A teel of a tum

• A Tale of a Tub: this is the second reference to A Tale of a Tub, Jonathan Swift's 1704 literary sensation (the first is FW 004.22: tete in a tub, with reference to a tub and the adverb swiftly in the next line). The main section of A Tale of A Tub is an allegory involving three brothers who represent Catholicism, non-Anglican Protestantism, and Anglicanism; much of the rest is a collection of parodies of various writers and schools of thought. Very Wakian, and a key text for FW

• a tale of a tub: a cock-and-bull story; an apocryphal story
  • "The phrase A Tale of a Tub was used by Sir Thomas More to describe a pointless speech. Ben Jonson gave the name to an early comedy, in which one of the characters was ‘Squire Tub’. Defoe, in a pamphlet published in 1704, on the grievances of Irish Dissenters, speaks of a certain Bill as a ‘Tale of a Tub’, exactly in the sense here used by Swift, from whom it is quite possible that Defoe borrowed the phrase" – note by Henry Craik to ‘The Author's Preface’ from A Tale Of a Tub

• tub: pulpit → Alexander Pope cited tub as slang for a pulpit

• a tale of a tomb

• a tale of a time

• A Tale of a Town: a play by Edward Martyn, revised by George Moore as The Bending of the Bough → FW 003.01: bend of bay

• teel: till

• eel: kind of fish → this paragraph contains the names of many species of fish

• Atum: the Egyptian god who created the world by masturbating on the primordial mud-heap → Mastabatoom on the previous page

• tumulus

• tum: the sound of a plucked string or drum → continuing the musical allusions in this paragraph

• dumb: in FW, Swift is often described as being deaf-and-dumb → Taubling in the next line