rhubarb

A bench-clearing rhubarb between the Boston Red Sox and the Tampa Bay Rays, 5 June 2008

7 June 2023

Rhubarb is any one of a variety of edible stalks of the genus Rheum. It has a strong tart taste, and as a result, while rhubarb is biologically a vegetable it is often considered more like a fruit in culinary circles, where it is often used in pies and pastries. Rhubarb also used to (still?) be used as a purgative. But in slang use, rhubarb has come to mean nonsense or rubbish, and in baseball circles, a rhubarb is a dispute, argument, or fight.

The English name for the plant comes from the Anglo-Norman reubarbe (1212), which in turn is from the post-classical Latin reubarbarum, and that from the Hellenistic Greek ῥῆον βάρβαρον (rion barbaron, barbarous rheum). It was “barbarous” because it was not cultivated in ancient Greece, but rather in the Black Sea region. The English word is in place by c.1390, when it appears in the poem “The Pistel of Swete Susan”:

Columbyne and charuwé  clottes þei creve,
With ruwe and rubarbe, ragget ariht.

(Columbine and caraway flourishing in clumps,
With rue and rhubarb ragged in the right way.)

How rhubarb came to mean nonsense is uncertain, but it happened by the beginning of the nineteenth century. The sense may come from a certain theatrical practice, where actors would repeatedly utter the word rhubarb to simulate the noise of a crowd, but this practice is not attested to until considerably after the nonsense sense. Still, it may be the practice is older and just not remarked upon in print.

The earliest example of the word being used to mean nonsense that I have found is in George Colman’s 1801 play The Poor Gentleman. In Act 2, Scene 1, two soldiers, Foss, a corporal, and Ollapod, an officer, are conversing:

Foss. Why your honour, I have seen a good deal of service in the regular way; and know nothing about Associations; but I think, an’ please your honour, if men take up arms to defend their country, they deserve to be thank’d, and respected for it, and it doesn’t signify a brass farthing what they are called.

Olla. Right—the name’s nothing—merit’s all—Rhubarb’s rhubarb, call it what you will.

Earlier in the play, Ollapod remarks upon an officer ostentatiously wearing a uniform rhubarb-colored lapels. Whether his saying rhubarb’s rhubarb, call it what you will is a reference to that earlier scene or to an already existing sense of the word meaning nonsense is uncertain.

Colman’s play was quite successful, and two decades later, the line rhubarb’s rhubarb, call it what you will was quoted in the 22 September 1823 issue of The Mirror of the Stage, so it is not inconceivable that Colman was the originator of the slang sense. At the least, his play probably had a role in popularizing the sense.

We see the nonsense sense again in William Johnson Neale’s 1841 novel Paul Periwinkle:

In vain Bamboozle endeavoured to coax up a reply from the bottom of his throat, the words were frozen there. He got as far as “I—I—I,” and then the heavy fist of Alibi finished the rest of the sentence by the most forcible of all arguments, which the learned have termed the argumentum bacculinum, and the unlearned “the knock-down.”

“I hope that's finished you! You thrice-dyed incarnation of lies and rhubarb!” proceeded Alibi, speaking in his wrath as loudly as if the words could still annoy the bleeding ear of poor old Bam, who lay as flat upon the deck as if he never should rise more.

So, rhubarb meaning nonsense was well established by the mid nineteenth century, but the theatrical practice uttering the word rhubarb to simulate the murmuring of a crowd isn’t recorded until the twentieth century, although it may in fact be much older. The earliest mention of the practice that I’m aware of is in an article about the actor Elliott Dexter in the February 1919 issue of Motion Picture Magazine:

To return from the piscatorial to biographical, [Elliott] Dexter began his stage career as a supe, which is a noisy dram for extra, in “The Great Diamond Robbery,” at the American Theater, in New York. He didn’t carry a spear in this dramatic masterpiece, probably because there were no spears to carry, but he did grumble, “Rhubarb, rhubarb, rhubarb” off stage to make up the angry mob.

