ARCHIBALD (John), attendant on the duke of Argyle.—­Sir W. Scott, Heart of Midlothian (time, George II.).

ARCHIMA’GO, the reverse of holiness, and therefore Satan the father of lies and all deception.  Assuming the guise of the Red Cross Knight, he deceived Una; and under the guise of a hermit, he deceived the knight himself.  Archimago is introduced in bks. i. and ii. of Spenser’s Faery Queen. The poet says: 

... he could take As many forms and shapes in seeming wise As ever Proteus to himself could make:  Sometimes a fowl, sometimes a fish in lake, Now like a fox, now like a dragon fell.

Spenser, The Faery Queen, I. ii. 10 (1590).

ARCHIMEDES, Syracusan philosopher, who discovered, among other great scientific facts, the functions of the lever.  The solution of an abstruse problem having occurred to him while in the bath, he leaped out of the water, and ran naked through the city, shouting, “Eureka!”

AR’CHY M’SAR’CASM (Sir), “a proud Caledonian knight, whose tongue, like the dart of death, spares neither sex nor age ...  His insolence of family and licentiousness of wit gained him the contempt of every one” (i. 1).  Sir Archy tells Charlotte, “In the house of M’Sarcasm are two barons, three viscounts, six earls, one marquisate, and two dukes, besides baronets and lairds oot o’ a’ reckoning” (i. 1).  He makes love to Charlotte Goodchild, but supposing it to be true that she has lost her fortune, declares to her that he has just received letters “frae the dukes, the marquis, and a’ the dignitaries of the family ... expressly prohibiting his contaminating the blood of M’Sarcasm wi’ onything sprung from a hogshead or a coonting-house” (ii. 1).

The man has something droll, something ridiculous in him.  His abominable Scotch accent, his grotesque visage almost buried in snuff, the roll of his eyes and twist of his mouth, his strange inhuman laugh, his tremendous periwig, and his manners altogether—­why, one might take him for a mountebank doctor at a Dutch fair.—­C.  Macklin, Love a-la-mode, i. 1 (1779).

Sir Archy’s Great-grandmother. Sir Archy M’Sarcasm insisted on fighting Sir Callaghan O’Brallaghan on a point of ancestry.  The Scotchman said that the Irish are a colony from Scotland, “an ootcast, a mere ootcast.”  The Irishman retorted by saying that “one Mac Fergus O’Brallaghan went from Carrickfergus, and peopled all Scotland with his own hands.”  Charlotte [Goodchild] interposed, and asked the cause of the contention, whereupon Sir Callaghan replied, “Madam, it is about sir Archy’s great-grandmother.”—­C.  Macklin, Love a-la-mode, i.  I (1779).

We shall not now stay to quarrel about sir Archy’s great-grandmother.—­Maepherson, Dissertation upon Ossian.

ARCHY’TAS of Tarentum made a wooden pigeon that could fly; and Regiomonta’nus, a German, made a wooden eagle that flew from Koenigsberg to meet the emperor, and, having saluted him, returned whence it set out (1436-1476).