A lilac. Rustic.

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1780.  A contributor to Notes and Queries, 8 S. ii. 108, furnishes the following: see also id. 253, with citation 1769.
  LAYLOCK = LILAC.Laylock is a North-County provincialism for lilac; but was the former ever the correct or old spelling of the word? I find an example of its use in the Westminster Magazine for 1780. At p. *334 (at the second pagination thus) its “Monthly Chronicle” for June 5 records that “on Sunday [George III.] entered into the forty-third year of his age,” and that on the Monday “there was a levee, and afterwards a drawing-room, at St. James’s…. The Ladies’ dresses in general were composed of laylock, white, and straw-coloured silks, most elegantly trimmed with flowers, silver spotted gauze, ornamented and intermixed with foil.”

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1837.  Square, you do n’t know nawthing about that yong woman, yender, do ye?—with that lay-lock dress on to her—do ye?—Knick. Mag., x. 167 (Aug.).

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1859.  Lalocks flowered late that year, and he got a great bunch off from the bushes in the Hancock front-yard.—Holmes, ‘The Professor at the Breakfast-Table,’ ch. ii.

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1861.  The laylocks wuz in bloom, an’ all overhead the lane wuz rustlin’ ’ith the great purple plumes in the moonlight.—Atlantic Monthly, vii. p. 149/2 (Feb.).

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1862.  

        The catbird in the laylock-bush is loud;
The orchards turn to heaps o’ rosy cloud.
Lowell, ‘Biglow Papers,’ 2nd Series, No. 6.    

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