In baseball circles, however, a rhubarb is a dispute or a fight. It is claimed that this sense is a coinage of sportswriter Garry Schumacher, but no one has found an early use of the term by him. This baseball sense of rhubarb was popularized by famed sportscaster Walter Lanier “Red” Barber, who used the term frequently. It is likely that Barber began using rhubarb in the late 1930s when he was covering the Cincinnati Reds, but the baseball sense of the term is not recorded until 12 April 1940, when it appears in the pages of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. By this time Barber was calling the games for the Brooklyn Dodgers, and it was he who undoubtedly brought the term to Brooklyn. The article in the Daily Eagle is about the possibility of Chicago Cubs pitcher Dizzy Dean joining the Dodgers, something that did not happen. Here rhubarb is used to mean trouble:

Well, in those not forgotten days, Leo [Durocher] was Dizzy’s friend, counsellor and guide. Probably Durocher’s sage advice kept the ex-cotton picker out of many a mess of rhubarb.

And we see the dispute sense in the pages of the New York Times on 19 May 1941, again in a reference to Brooklyn, who had played the Cubs the previous day:

There was what the boys call “a bit of a rhubarb” in the eighth when Cavarretta tried to steal home as Tamulis tossed the ball to first. In the ensuing run-down, the Cubs charged Phil’s progress was illegally blocked by Lavagetto. Umpire Al Barlick ruled otherwise.

And to round out the early appearances of the baseball sense, there is this from the New York Herald Tribune of 25 September 1942 about Larry MacPhail, manager of the Dodgers:

Unless Larry turns up some kind of rumpus today he apparently is going to stand on his last two “rhubarbs,” i.e., the recent ruckus with Bill Klem, the old arbitrator, and the telegraphic altercation recently undertaken with Bill McKechnie, the Cincinnati manager.

So, how the plant became associated with nonsense is unknown, but that slang sense probably gave rise to the theatrical practice of repeating saying rhubarb to simulate crowd noise. The idea of an angry crowd may, in turn, have given rise to the baseball sense of a dispute or fight. But the connections between all these senses are a bit tenuous.

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Sources:

Anglo-Norman Dictionary, 2021, s.v. reubarbe, n.

Colman, George. The Poor Gentleman (performed 11 February 1801). London: A. Strahan, 1802, 2.1, 24. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

The Dickson Baseball Dictionary, third edition. New York: W.W. Norton, 2009, 704–06, s.v. rhubarb, n.

Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources, 2013, s.v. reubarbarum, n. Brepols: Database of Latin Dictionaries.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2023, s.v. rhubarb, n.1. https://greensdictofslang.com/entry/yk4ob2q

Holmes, Tommy. “Dizzy Dean is Dodger Possibility” (12 April 1940). Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 13 April 1940, 5/4. Brooklyn Public Library: Brooklyn Newsstand.

McGaffey, Kenneth. “The Excellent Elliott.” Motion Picture Magazine, February 1919, 37. Media History Digital Library.

McGowen, Roscoe. “Wyatt Loses 7–4, After 7 Straight.” New York Times, 19 May 1941, 20/6. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. rubarbe, n.

Neale, William Johnson. Paul Periwinkle: or, The Pressgang. London: Willoughby, 1841, 615. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2010, s.v. rhubarb, n. and adj., rhubarb, v.

“The Pistel of Swete Susan.” In Russell A. Peck, ed. Heroic Women from the Old Testament in Middle English Verse. TEAMS Middle English Text Series. Kalamazoo, Michigan: Medieval Institute Publications, 1991, lines 111–12. Oxford, Bodleian Library MS. Eng. poet. a. 1 (The Vernon Manuscript).

Popik, Barry. “Rhubarb (A Heated Dispute),” Barrypopik.com, 17 July 2015.

“Theatrical Diary.” The Mirror of the Stage, 3.4, 22 September 1823. London: Duncombe, 1824, 60. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Tréguer, Pascal. “Sense Evolution of ‘Rhubarb’: From Theatre to Nonsense.” Wordhistories.net, 28 January 2022.

