Chiefly pl.
1. Strings with which children used to be guided and supported when learning to walk. To be in leading-strings: to be still a child; fig. to be in a state of dependence or pupilage.
1677. Wycherley, Plain Dealer, I. i. 1. But I’ll have no Leading-strings, I can walk alone.
a. 1685. Otway, Compl. Muse, xiii. Wks. 1727, II. 366. In little time the Hell-bred Brat … Without his Leading-strings could walk.
1779. T. A. Mann, in Lett. Lit. Men (Camden), 417. I live in a Country where good Philosophy is still in its leading-strings.
1780. Cowper, Progr. Err., 531. One that still needs his leading-string and bib.
1809. W. Irving, Knickerb. (1861), 69. He … gallops through mud and mire … merely to show that he is a lad of spirit, and out of his leading-strings.
1851. Mayhew, Lond. Labour, 317. Thus the ‘model’ lodgers are kept, as it were, in leading-strings.
1884. Lowell, Wks. (1890), VI. 135. His [Cervantes’] genius soon broke away from the leading-strings of a plot that denied free scope to his conceptions.
2. A cord for leading an animal. Cf. leading rein.
1859. Archæol. Cant. II. 106. At the feet of each crouches a dog with knotted leading-strings.
1886. Ruskin, Præterita, I. v. 159. Led … by a riding master with a leading string.
Hence Leading-stringed pa. pple., nonce-wd., guided with, or kept within, leading-strings.
1859. Thackeray, Virgin., II. xiv. 104. A powerful mettlesome young Achilles ought not to be leading-stringed by women too much.
