With apologies if this snooping for allusions is tedious--

 

1. PF: Book reviewers being mentioned, he said: "I have never acknowledged printed praise though sometimes I longed to embrace the glowing image of this or that paragon of discernment; and I have never bothered to lean out of my window and empty my skoramis on some poor hack's pate. I regard both the demolishment and the rave with like detachment." (n.172, 155)

 

2. Boyd's footnote in the LoA: skoramis] From the ancient Greek word for "closet stool" found only in Aristophanes. Vera Nabokov wrote to Reuben Abel (Jan 31, 1968). "says VN, was used for chamber pot by English dons in the past."

 

3. In Browning's "Of Pachiarotto, and How He Worked in Distemper," the speaker, a painter, casts his critics as chimney sweeps who have come to clean his chimney (the neighbors were complaining). He addresses them directly:

 

Long after the last of your number

Has ceased my front-court to encumber

While, treading down rose and ranunculus,

You Tommy-make-room-for-your-Uncle us!

Troop, all of you--man or homunculus,

Quick march! for Xanthippe, my housemaid,

If once on your pates she a souse made

With what, pan or pot, bowl or skoramis

First comes to her hand--things were more amiss!

 

Xanthippe, by the way, was the wife of Socrates. In a famous emblem from Emblemata Horatiana (1607), the illustrator, Otho Vaenius, shows her emptying a chamber pot over Socrates' head. See here:

 

Matt Roth