Part 205

=Piers Plowman= (_pērs plou´man_).--A satirical poem of the fourteenth century. The hero falls asleep, like John Bunyan, on the Malvern hills, and has different visions, which he describes, and in which he exposes the corruptions of society, the dissoluteness of the clergy, and the allurements to sin. The author is supposed to be Robert or William Langland. No other writings so faithfully reflect the popular feeling during the great social and religious movements of that century as the bitterly satirical poem. _The Vision of Piers Plowman_. In its allegory, the discontent of the commons with the course of affairs in church and state found a voice.

=Pietro.=--_The Ring and the Book_, Browning. The professed father of Pompilia, criminally assumed as his child to prevent certain property from passing to an heir not his own.

=Pilgrim’s Progress.=--A celebrated allegory by Bunyan. It recounts the adventures of the hero, Christian, from his conversion to his death. He wanders from the way to Doubting Castle, and is held there by Giant Despair. His sins are a pack; his Bible is 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 passage over a deep stream which flows between him and heaven.

=Pilot, The.=--Title of a sea-story by Cooper, which was called the “first sea-novel of the English language.” It was published in the year 1823, and soon translated into Italian, German, and French. It is founded on the adventures of John Paul Jones.

=Pinch, Tom.=--A character in Dickens’ _Martin Chuzzlewit_, distinguished by his guilelessness, his oddity, and his exhaustless goodness of heart.

=Pippa= (_pēp´pä_) =Passes.=--A drama, Italian in scene and character, by Robert Browning. “It is,” says Stedman, “a cluster of four scenes, with prologue, epilogue, and interludes, half prose, half poetry, varying with the refinement of the dialogue. Pippa is a delicately pure, good, blithesome peasant maid. It is New Year’s Day at Ardo. She springs from bed at sunrise, resolved to enjoy to the full her sole holiday. Others may be happy throughout the year; haughty Ottima and Sebald, the lovers on the hill; Jules and Phene, the artist and his bride; Luigi and his mother; Monsignor, the bishop; but Pippa has only this one day to enjoy. Now, it so happens that she passes, this day, each of the groups or persons we have named, at an important crisis in their lives, and they hear her various carols as she trills them forth in the innocent gladness of her heart. _Pippa Passes_ is a work of pure art, and has a wealth of original fancy and romance, apart from its wisdom.” It appeared in 1842.

=Pistol= (_pis´tol_).--A follower of Falstaff, in Shakespeare’s comedy of _The Merry Wives of Windsor_, and in the second part of _King Henry IV_. “A roguing beggar, a cantler, an upright man that liveth by cozenage.”

=Pocket.=--_Great Expectations_, Dickens. Name of a family prominent in the story.

=Pocket.=--A real scholar, educated at Harrow, and an honor-man at Cambridge, but, having married young, he had to take up the calling of “grinder” and literary fag for a living. Pip was placed in his care.

=Pocket, Herbert.=--Son of Mr. Matthew Pocket, wonderfully hopeful, but had not the stuff to push his way into wealth.

=Pocket, Mrs.=--Daughter of a city knight, brought up to be an ornamental nonentity, helpless, shiftless, and useless. She was the mother of eight children, whom she allowed to “tumble up” as best they could, under the charge of her maid, Flopson.

=Pocket, Sarah.=--Sister of Matthew Pocket, a little, dry, old woman, with a small face that might have been made of walnut-shell, and a large mouth.

=Poor Richard’s Almanac.=--An almanac published by Benjamin Franklin, 1732-1757, noted for its maxims. He made it the medium for teaching thrift, temperance, order, cleanliness, chastity, forgiveness, and so on. The maxims or precepts of these almanacs generally end with the words, “as poor Richard says.”

=Portia= (_pôr´shiä_).--In _The Merchant of Venice_, a rich heiress, whose hand and fortune hang upon the right choosing between a gold, a silver, and a leaden casket. She is in love with Bassanio, who, luckily, chooses well. She appears at the trial of Antonio as a “young doctor of Rome,” named Balthazar.

