sixteen-string

Updated: May 17, 2025

There's a touch of the late lamented Sixteen-string Jack about the trick. Well, it is only messages of another kind that I send to a lady, so we'll just drive on our way, nephew, and thank our stars that we bring whole bones over the Thames."

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle - Rodney Stone

Now, the hostess of the little inn was Ellen Roach, friend and accomplice of Sixteen-String Jack, once the most famous woman in England, and still after a weary stretch at Botany Bay the strangest of companions, the most buxom of spinsters. Her beauty was elusive even in her triumphant youth, and middle-age had neither softened her traits nor refined her expression.

Charles Whibley - A Book of Scoundrels

Sixteen-string Jack* towered above the common mark. BOSWELL. 'Then, Sir, what is poetry? JOHNSON. 'Why, Sir, it is much easier to say what it is not. We all KNOW what light is; but it is not easy to TELL what it is. * A noted highwayman, who after having been several times tried and acquitted, was at last hanged.

James Boswell - Boswell's Life of Johnson : Abridged and edited, with an introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood