From the top of this gatehouse was a most pleasant and delightful prospect as is to be seen. His Lordship [Sir Thomas More] was wont to recreate himself in this place to apricate and contemplate, and his little dog with him.

[…] I rubbed my eyes, doubting the very evidence of my own eyesight—a or the huge man in his shirt-sleeves; yes, positively not sunning but mooning himself—apricating himself in the occasional moonbeams; and, as if simple star-gazing from a sedentary station were not sufficient on such a night, absolutely pursuing his astrological studies, I repeat, in his shirt-sleeves!

Eating apricots and apricating himself the while on a garden wall, his hands in his pockets, he [the poet James Thomson] forms a pretty pendant to the Horatian picture.

The infirm state of my bodily health would be a sufficient apology for not taking up the pen at this time, wholesome as I deem it for the mind to apricate in the shelter of epistolary confidence, were it not that a considerable, I might even say a large, number of individuals in this parish expect from their pastor some publick exprssion of sentiment at this crisis.

It would never have occurred to him that in placing the apricot in my palm he was giving me his ass to hold or that, in biting the fruit, I was also biting into that part of his body that must have been fairer than the rest because it never apricated— […]

No longer were social parties the old heraldic solemnities enjoyed by red letters in the almanac, in which the chief objects were to discharge some arrear of ceremonious debt, or to ventilate old velvets, or to apricate and refresh old gouty systems and old traditions of feudal ostentation, which both alike suffered and grew smoke-dried under too rigorous a seclusion.

Apricate

Meaning

Verb

Synonyms