pickle-herring

How? soul of a pickle-herring, body of a spagirical tosspot, doublet of motley, and mantle of pilgrim, how art thou transmuted!

Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 12, No. 32, November, 1873 Various

Others are Mother Goose and nursery tales; -- others bad tragedies or pickle-herring farces; and others, like that of the landlady's daughter at the Star, sweet love-anthologies, and songs of the affections.

Hyperion Henry Wadsworth Longfellow 1844

Others are Mother Goose and nursery tales; — others bad tragedies or pickle-herring farces; and others, like that of the landlady's

Hyperion 1839

'Tis a gentle man here -- a plague o 'these pickle-herring!

Twelfth Night; or What You Will 1601

Tweed: thou servile echo of fashionable barbarisms: thou quack, vending the nostrums of empirical elocution: thou marriage-maker between vowels and consonants, on the Gretna-green of caprice: thou cobler, botching the flimsy socks of bombast oratory: thou blacksmith, hammering the rivets of absurdity: thou butcher, imbruing thy hands in the bowels of orthography: thou arch-heretic in pronunciation: thou pitch-pipe of affected emphasis: thou carpenter, mortising the awkward joints of jarring sentences: thou squeaking dissonance of cadence: thou pimp of gender: thou Lion Herald to silly etymology: thou antipode of grammar: thou executioner of construction: thou brood of the speech-distracting builders of the Tower of Babel; thou lingual confusion worse confounded: thou scape-gallows from the land of syntax: thou scavenger of mood and tense: thou murderous accoucheur of infant learning; thou _ignis fatuus_, misleading the steps of benighted ignorance: thou pickle-herring in the puppet-show of nonsense: thou faithful recorder of barbarous idiom: thou persecutor of syllabication: thou baleful meteor, foretelling and facilitating the rapid approach of Nox and Erebus.

The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. With a New Life of the Poet, and Notices, Critical and Biographical by Allan Cunningham Robert Burns 1777