A braggart; a character in an old play entitled Solyman and Perseda. Shakespeare makes the Bastard say to his mother, who asks him why he boasted of his ill-birth, “Knight, knight, good mother, Basilisco-like”—i.e. my boasting has made me a knight. (King John, i. 1.)
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Entry taken from Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, edited by the Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D. and revised in 1895.