=Poyser= (_poi´zer_), =Mrs.=--A character in _Adam Bede_. Some of her wonderfully shrewd and humorous observations have passed into the language. Here are some specimens: “It seems as if them as aren’t wanted here are th’ only folks as aren’t wanted in the other world.” “I’m not denyin’ the women are foolish; God Almighty made ’em to match the men.” “It’s hard to tell which is Old Harry when everybody’s got boots on.” “There’s many a good bit o’ work done with a sad heart.” “It’s poor work allays settin’ the dead above the livin’. It ’ud be better if folks ’ud make much on us beforehand, istid o’ beginning when we’re gone.” “Some folks’ tongues are like the clocks as run on strikin’ not to tell you the time of day, but because there’s summat wrong in their own inside.”

=Précieuses Ridicules= (_prā-syuz´ ri-di-kul´_), =Les.=--A comedy by Molière, in ridicule of the _Précieuses_, as they were styled, forming the coterie of the Hotel de Rambouillet in the seventeenth century. The _soirées_ held in this hotel were a great improvement on the licentious assemblies of the period; but many imitators made the thing ridiculous, because they lacked the same presiding talent and good taste.

The two girls of Molière’s comedy are Madelon and Cathos, the daughter and niece of Gargibus, a bourgeois. They change their names to Polixène and Aminte, which they think more genteel, and look on the affectations of two flunkies as far more _distingués_ than the simple, gentlemanly manners of their masters. However, they are cured of their folly, and no harm comes of it.

=Prelude= (_prē´lūd_, or _prel´ūd_), =The=, or _The Growth of a Poet’s Mind_.--An autobiographical poem, in blank verse, by William Wordsworth. It was intended as an introduction to “a philosophical poem, containing views of Man, Nature, and Society; and to be entitled _The Recluse_, as having for its principal subject the sensations and opinions of a poet living in retirement.” This poem was to have consisted of three parts, of which the second only, _The Excursion_, was completed and published. _The Prelude_ consists of fourteen books: Book one, _Childhood and Schooltime_; book two, _Schooltime_, continued; book three, _Residence at Cambridge_; book four, _Summer Vacation_; book five, _Books_; book six, _Cambridge and the Alps_; book seven, _Residence in London_; book eight, _Retrospect--Love of Nature Leading to Love of Man_; book nine, _Residence in France_; book ten, _Residence in France_, continued; book eleven, _France_, concluded; book twelve, _Imagination and Taste, How Impaired and Restored_; book thirteen, the same subject continued and concluded; and book fourteen, _Conclusion_.

=Primrose= (_prim´rōz_), =Rev. Charles.=--_Vicar of Wakefield_, Goldsmith. A clergyman, rich in heavenly wisdom, but poor indeed in all worldly knowledge.

=Primrose, Moses.=--Brother of the above, noted for giving in barter a good horse for a gross of worthless green spectacles with copper rims.

=Primrose, Olivia.=--The eldest daughter of the doctor. Pretty, enthusiastic, a sort of Hebê in beauty. “She wished for many lovers,” and eloped with Squire Thorndill.

=Primrose, Sophia.=--The second daughter of Dr. Primrose. She was “soft, modest, and alluring.”

=Princess:= _a Medley_.--A poem by Alfred Tennyson. “It is,” says Stedman, “as he entitles it, a medley, constructed of ancient and modern materials--a show of mediæval pomp and movement, observed through an atmosphere of latterday thought and emotion. The poet, in his prelude, anticipates every stricture, and to me the anachronisms and impossibilities of the story seem not only lawful, but attractive. Tennyson’s special gift of reducing incongruous details to a common structure and tone is fully illustrated in a poem made--

“‘To suit with time and place, A Gothic ruin and a Grecian house, A talk at college and of ladies’ rights, A feudal knight in silken masquerade.’

Other works of our poet are greater, but none is so fascinating. Some of the author’s most delicately musical lines are herein contained. The tournament scene is the most vehement and rapid passage in the whole range of Tennyson’s poetry. The songs reach the high water mark of lyrical compositions. The five melodies--_As Thro’ the Land_, _Sweet and Low_, _The Splendor Falls_, _Home They Brought_ and _Ask Me No More_--constitute the finest group of songs produced in our century, and the third seems to many the most perfect English lyric since the time of Shakespeare.” The name of the Princess is Ida.

=Priscilla= (_pri-sil´ä_).--_Courtship of Miles Standish_, Longfellow. A Puritan maiden who is wooed by Captain Standish through the mediation of his friend, John Alden, who is in love with Priscilla. She prefers John Alden and marries him after the captain’s supposed death. The captain, however, appears at the close of the wedding service, and the friends are reconciled.

