Tale of the Third Calender. This tale is given under the word AGIB.

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  “I am called Agib,” he says, “and am the son
  of a king whose name was Cassib.”—­Arabian
  Nights.

CALEPINE (Sir), the knight attached to Serena (canto 3).  Seeing a bear carrying off a child, he attacked it, and squeezed it to death, then committed the babe to the care of Matilde, wife of sir Bruin.  As Matilde had no child of her own, she adopted it (canto 4).—­Spenser, Faery Queen, vi. (1596).

[Illustration] Upton says, “the child” in this incident is meant for M’Mahon, of Ireland, and that “Mac Mahon” means the “son of a bear.”  He furthermore says that the M’Mahons were descended from the Fitz-Ursulas, a noble English family.

CALES (2 syl.).  So gipsies call themselves.

  Beltran Cruzado, count of the Cales. 
  Longfellow, The Spanish Student.

CALF-SKIN.  Fools and jesters used to wear a calf-skin coat buttoned down the back, and hence Faulconbridge says insolently to the arch-duke of Austria, who had acted very basely towards Richard Lion-heart: 

  Thou wear a lion’s hide! doff it for shame,
  And hang a calf-skin on those recreant limbs. 
  Shakespeare, King John, act ii. sc.  I (1596).

CALIANAX, a humorous old lord, father of Aspatia, the troth-plight wife of Amintor.  It is the death of Aspatia which gives name to the drama.—­Beaumont and Fletcher, The Maid’s Tragedy (1610).

CALIBAN, a savage, deformed slave of Prospero (the rightful duke of Milan and father of Miranda).  Caliban is the “freckled whelp” of the witch Sycorax.  Mrs. Shelley’s “Frankenstein” is a sort of Caliban.—­Shakespeare, The Tempest (1609).

“Caliban” ... is all earth ... he has the dawnings of understanding without reason or the moral sense ... this advance to the intellectual faculties without the moral sense is marked by the appearance of vice.—­Coleridge.

CALIBURN, same as Excalibur, the famous sword of king Arthur.

  Onward Arthur paced, with hand
  On Caliburn’s resistless brand. 
  Sir W. Scott, Bridal of Triermain (1813).

Arthur ... drew out his Caliburn, and ... rushed forward with great fury into the thickest of the enemy’s ranks ... nor did he give over the fury of his assault till he had, with his Caliburn, killed 470 men.—­Geoffrey, British History, ix. 4 (1142).

CALIDORE (Sir), the type of courtesy, and the hero of the sixth book of Spenser’s Faery Queen.  The model of this character was sir Philip Sidney.  Sir Calidore (3 syl.) starts in quest of the Blatant Beast, which had escaped from sir Artegal (bk. v. 12).  He first compels the lady Briana to discontinue her discourteous toll of “the locks of ladies and the beards of knights”