Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama Part 81

=Pilgrim to Compostella.= Some pilgrims on their way to Compostella, stopped at a hospice in La Calzada. The daughter of the innkeeper solicited a young Frenchman to spend the night with her, but he refused; so she put in his wallet a silver cup, and when he was on the road, she accused him to the alcayde of theft. As the property was found in his possession, the alcayde ordered him to be hung. His parents went on their way to Compostella, and returned after eight days, but what was their amazement to find their son alive on the gibbet, and uninjured.

They went instantly to tell the alcayde; but the magistrate replied, "Woman, you are mad! I would just as soon believe these pullets, which I am about to eat, are alive, as that a man who has been gibbeted eight days is not dead." No sooner had he spoken than the two pullets actually rose up alive. The alcayde was frightened out of his wits, and was about to rush out of doors, when the heads and feathers of the birds came scampering in to complete the resuscitation. The c.o.c.k and hen were taken in grand procession to St. James's Church of Compostella, where they lived seven years, and the hen hatched two eggs, a c.o.c.k and a hen, which lived just seven years, and did the same. This has continued to this day, and pilgrims receive feathers from these birds as holy relics; but no matter how many feathers are given away, the plumage of the sacred fowls is never deficient.

? This legend is also seriously related by Bishop Patrick, _Parable of the Pilgrims_, x.x.xv. 430-4. Udal ap Rhys repeats it in his _Tour through Spain and Portugal_, 35-8. It is inserted in the _Acta Sanctorum_, vi.

45. Pope Calixtus II. mentions it among the miracles of Santiago.

=Pilgrim= (_A Pa.s.sionate_), American who visits England, as one seeks the home he has loved throughout a tedious exile. It is like the return of a weary child to his mother's arms, as night comes on. He lingers upon each feature of the landscape as upon the face of his beloved, and counts the rest of the world but "a garish" place.--Henry James, Jr., _A Pa.s.sionate Pilgrim_.

=Pilgrim's Progress= (_The_), by John Bunyan. Pt. i., 1670; pt. ii., 1684.

This is supposed to be a dream, and to allegorize the life of a Christian, from his conversion to his death. His doubts are giants, his sins a pack, his Bible a chart, his minister, Evangelist, his conversion a flight from the City of Destruction, his struggle with besetting sins a fight with Apollyon, his death a toilsome pa.s.sage over a deep stream, and so on.

The second part is Christiana and her family led by Greatheart through the same road, to join Christian who had gone before.

=Pillar of the Doctors= (_La Colonne des Docteurs_), William de Champeaux (*-1121).

=Pilot= (_The_), an important character and the t.i.tle of a nautical burletta by E. Fitzball, based on the novel so called by J. Fenimore Cooper, of New York. "The pilot" turns out to be the brother of Colonel Howard, of America. He happened to be in the same vessel which was taking out the colonel's wife and only son. The vessel was wrecked, but "the pilot" (whose name was John Howard) saved the infant boy, and sent him to England to be brought up, under the name of Barnstable. When young Barnstable was a lieutenant in the British navy, Colonel Howard seized him as a spy, and commanded him to be hung to the yardarm of an American frigate, called the _Alacrity_. At this crisis, "the pilot"

informed the colonel that Barnstable was his own son, and the father arrived just in time to save him from death.

=Pilpay'=, the Indian aesop. His compilation was in Sanskrit, and ent.i.tled _Pantschatantra_.

It was rumored he could say ...

All the "Fables" of Pilpay.

Longfellow, _The Wayside Inn_ (prelude).

=Pilum'nus=, the patron G.o.d of bakers and millers, because he was the first person who ever ground corn.

Then there was Pilumnus, who was the first to make cheese, and became the G.o.d of bakers.--Ouida, _Ariadne_, i. 40.

=Pinabello=, son of Anselmo (king of Maganza). Marphi'sa overthrew him, and told him he could not wipe out the disgrace till he had unhorsed a thousand dames and a thousand knights. Pinabello was slain by Brad'amant.--Ariosto, _Orlando Furioso_ (1516).

=Pinac=, the lively, spirited fellow-traveller of Mirabel, "the wild goose." He is in love with the sprightly Lillia-Bianca, a daughter of Nantolet.--Beaumont and Fletcher, _The Wild Goose Chase_ (1652).

