That is our selfe, whom though we do not see
  Yet each doth in himselfe it well perceive to bee.

  Therefore a God him sage Antiquity
  Did wisely make, and good Agdistes call—­

  Spenser, Faerie Queene, ii. 12.

AGDISTIS, a genius of human form, uniting the two senses and born of an accidental union between Jupiter and Tellus.  The story of Agdistis and Atys is apparently a myth of the generative powers of nature.

AGED (The), so Wemmick’s father is called.  He lived in “the castle at Walworth.”  Wemmick at “the castle” and Wemmick in business are two “different beings.”

Wemmick’s house was a little wooden cottage, in the midst of plots of garden, and the top of it was cut out and painted like a battery mounted with guns....  It was the smallest of houses, with queer Gothic windows (by far the greater part of them sham), and a Gothic door, almost too small to get in at....  On Sundays he ran up a real flag....  The bridge was a plank, and it crossed a chasm about four feet wide and two deep....  At nine o’clock every night “the gun fired,” the gun being mounted in a separate fortress made of lattice-work.  It was protected from the weather by a tarpaulin ... umbrella.—­ C. Dickens, Great Expectations, xxv. (1860).

AG’ELASTES (Michael), the cynic philosopher.—­Sir W. Scott, Count Robert of Paris (time, Rufus).

AGESILA’US (5 syl.).  Plutarch tells us that Agesilaus, king of Sparta, was one day discovered riding cock-horse on a long stick, to please and amuse his children.

A’GIB (King), “The Third Calender” (Arabian Nights’ Entertainments).  He was wrecked on the loadstone mountain, which drew all the nails and iron bolts from his ship; but he overthrew the bronze statue on the mountain-top, which was the cause of the mischief.  Agib visited the ten young men, each of whom had lost the right eye, and was carried by a roc to the palace of the forty princesses, with whom he tarried a year.  The princesses were then obliged to leave for forty days, but entrusted him with the keys of the palace, with free permission to enter every room but one.  On the fortieth day curiosity induced him to open this room, where he saw a horse, which he mounted, and was carried through the air to Bag dad.  The horse then deposited him, and knocked out his right eye with a whisk of its tail, as it had done the ten “young men” above referred to.

AGITATOR (The Irish), Daniel O’Connell (1775-1847).

AGLAE, the unwedded sister in T. B. Aldrich’s poem, The Sisters’
Tragedy (1891).

  Two sisters loved one man.  He being dead,
  Grief loosed the lips of her he had not wed,
  And all the passion that through heavy years,
  Had masked in smiles, unmasked itself in tears.

AGNEI’A (3 syl.), wifely chastity, sister of Parthen’ia or maiden chastity.  Agneia is the spouse of Encra’tes or temperance.  Fully described in canto x. of The Purple Island, by Phineas Fletcher (1633). (Greek, agneia, “chastity.”)