=Prometheus= (_prō-mē´thūs_) =Bound.=--A tragedy of Æschylus, of uncertain date. Prometheus is fabled to have made men of clay, and to have imparted life to them by means of fire brought from heaven. It was said that for this he was bound to the rock by order of Zeus, that he resisted all efforts to subdue his will and purpose, bade defiance to the father of the gods, and disappeared in an appalling tempest. Mrs. Browning published a poetical translation in 1833.

=Prospero= (_pros´pe-rō_).--_Tempest_, Shakespeare. Rightful duke of Milan, deposed by his brother. Drifted on a desert island, he practised magic, and raised a tempest in which his brother was shipwrecked. Ultimately Prospero “broke his wand,” and his daughter married the son of the King of Naples.

=Puff, Mr.=--In Sheridan’s farce _The Critic_, a hack writer, who, having failed at other occupations, tries criticism for a living, and is a “professor of the art of puffing.”

=Puss in Boots.=--The subject and title of a well-known nursery tale derived from a fairy story in the _Nights_ of the Italian author Straparola, and Charles Perrault’s _Contes des Fées_. The wonderful cat secures a princess and a fortune for his master, a poor young miller, whom he passes off as the rich marquis of Carabas.

=Pygmalion= (_pig-mā´li-on_) =and Galatea= (_gal-a-tē´ä_).--A mythological comedy, by W. S. Gilbert, embodying the fable of the Athenian sculptor who prayed the gods to put life into the statue of Galatea which he had fashioned. In the comedy, Galatea evokes the jealousy of the sculptor’s wife Cynisca; and, after causing great misery by her very innocence, voluntarily returns to the original stone.

=Pyncheon= (_pin´chon_).--The name of an ancient but decayed family in Hawthorne’s romance _The House of the Seven Gables_. There are: (1) Judge Pyncheon, a selfish, cunning, worldly man. (2) His cousin Clifford, a delicate, sensitive nature, reduced to childishness by long imprisonment and suffering. (3) Hepzibah, the latter’s sister, an old maid who devotes herself to the care of Clifford. (4) A second cousin, Phœbe, a fresh, cheerful young girl, who restores the fallen fortunes of the family and removes the curse which rested on it.

=Q=

=Quasimodo= (_kwā-si-mō´dō_).--_Notre Dame de Paris_, Hugo. A misshapen dwarf, one of the prominent characters in the story. He is brought up in the cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris. One day, he sees Esmeralda, who had been dancing in the cathedral close, set upon by a mob, and he conceals her for a time in the church. When, at length, the beautiful gypsy girl is gibbeted, Quasimodo disappears mysteriously, but a skeleton corresponding to the deformed figure is found after a time in a hole under the gibbet.

=Quaver.=--_The Virgin Unmasked_, Fielding. A singing-master, who says, “if it were not for singing-masters, men and women might as well have been born dumb.” He courts Lucy by promising to give her singing-lessons.

=Queen Lab.=--_Arabian Nights._ The queen of magic, ruler over the enchanted city, in the story of Beder, prince of Persia. She transforms men into horses, mules, and other animals. Beder marries her, defeats her plots against him, but is himself turned into an owl for a time.

=Quentin Durward= (_kwen´tin der´wärd_).--A novel by Sir Walter Scott. A story of French history. The delineations of Louis XI. and Charles the Bold of Burgundy will stand comparison with any in the whole range of fiction or history.

=Quickly, Mistress.=--_Merry Wives of Windsor_, Shakespeare. A serving woman to Dr. Caius, a French physician. She is the go-between of three suitors for “sweet Anne Page,” and with perfect disinterestedness wishes all three to succeed.

=Quickly, Mistress Nell.=--Hostess of a tavern in Eastcheap, frequented by Harry, Prince of Wales, Sir John Falstaff, and all their disreputable crew.

=Quidnunkis.=--Title and name of hero in a fable found or written by Gay in 1726. This hero was a monkey which climbed higher than its neighbors, and fell into a river.

=Quilp= (_kwilp_).--_Old Curiosity Shop_, Dickens. A hideous dwarf, cunning, malicious, and a perfect master in tormenting. Of hard, forbidding features, with head and face large enough for a giant, he lived on Tower hill, collected rents, advanced money to seamen, and kept a sort of wharf, calling himself a ship-breaker.

=Quintus Fixlein.=--Title of a romance by Jean Paul Richter and the name of the principal character.

