Fun with phrases: "gentle giant"

[Jonathan Lighter]

Sir Richard Branson decsribes the whale shark as "a gentle giant."  ISTR
that Gentle Ben was also called "a gentle giant."  It is certainly a modern
cliche'.

Some 18th C. elocution manuals used to juxtapose "gentle" and "giant" as
alphabetically ordered exx. of "g" pronounced as "j."

But there seems to be nothing literal or figuative before this:

1814 Lord Sheffield, ed._The Misc. Works of Edward Gibbon_ II (London: For
John Murray, 1814) 477 [ref. to 1792]: Mr. Gibbon used to call [Sir James
Macpherson] the _Gentle Giant_.

The 1801 snippet in GB appears to be compromised by its mention of Germans
invading Russia with 1,000 tanks.

JL

--
"If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the truth."

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