Part 75

Pantheon, a circular temple in Rome, erected by Agrippa, son-in-law of Augustus, and dedicated to the gods in general: now a church and place of burial for the illustrious Italian dead

Paoli, the Corsican general (1796-1807) who, failing against the might of France, made his home in England, and was chaperoned by Boswell

Parnell, Thomas, Archdeacon of Clogher, satirist and translator. He was a sweet and easy poet with a high moral tone; friend of Addison and Swift (1679-1718)

Parson Barnabas, Parson Trulliber (see Fielding’s Joseph Andrews)

Pasquin, Antony, a fifteenth-century Italian tailor, noted for his caustic wit

Paulician Theology originated in Armenia, and flourished c.660-970 A.D. Besides certain Manichee elements it denied the deity of Jesus and abjured Mariolatry and the sacraments

Pescara, Marquis of, an Italian general who betrayed to the emperor, Charles V., the plot of Francesco Sforza for driving the Spaniards and Germans out of Italy

Peter Martyr, a name borne by three personages. The reference here is to the Italian Protestant reformer who made his home successively in Switzerland, England, Strasburg, and Zurich (d. 1562)

Phidias, Athens’s greatest sculptor. A contemporary of Pericles (d. 432 B. C.)

Philips, John, best remembered by The Splendid Shilling, a good burlesque in imitation of Milton (1676-1708)

Pilpay, the Indian Aesop. For the pedigree of the Pilpay literature, see Jacobs: Fables of Bidpai (1888), 641

Pisistratus and Gelon, two able Grecian tyrants who ruled beneficially at Athens (541-527 B.C.), and at Syracuse (484-473 B.C.), respectively

Pococurante, one who cares little and knows less: a dabbler

Porridge Island, the slang name of an alley near St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields, which was pulled down c. 1830

Politian, a distinguished poet and scholar in the time of the Italian Renaissance; professor of Greek and Latin at Florence (1454-94)

Pompadour, Madame de, mistress of Louis XV., and virtually ruler of France from 1745 till her death in 1764

Prior, Matthew, a wit and poet of the early eighteenth century whose lyrics were pronounced by Thackeray to be “amongst the easiest, the richest, the most charmingly humorous” in the English language,

Pudding, Jack, a clown who swallows black puddings, etc. Cp. Germ. Hans Worst, Fr. Jean-potage

Pulci, a Florentine poet (noted for his humorous Sonnets), and friend of Lorenzo de’ Medici (1432-84)

Pye--the immediate--Cibber--more remote--predecessor of Southey in the Laureateship

Pyrgopolynices, a braggart character in Plautus’s Miles Gloriosus

Pyrrho, “the father of the Greek sceptics,” contemporary with Aristotle. Like, Carneades (ib.), he denied that there was any criterion of certainty in the natural or the moral world

QUEDLINBURGH, an old town in Saxony at the foot of the Harz, long a favourite residence of the mediaeval emperors

RALPHO, the clerk and squire of Hudibras in Samuel Butler’s satire of that name

Rambouillet, the marchioness of this name was a wealthy patron of art and literature, and gathered round her a select salon of intellectual people, which degenerated into pedantry, was ridiculed, and dissolved at her death in 1665

Ramus, Peter French, philosopher and humanist; attacked Aristotle and Scholasticism; massacred on the eve of St, Bartholomew, 1572

Rehearsal, The, a burlesque based on Beaumont’s Knight of the Burning Pestle, produced in 1671 by George Clifford, Duke of Buckingham, and Samuel Butler

Relapse, a comedy by Sir John Vanbrugh (d. 1726), who also achieved some distinction as a soldier and an architect