or tober, subs. (old cant).—1.  The road; the highway. Whence HIGH-TOBY = a main road; THE TOBY (TOBY-LAY or TOBY-CONCERN) = highway robbery (see quot. 1785); TOBY-GILL (or TOBY-MAN) = a road thief; HIGHTOBYMAN = a mounted highwayman, LOWTOBYMAN = a footpad; TO TOBY = to rob on the highway; and DONE FOR A TOBY = convicted for highway robbery. Cf. GYPSY TOBER = road.

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  1785.  GROSE, A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, s.v. THE TOBY applies exclusively to robbing on horseback; the practice of footpad robbery being properly called the spice, though it is common to distinguish the former by the title of HIGH-TOBY, and the latter of LOW-TOBY.

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  1830.  BULWER-LYTTON, Paul Clifford, II. xiii. You are a capital fellow! … the bravest and truest gill that ever took to THE TOBY. Ibid., I. iv. All the most fashionable prigs or TOBYMEN, sought to get him into their set.

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  1834.  W. H. AINSWORTH, Rookwood (1884), 95, ‘The Game of High Toby.’

        Believe me, there is not a game, my brave boys,
  To compare with the game of HIGH TOBY;
No rapture can equal the TOBYMAN’S joys.

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  2.  (showmen’s).—A pitch for a travelling show.

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  1893.  Standard, 29 Jan., 2. We have to be out in the road early, you know, to secure our ‘TOBY.’

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  3.  (old: eighteenth century).—A drinking jug or mug: usually a grotesque figure of an old man in a three-cornered hat.

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  1840.  DICKENS, Barnaby Rudge, iv. A … jug of well-browned clay, fashioned into the form of an old gentleman. ‘Put TOBY this way, my dear.’ This TOBY was the brown jug.

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  4.  (venery).—The female pudendum: see MONOSYLLABLE.

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  1678.  COTTON, Scarronides, or, Virgil Travestie (1770), 57.

        That Fame and Honour she may go by,
And let Æneas firk her TOBY.

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