Such a charm were right Canidian. 
  Mrs. Browning, Hector in the Garden, iv.

CANMORE or GREAT-HEAD, Malcolm III. of Scotland (1057-1093).—­Sir W. Scott, Tales of a Grandfather, i. 4.

CANNING (George), statesman (1770-1827).  Charles Lamb calls him: 

  St. Stephen’s fool, the zany of debate.
  Sonnet in “The Champion.”

CANOPOS, Menelaeos’s pilot, killed in the return voyage from Troy by the bite of a serpent.  The town Canoepos (Latin, Canopus) was built on the site where the pilot was buried.

CANTAB, a member of the University of Cambridge.  The word is a contraction of the Latin Cantabrigia.

CANTACUZENE (4 syl.), a noble Greek family, which has furnished two emperors of Constantinople, and several princes of Moldavia and Wallachia.  The family still survives.

  We mean to show that the Cantacuzenes are
  not the only princely family in the world.—­D’Israeli,
  Lothaire.

  There are other members of the Cantacuzene
  family besides myself.—­Ditto.

Cantacuzene (Michael), the grand sewer of Alexius Comnenus, emperor of Greece.—­Sir W. Scott, Count Robert of Paris. (time, Rufus).

CANTERBURY TALES.  Eighteen tales told by a company of pilgrims going to visit the shrine of “St. Thomas a Becket” at Canterbury.  The party first assembled at the Tabard, an inn in Southwark, and there agreed to tell one tale each both going and returning, and the person who told the best tale was to be treated by the rest to a supper at the Tabard on the homeward journey.  The party consisted of twenty-nine pilgrims, so that the whole budget of tales should have been fifty-eight, but only eighteen of the number were told, not one being on the homeward route.  The chief of these tales are:  “The Knight’s Tale” (Palamon and Arcite, 2 syl.); “The Man of Law’s Tale” (Custance, 2 syl.); “The Wife of Bath’s Tale” (A Knight); “The Clerk’s Tale” (Grisildis); “The Squire’s Tale” (Cambuscan, incomplete); “The Franklin’s Tale” (Dor’igen and Arvir’agus); “The Prioress’s Tale” (Hugh of Lincoln); “The Priest’s Tale” (Chanticleer and Partelite); “The Second Nun’s Tale” (St. Cecil’ia); “The Doctor’s Tale” (Virginia); “The Miller’s Tale” (John the Carpenter and Alison); and “The Merchant’s Tale” (January and May) (1388).

CANTON, the Swiss valet of lord Ogleby.  He has to skim the morning papers and serve out the cream of them to his lordship at breakfast, “with good emphasis and good discretion.”  He laughs at all his master’s jokes, flatters him to the top of his bent, and speaks of him as a mere chicken compared to himself, though his lordship is seventy and Canton about fifty.  Lord Ogleby calls him his “cephalic snuff, and no bad medicine against megrims, vertigoes, and profound thinkings.”—­Colman and Garrick, The Clandestine Marriage (1766).