Woodward, Stanley. “Views of Sport.” New York Herald Tribune, 25 September 1942, 27/2. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Photo credit: Kevin Bedell, 2008. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.

dressed to the nines

26 August 2020

[3 June 2023: corrected the Scots translation]

To be dressed to the nines is to exhibit the very finest sartorial splendor. It is a variant of the more general to the nines, meaning to perfection, to the highest degree possible. But why the number nine?

The short answer is that no one knows. Most likely it’s an arbitrary number, like cloud nine. It has been suggested that the number nine has numerological or mystical significance and therefore appears in the phrase. But the early recorded uses of the phrase don’t hint at that. Ware (1909) claims that it is a variation on dressed to the eyen, referring to smart-looking attire, but no instances of that phrase have been found in the extant literature, and the more modern dressed to the eyes only appears after other instances of to the nines, so that can’t be the source.

We do know the phrase seems to have originated in Scotland. It first appears in a verse letter sent by a William Hamilton to Allan Ramsay on 24 July 1719:

THE bonny Lines therein thou sent me,
How to the Nines they did content me.

Robert Burns used the phrase in several of his poems later in the eighteenth century. The first is “Sketch,” from c. 1785:

Thou paints auld Nature to the nines,
In thy sweet Caledonian lines.

And in March 1787, he penned “The Answer,” which associates the phrase with clothing:

The marled plaid ye kindly spare,
By me should gratefully be ware;
            ‘Twad please me to the Nine.

In 1789 he wrote the bawdy “Come Rede Me, Dame,” which plays on the phrase by associating it with a well-endowed man:

Come rede me, dame, come tell me, dame,
   “My dame come tell me truly,
“What length o’ graith, when weel ca’d hame,
   “Will sair a woman duly?”
The carlin clew her wanton tail,
   Her wanton tail sae ready—
I learn’d a sang in Annandale,
   Nine inch will please a lady.—

But for a koontrie c—nt like mine,
   In sooth, we’re nae sae gentle;
We’ll tak tway thumb-bred to the nine,
   And that’s a sonsy p—ntle.

[graith = equipment
sair = cause distress, discomfort
carlin = old woman, crone
tway = two
thumb-bread = thumb-breadth
sonsy = impressive, good
pintle = penis, bolt, pin]

At about the same time that Burns is writing these poems, the word appears in North America, again associated with clothing and appearance. From a letter published in Philadelphia’s Independent Gazetteer on 27 March 1787:

Last Saturday, one of those notorious villains, (distinguished by the appellation of sharper) dressed in his laced cloaths, and powdered off to the nines, went on board of a brig, bound for Calais, and enquired (with an audacious confidence) for the Captain.

Dressed is added to the general phrase, making it specific to clothing, in the mid nineteenth century. From a story that appeared in New York’s Herald on 11 March 1837, and subsequently reprinted in newspapers across the United States:

One evening a smart young mechanic, “dressed to the nines.” as Ben Bowline says, might have been seen wending his way along Broadway.

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Sources:

Burns, Robert. The Poems and Songs of Robert Burns, vol. 1 of 3, James Kinsley, ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968. “Sketch,” 155, lines 37–38; “The Answer,” 327, lines 60–62; “Come Rede Me, Dame,” 457, lines 1–12. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Dictionary of the Scots Language, 2020.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2020, s.v. dressed (up) to the nines, phr., up to the nines, phr.

Hamilton, William. “Epistle II.” 24 July 1719. In Allan Ramsay, Familiar Epistles Between W— H— and A— R—. Edinburgh [?]: 1719[?], 8. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

“Letter.” The Independent Gazetteer (Philadelphia), 24 March 1787, 2. NewsBank: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, September 2003, s.v. nine, adj. and n.

