“I smell a rat.”

—  Thomas Middleton

Blurt, Master-Constable (c. 1601), Act iii. Sc. 3. Compare: "I smell a rat", Ben Jonson, Tale of a Tub, act iv. Sc. 3; Samuel Butler, Hudibras, part i. canto i. line 281; "I begin to smell a rat", Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote, book iv. chap. x.

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English playwright and poet 1580–1627

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