=Quirk, Gammon, and Snap.=--A firm of rascally, scheming, hypocritical solicitors in Warren’s _Ten Thousand a Year_.

=R=

=Raby, Aurora.=--In Byron’s _Don Juan_. She was a rich, noble English orphan, “a rose with all its sweetest leaves yet folded.”

=Radigund.=--_Faërie Queene_, Spenser. Queen of the fabled Amazons. Having been rejected by Bellodant “the Bold,” she revenged herself by degrading all the men who fell into her power by dressing them like women, and giving them women’s work.

=Ramayana= [(_rä´-mä´yȧ-nȧ_); _Rāma-ayana_, the goings or doings of Rama].--One of the two great epics of India, the other being the Mahabharata. It is ascribed to a poet, Valmiki, and consists at present of about twenty-four thousand stanzas, divided into seven books. It is the production of one man, though many parts are later additions, such as those in which Rama is represented as an incarnation of Vishnu, all the episodes in the first book, and the whole of the seventh. It was at first handed down orally, and variously modified in transmission, and afterward reduced to writing.

=Ramona= (_ra-mō´nä_).--Title of a romance by Helen Hunt Jackson. Ramona saw the American Indian followed by “civilization” while retreating slowly but surely toward his own extinction, and had herself a share in the tragedy. Ramona is considered the great romance of Indian life.

=Random= (_ran´dom_).--_Roderick Random_, Smollett. A young Scotch scapegrace in quest of fortune. At one time he revels in prosperity, again he is in utter destitution. He roams at random, in keeping with his name.

=Rappaccini= (_rap-ä-chē´nē_).--_Mosses from an Old Manse_, Hawthorne. A doctor in whose garden grew strange plants whose juices and fragrance were poison. His daughter, nourished on these odors, became poisonous herself. Her lover found an antidote which she took, but the poison meant life and the antidote meant death to her.

=Rasselas= (_ras´e-las_).--An imaginary romance by Dr. Johnson. According to the custom of his country, Abyssinia, Rasselas was confined in paradise, with the rest of the royal family. This paradise was in the valley of Amhara, surrounded by high mountains. It had only one entrance, a cavern concealed by woods, and closed by iron gates. He escaped with his sister Nekayah and Imlac the poet, and wandered about to find what condition or rank of life was the most happy. After investigation, he found no lot without its drawbacks, and resolved to return to the “Happy Valley.”

=Raud the Strong.=--_Tales of a Wayside Inn_, Henry W. Longfellow. The viking who worshiped the old gods and lived by fire and sword. King Olaf went against him, sailing from Drontheim to Salten Fjord.

=Raven, The.=--A poem by Edgar Allan Poe, published in 1845, which has attained a world-wide popularity. For the author’s account of the mode of its construction, see _The Philosophy of Composition_, an essay, in the collected edition of his works. The last verse runs:

And the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting, On the pallid bust of Pallas, just above my chamber door; And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon’s that is dreaming, And the lamplight o’er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor; And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor Shall be lifted--Nevermore!

=Ravenswood.=--_Bride of Lammermoor_, Scott. The lord of Ravenswood, an old Scotch nobleman and a decayed royalist. His son Edgar falls in love with Lucy Ashton, daughter of Sir William Ashton, Lord-Keeper of Scotland. The lovers plight their troth, but Lucy is compelled to marry Frank Hayston, laird of Bucklaw. The bride, in a fit of insanity, attempts to murder the bridegroom and dies. Bucklaw goes abroad. Colonel Ashton, seeing Edgar at the funeral of Lucy, appoints a hostile meeting; and Edgar, on his way to the place appointed, is lost in the quicksands. A prophecy, noted as a curse, hung over the family and was thus fulfilled.

=Raymond.=--In _Jerusalem Delivered_, by Tasso. Raymond was known as the Nestor of the crusaders, slew Aladine, the king of Jerusalem, and planted the Christian standard upon the tower of David.

=Rebecca.=--_Ivanhoe_, Scott. Daughter of Isaac the Jew, in love with Ivanhoe.

=Red-cross Knight.=--The Red-cross Knight is St. George, the patron saint of England, and, in the obvious and general interpretation, typifies holiness, or the perfection of the spiritual man in religion. In Spenser’s _Faërie Queene_ the task of slaying a dragon was assigned to him as the champion of Una.