“The Penny Wedding.” The Herald (New York), 11 March 1837, 2. NewsBank: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Ware, J. Redding. Passing English of the Victorian Era. London: George Routledge, 1909, 117. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

cobalt

Cobalt

2 June 2023

Cobalt is a hard, lustrous, silvery metal with atomic number 27 and the symbol Co. The element was first isolated by Georg Brandt in 1735, but its alloys have been known since antiquity. Long used in the production of blue pigments, today it has many uses, including in the production of lithium-ion batteries

Cobalt ores often also contain arsenic and other toxic materials, a fact that gives rise to its name, which is from the German kobalt or kobold, meaning goblin or demon because of the dangers the ore posed to miners. The German name spread to other European languages, and it appears in English as early as 1657 in a translation of a work by Paracelsus (Theophrastus von Hohenheim):

For at the first creation the four Elements lay hid in all things alike in the great mysterie: which things also were separated after the same manner and in one instant, and were divided among themselves one after another by a second separation, which is Elementary. And by this kind of Elementary separation out of the Element of the Earth things sensible and insensible, those that are eternall and those that are not eternall were parted from one another, every one obtaining its peculiar essence and free power. All that was of a woody nature was made wood. The next was mines of mettalls. A third became marcasite, talke, bisemute, pomegranate, mettallick cobalt, milsto, and many other things. A fourth precious stones of many sorts and shapes, as also stones, sands and lime. A fift was made into fruit, flowers, hearbs and seeds. A sixt into sensible living creatures, whereof some partake of eternity, as men, others doe not, as calves, sheep, &c.

Other early mentions in English include in a 1683 translation of Lazarus Ercker’s Fleta Minor:

Concerning the Cobolt oars, there are many sorts of them, some fresh and some milde, black and gray, some in trying do go easily into the Lead, but such Lead that comes by Ʋp-boyling from it, is black and red, and it afterwards doth work upon the Coppel, and dissolves, therefore it must after the first Ʋp-boyling, be cleansed again of its Wildness and must be slackd once more, so it will become white, and go clean off from the Coppel: One may also set the weightiest Cobolt Oar in a Test in the Oven, and let the smoak pass away, some of which sort do leave gray Ashes, and some a black grain upon the Test, and the rest will burn all away, but put a little Lead to it, and it will easily go in it, and also go clean off from the Coppel, and is found alike with the other Tryals.

And in John Woodward’s 1728 Fossils of All Kinds:

Cobaltum, a Marcasite frequent in Saxony. It is plentifully impregnated with Arsenic, contains Copper, and some Silver. G. Agricola […] and the rest of the Writers of Minerals take this for the Cadmia of the Antients. Being sublim’d, the Flores are of a blue colour. This the German Mineralists call Zaffir.

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Sources:

Ercker, Lazarus. Fleta Minor. The Laws of Art and Nature in Knowing, Judging, Assaying, Fining, Refining and Inlarging the Bodies of Confin’d Metals. London: Thomas Dawks, 1683, 34–35. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Miśkowiec, Pawel. “Name Game: The Naming History of the Chemical Elements—Part 1—From Antiquity Till the End of 18th Century.” Foundations of Chemistry (online), 1 November 2022.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. cobalt, n.

Paracelsus (Theophrastus von Hohenheim). The First Book of Philosophy. In Croll, Oswald. Philosophy Reformed and Improved in Four Profound Tractates. H. Pinnell, trans. London: M.S. for Lodowick Lloyd, 1657, 14. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Woodward, John. Fossils of All Kinds. London: William Innys, 1728, 43n. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Photo credit: Heinrich Pniok, 2010. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons ‘Attribution-NonCommercial-NonDerivative 3.0 (US) license.

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Source:

Oxford English Dictionary, cobalt, 2nd Edition, 1989.

go yard

Philadelphia Philly Chase Utley going yard against the Detroit Tigers on 10 April 2007

31 May 2023

To go yard is baseball slang for hitting a home run. The yard is apparently a reference to the ballyard, or ballfield.

The phrase starts appearing in print in 1988. The earliest example I have found is from the Akron Beacon Journal of 1 June of that year:

Edwards believes Allanson can be a valuable run producer without trying to turn himself into a home-run hitter.

“If Andy makes consistent contact, he'll drive in runs with that short swing,” the manager said. “He's got gap power, which means he can drive the ball in the holes for doubles.

“As long as he doesn't get it in his head to ‘go yard,’ as he calls it, and use that long, looping swing, Andy will do the job just fine. He's made a lot of progress already since spring training.”