=Pinch=, a schoolmaster and conjuror, who tries to exorcise Antiph'olus (act iv. sc. 4).--Shakespeare, _Comedy of Errors_ (1593).

_Pinch_ (_Tom_), clerk to Mr. Pecksniff "architect and land surveyor."

Simple as a child, green as a salad, and honest as truth itself. Very fond of story-books, but far more so of the organ. It was the seventh heaven to him to pull out the stops for the organist's a.s.sistant at Salisbury Cathedral; but when allowed, after service, to finger the notes himself, he lived in a dreamland of unmitigated happiness. Being dismissed from Pecksniff's office, Tom was appointed librarian to the Temple Library, and his new catalogue was a perfect model of workmans.h.i.+p.

_Ruth Pinch_, a true-hearted, pretty girl, who adores her brother, Tom, and is the suns.h.i.+ne of his existence. She marries John Westlock.--C.

d.i.c.kens, _Martin Chuzzlewit_ (1844).

=Pinchbeck.= Sham doctor and matrimonial agent in John Brougham's play, _Playing With Fire_.

_Pinchbeck_ (_Lady_), with whom Don Juan placed Leila to be brought up.

Olden she was--but had been very young; Virtuous she was--and had been, I believe ...

She merely now was amiable and witty.

Byron, _Don Juan_, xii. 43, 47 (1824).

=Pinchwife= (_Mr._), the town husband of a raw country girl, wholly unpractised in the ways of the world, and whom he watches with ceaseless anxiety.

Lady Drogheda ... watched her town husband a.s.siduously as Mr.

Pinchwife watched his country wife.--Macaulay.

_Mrs. Pinchwife_, the counterpart of Moliere's "Agnes," in his comedy ent.i.tled _L'ecole des Femmes_. Mrs. Pinchwife is a young woman wholly unsophisticated in affairs of the heart.--Wycherly, _The Country Wife_ (1675).

? Garrick altered Wycherly's comedy to _The Country Girl_.

=Pindar= (_Peter_), the pseudonym of Dr. John Wolcot (1738-1819).

_Pindar_ (_The British_), Thomas Gray (1716-1771). On his monument in Westminster Abbey is inscribed these lines:

No more the Grecian muse unrivalled reigns; To Britain let the nations homage pay: She felt a Homer's fire in Milton's strains, A Pindar's rapture in the lyre of Gray.

_Pindar_ (_The French_), (1) Jean Dorat (1507-1588); (2) Ponce Denis Lebrun (1719-1807).

_Pindar_ (_The Italian_), Gabriello Chiabrera (1552-1637).

=Pindar of England.= Cowley was preposterously called by the duke of Buckingham "The Pindar, Horace and Virgil of England." Posterity has not endorsed this absurd eulogium (1618-1667).

=Pindar of Wakefield= (_The_), George-a-Green, pinner of the town of Wakefield--that is, keeper of the public pound for the confinement of estrays.--_The History of George-a-Green, Pindar of the Town of Wakefield_ (time, Elizabeth).

=Pindo'rus and Aride'us=, the two heralds of the Christian army in the siege of Jerusalem.--Ta.s.so, _Jerusalem Delivered_ (1575).

=Pine-Bender= (_The_), Sinis, the Corinthian robber who used to fasten his victims to two pine trees bent towards the earth, and leave them to be torn to pieces by the rebound.

=Pingree= (_Nancy_), called "Old Lady Pingree" because of her pride and black lace turban. She lives by herself in the lower part of the old Pingree house, and is so poor that to give an egg to the lodgers above stairs is an act of self-denying generosity. She has money and burial-clothes laid away for her funeral, yet when the neighbor upstairs dies, Nancy "lends" it to the daughter to keep her mother out of the Potter's field. A sudden rise in property brings Nancy a few hundreds, and enables her to face death with calm certainty of an independent burial in the Pingree lot.--Mary E. Wilkins, _A Humble Romance, and Other Stories_ (1887).

=Pinkerton= (_Miss_), a most majestic lady, tall as a grenadier, and most proper. Miss Pinkerton kept an academy for young ladies on Chiswick Mall. She was "the Semiramis of Hammersmith, the friend of Dr. Johnson, and the correspondent of Mrs. Chapone." This very distinguished lady "had a Roman nose, and wore a solemn turban." Amelia Sedley was educated at Chiswick Mall academy, and Rebecca Sharp was a pupil-teacher there.--Thackeray, _Vanity Fair_, i. (1848).