TO DANCE BARNABY, verb. phr. (old).—To move expeditiously, irregularly (GROSE): [An old dance to a quick movement was so named: but cf. Richard Braithwaite’s Drunken Barnaby’s Journal, narrating a frolicsome tour through England.] BARNABY-BRIGHT (or LONG BARNABY) = St. Barnabas’s Day, 11th June, O.S.: cf. old rhyme—BARNABY BRIGHT! BARNABY BRIGHT: The longest day and the shortest night.

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  1595.  SPENSER, Epithalamion, 266.

        This day the sunne is in his chiefest hight,
With BARNABY THE BRIGHT.

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  1645.  G. DANIEL, Ode XVIII., in Poems (1878), II. 49.

        Of worth and price; this short December Day,
It would spin out, to make my Readers say,
Long BARNABIE was never halfe soe Gay.

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  1650.  FULLER, A Pisgah Sight of Palestine, II. xii. 255. Staying the Sun in Gibeon. This was the BARNABY DAY of the whole world.

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  1664.  COTTON, Virgil Travestie, 15.

        ‘Bounce,’ cries the port-hole, out they fly,
And make the world DANCE BARNABY.

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  1670.  EACHARD, The Ground and Occasions of the Contempt of the Clergy and Religion, 32. BARNABY-BRIGHT would be much too short for him to tell you all that he could say.

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  1714.  Spectator, No. 623. The steward, after having perused their several pleas, adjourned the court to BARNABY-BRIGHT, that they might have day enough before them.

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  1805.  SCOTT, The Lay of the Last Minstrel, iv. 4.

        It was but last St. BARNABRIGHT
They seized him a whole summer night.

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