Sportswriter Dick Kaegel wrote a piece on baseball jargon later that season that included the term. The article was published in a number of papers on different dates, and the earliest I have found is from the Kansas City Times of 15 August 1988:

The game keeps changing and so does its language.

When today's players take somebody downtown, it's the wife to a movie. They call a home run a tater or a large fly or a dinger or a Johnson. […]

A batter with power can hit a ball out of the ballyard, yes.

More likely, though, he can go back, go massive or go yard. As in, ``Lotta guys on this team can go back.''

[…]

If a long drive doesn't quite go yard and bounces off the wall, it's a Michael Jackson. “Off the Wall” is a Michael Jackson album.

Many people mistakenly associate the origin of go yard with Orioles Park at Camden Yards in Baltimore, but that’s not the case. Construction of that ballyard did not even begin until 1989, and the first game wasn’t played there until 1992, well after go yard was established as a slang term.

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Sources:

Dickson, Paul. The Dickson Baseball Dictionary, 3rd edition, W. W. Norton, 2009, 379.

Kaegel, Dick. “‘When the Game’s Tight, a Johnson or Al Capone Makes All the Difference.” Kansas City Times (Missouri), 15 August 1988, C-7/1. NewsBank Access World News Research Collection 2022 Edition.

Ocker, Sheldon. “Tribe’s Allanson Surprises with Production as a Hitter.” Akron Beacon Journal (Ohio), 1 June 1988, C5. NewsBank Access World News Research Collection 2022 Edition.

Photo credit: Unknown photographer, 2007. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

round robin

A c.1627 sailors’ round-robin letter addressed to a ship’s captain (fuller description and transcript below)

29 May 2023

Round robin is a term that has had many meanings over the centuries. Today, one perhaps hears it most often as a term for a sports tournament in which each contestant plays at least one match with all of the others. But this is a relatively recent sense of the term.

I’m not going to detail all the various senses—that would be the topic for a short book. But over the years round robin has been used as a disparaging term for the eucharistic host (16th C); a disparaging term for a man (16th C); a small ruff or collar (17th C); various round objects, such as leather loops or pancakes (18th C); any of a variety of fishes or plants (18th C); an Australian term for a burglar’s tool (19th C); a British term for a swindle (19th C); a chain letter (19th C); and an American slang verb meaning to have sex with multiple partners in succession (1960)

But the sports term is an extension of a nautical sense dating to late seventeenth century where it is used to denote a petition or complaint with the signatures arranged in a circle to hide who had signed first, who would presumably be the ringleader (Note, this is not the origin of the term ringleader, which dates to almost two hundred years earlier).

The photo is of round-robin letter found in the Calendar of State Papers for 1627 and addressed to a captain in King Charles I’s fleet. The letter is signed by seventy-six sailors, with the signatures arranged around twelve lines of verse that state they will not weigh anchor until they are paid and the ship is fully victualed. The lines read:

Goode Captaine to your wordes wee all give eare
But they unpleasing seame as wee doe heare
And those which are allowed not by the kinge
Thearefore with echoa like wee all doe sing
If that ower [al]lowanse wee receive not dulye
And also staying heare wee victule newlye
The shipe shall ride whilst cables they be rotten
Andso longes wee are whare victules maye be gotten
Unto which saying wee will all apply
Before wele yeld wee one and all will dye
God blesse the kinge and send him longe to rayne
And all such parsons as doe this mayntaine

(Good Captain, to your words we all give ear
but they unpleasing seem as we do hear
and those which are allowed not by the king
therefore with echo-like we all do sing
if that our allowance we receive not duly
and also staying here we victual newly
the ship shall ride whilst cables they be rotten
and so long as we are where victuals may be gotten
until which saying will we all apply
before we yield we one and all will die
God bless the king and send him long to reign
and all such persons as do this maintain.)

As the photo demonstrates, this practice of round-robin letters dates to c.1627 at least, but the term round robin in reference to the practice doesn’t appear until the end of the seventeenth century. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) has a citation of this sense from 1698 in a manuscript with the abbreviated title and shelfmark of High Court of Admiralty Exam. & Answers (P.R.O.: HCA 13/81) f. 679v:

Some of them drew up a paper commonly called a Round Robin, and signed the same whereby they intimated that if the Captaine would not give them leave to goe a shore, they would take leave.

