But no amount of
lubberly book-jargon can disguise a fact well calculated to afflict the soul of every sound economist.
The poor voyageurs, too, continually irritated his spleen by their "lubberly" and unseemly habits, so abhorrent to one accustomed to the cleanliness of a man-of-war.
Astor, wherein he pours forth the bitterness of his soul, and his seamanlike impatience of what he considers the "lubberly" character and conduct of those around him, are before us, and are amusingly characteristic.
' I did that, sir,' said a great
lubberly fellow, stepping forward; 'and preciously I cut my knuckle agin' his mouth.
From the wharf at Selby's we watched with careless interest the
lubberly manoeuvre performed of bringing the yacht to anchor, and the equally
lubberly manoeuvre of sending the small boat ashore.
When he got his
lubberly sandals on, and his long robe of coarse brown linen cloth, which hung straight from his neck to his ankle-bones, he was no longer the comeliest man in his kingdom, but one of the unhandsomest and most commonplace and un- attractive.
I say, Master Kirby, what a
lubberly oar you pull—you handle an oar, boy, pretty much as a cow would a musket, or a lady would a marling-spike.”
Go back to your fields and your cattle, you
lubberly fellow; you're not fit to associate with ladies and gentlemen like us, that have nothing to do but to run snooking about to our neighbours' houses, peeping into their private corners, and scenting out their secrets, and picking holes in their coats, when we don't find them ready made to our hands - you don't understand such refined sources of enjoyment.'
But these great
lubberly fellows resemble mountains, not only in bulk, but in their disinclination to move.
Mistress Page is disguised, with her little brothers, as "Like urchins, oafs, and fairies, green and white, / With rounds of waxen tapers on their heads,/ And rattles in their hands" (4.4.47-51) as they perform the Masque of Heme the Hunter, designed to humiliate Falstaff: "then let them all encircle him about/ And fairy-like to pinch the unclean knight" (56-57).86 It is in the guise of a fairy that young Anne is supposed to be shuffled away to marry Doctor Caius or Slender, but, taking "a boy for a girl" (5.5.189), they each get a wrong fairy and end up marrying "
lubberly" (182) little boys; "
lubberly" here classifies their dancing as the opposite of "featly": clumsy, heavy, dull, cloddish.