the land." The essay appears in Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers of D.H. Lawrence, edited by Edward D. Mc Donald (1936); the quotation is on page 420.
"lost on a Ferris wheel" (November-December 2004). Martha Bennett Stiles recognized William Peden's "Night in Funland," first published in New Mexico Quarterly 29, no. 4 (Winter 1959-60), on pages 395 through 402.
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