This sense of the term is elaborated on in Charles Johnson’s 1724 A General History of the Pyrates:

This being approved of, it was unanimously resolved on, and the underwritten Petition drawn up and signed by the whole Company in the Manner of what they call a Round Robin, that is, the Names were writ in a Circle, to avoid all Appearance of Pre-eminence, and least any Person should be mark’d out by the Government, as a principal Rogue among them.

By the mid seventeenth century this usage had moved from nautical to general use. An anonymous 16 October 1755 piece in the newspaper The World uses it in a non-nautical context, although the article does make use of nautical imagery. The OED credits the piece to Philip Stanhope, Fourth Earl of Chesterfield; Stanhope did pen pieces for the paper, but I don’t know what evidence the dictionary uses for this particular credit—the writer Adam Fitz-Adam is the publisher and primary writer for that paper and is another logical candidate for authorship. The piece is an over-the-top screed against women wearing make-up, which I can only hope was written at least half in jest:

As my fair fellow subjects were always famous for their public spirit and love of their country, I hope they will upon the present emergency of the war with France, distinguish themselves by unequivocal proofs of patriotism. I flatter myself that they will at their first appearance in town, publicly renounce those French fashions, which of late years have brought their principles, both with regard to religion and government, a little in question. And therefore I exhort them to disband their curls, comb their heads, wear white linen, and clean pocket handkerchiefs, in open defiance of all the power of France. But above all, I insist upon their laying aside that shameful piratical practice of hoisting false colours upon their top-gallant, in the mistaken notion of captivating and enslaving their countrymen. This may the more easily do at first, since it is to be presumed, that during their retirement, their faces have enjoyed uninterrupted rest. Mercury and vermillion have made depredations these six months; good air and good hours may perhaps have restored, to a certain degree at least, their natural carnation: but at worst, I will venture to assure them, that such of their lovers who may know them again in that state of native artless beauty, will rejoice to find the communication opened again, and all the barriers of plaister and stucco removed. Be it known to them, that there is not a man in England, who does not infinitely prefer the brownest natural, to the whitest artificial skin; and I have received numberless letters from men of the first fashion, not only requesting, but requiring me to proclaim this truth, with leave to publish their names; which however I decline; but if I thought it could be of any use, I could easily present them with a round robin to that effect, of above a thousand of the most respectable names.

The sporting sense is an extension of the idea of equality among the participants, where no one artificially ranked above another. The term arises in tennis and dates to the closing years of the nineteenth century, and it appears at about the same time as seed https://www.wordorigins.org/big-list-entries/seed begins to be used as a term for ranking players in a tournament. A round-robin tournament is the antithesis of a seeded one. From an article about the planning for a tennis tournament that appeared in the New York Times of 28 September 1894

Many improvements for next year’s Newport championship have been suggested by those who are vainly striving to adjust the varying chances of the game so as to do away with the element of luck altogether. Juggling the drawings so that the stronger players appear at regular intervals on the score board appear to be most favored, as no change in the general arrangements is needed. Then a well-known player has proposed that the four players who reach the semi-finals play a kind of “round robin” tournament. This is also a good suggestion and would involve playing only three more matches than the old way.

And there is this from the 30 May 1895 New-York Tribune:

In order to prevent flukes, a round robin tournament will be played, each player contesting one match with each of his competitors.

And from this base in the world of tennis, the term spread to other sports.

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Sources:

“Gossip of Tennis Players.” New York Times, 28 September 1894, 3/5. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2023, s.v. round robin n., round robin, v.

“International Tennis Tournament.” New-York Tribune, 30 May 1895, 4/4. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Johnson, Charles. A General History of the Pyrates, second edition. London: T. Warner, 1724, 332–333. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

“Round Robin.” Languagehat.com, 13 August 2012.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2011, s.v. round robin, n.; June 2010, s.v. ringleader, n.

The World, 146, 16 October 1755, 878–79. Gale Primary Sources: Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Burney Newspapers Collection.

Photo credit: National Archives UK. Public domain image.