Definition of "agaric"

[…] these [commentators] were slight excrescences, mushrooms, champignons, that perished as the smoke of the dunghil evaporated, which reared them. A modern editor of Shakespeare is, on the contrary, a fungus attached to an oak; a male agaric of the most astringent kind, that, while it disfigures its form, may last for ages to disgrace the parent of its being.

1765, William Kenrick, A Review of Doctor Johnson’s New Edition of Shakespeare‎, London: J. Payne, page 88

Nobody cares for planting the poor fungus: so she shakes down from the gills of one agaric countless spores, any one of which, being preserved, transmits new billions of spores to-morrow or next day.

1844, Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Poet”, in Essays. Second Series‎, Boston: James Munroe, pages 24–25

She thereat, as one / That smells a foul-flesh’d agaric in the holt, / And deems it carrion of some woodland thing, / Or shrew, or weasel, nipt her slender nose / With petulant thumb and finger,

1872, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Idylls of the King, “Gareth and Lynette” in Gareth and Lynette, Etc. London: Strahan & Co., p. 47

[…] I came to / Under a rainy ridge, in a goblin clump / Of agaric.

1989, Ted Hughes, “Slump Sundays”, in Wolfwatching‎, London: Faber and Faber, page 4

Agarick to purge his flegme, lest he be too drowsie

1624, John Donne, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions‎, London: Thomas Jones, Devotion 8, Meditation, page 179