Meanly shrinking from danger, cowardly, dastardly.
- 1590, Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, Book III, Canto One, Stanza 22, in The Faerie Queene, Books Three and Four, edited by Dorothy Stephens, Hackett, 2006, p. 13,
Like dastard Curres, that having at a bay
The salvage beast embost in wearie chace,
Dare not adventure on the stubborne pray,
Ne byte before, but rome from place to place,
To get a snatch, when turned is his face.