=Redgauntlet= (_red-gänt´let_).--One of the principal characters in Sir Walter Scott’s novel of the same name, a political enthusiast and Jacobite, who scruples at no means of upholding the cause of the Pretender and finally accompanies him into exile. His race bore a fatal mark resembling a horseshoe which appeared on the face of Red-gauntlet as he frowned when angry.

=Red-Riding-Hood.=--This nursery tale is, with slight variations, common to Sweden, Germany, and France. In Charles Perrault’s _Contes des Fées_ it is called _Le Petit Chaperon Rouge_.

=Religio Medici= (_rē-lij´i-ō med´i-sī_).--A prose work by Sir Thomas Browne. “_The Religio Medici_,” says the elder Lytton, “is one of the most beautiful prose poems in the language; its power of diction, its subtlety and largeness of thought, its exquisite conceits and images, have no parallel out of the writers of that brilliant age when Poetry and Prose had not yet divided their domain, and the Lyceum of Philosophy was watered by the mixing of the wine!”

=Representative Men.=--A work by Emerson which more nearly than any of his other works, gives expression to his system as a whole. The topics are: (1) Plato, the Philosopher; (2) Swedenborg, the Mystic; (3) Montaigne, the Skeptic; (4) Shakespeare, the Poet; (5) Napoleon, the Man of the World; (6) Goethe, the Writer. The mental portraits sketched under these six heads give us Emerson himself, so far as he is capable of being formulated at all.

=Republic, The.=--A work composed by Plato four hundred years before Christ. _The Republic_ is not, as the title would suggest, a political work, like the _Politics_ of Aristotle. The principles and government of an ideal moral organism, of which the rulers shall be types of fully developed and perfectly educated men, are the real subject. In the _Republic_ we find the necessity of virtue to the very idea of social life proved in the first book; then the whole process of a complete moral and scientific education is set forth. It has been said that the most complete record of the beliefs or opinions of Plato are found in this work.

=Reveries of a Bachelor.=--By D. G. Mitchell. The _Reveries_ is a collection of sketches of life and character, painted in such a dreamlike, delicate manner as to make the reader lose for the time being the full consciousness of his surroundings. It has called forth a number of imitators more or less successful, no one of whom, however, is comparable to the original.

=Reynard= (_rā´närd_, or _ren´ärd_) =the Fox=.--A beast-epic, so called. This prose poem is a satire on the state of Germany in the middle ages. Reynard represents the Church; Isengrin the wolf (his uncle) typifies the baronial element; and Nodel the lion stands for the regal power. The plot turns on the struggle for supremacy between Reynard and Isengrin. Reynard uses all his endeavors to victimize everyone, especially his uncle Isengrin, and generally succeeds.

=Richelieu= (_rēsh-y-lōō´_), or _The Conspiracy_.--A drama in five acts, by Edward, Lord Lytton; produced in 1839, the part of the hero being played by Macready. For some of the incidents the author confesses himself indebted to the authors of _Cinq Mars_ and _Picciola_. Among the characters are Baradas, the favorite; De Mauprat, in love with Julie; Julie de Mortemar herself; Marion de Lorme, mistress of Orleans; Orleans himself; Louis XIII., and others.

=Rights of Man, The.=--“Being an answer to Mr. Burke’s Attack on the French Revolution,” by Thomas Paine. This work, which was published in 1791-1792, procured for the writer the distinction of a trial for sedition, which he escaped by flying to France.

=Rinaldo= (_ri-nal´dō_).--A Christian hero in Tasso’s _Jerusalem Delivered_. He was the son of Bertoldo and Sophia, and nephew of Guelpho, but was brought up by Matilda. He was one of Charlemagne’s paladins, and cousin to Orlando. Having killed Charlemagne’s nephew Berthelot, he was banished and outlawed. After various adventures and disasters, he went to the Holy Land, and, on his return, succeeded in making peace with the emperor.

=Ring and the Book, The.=--A poem by Robert Browning, published in 1869. It is the story of a tragedy which took place at Rome in 1698. The versified narrative of the child Pompilia’s sale to Count Guido, of his cruelty and violence, of her rescue by a young priest, the pursuit, the lawful separation, the murder by Guido of the girl and her putative parents, the trial and condemnation of the murderer, and the affirmation of his sentence by the pope--all this is made to fill out a poem of twenty-one thousand lines; but these include ten different versions of the tale, besides the poet’s prelude, in which latter he gives a general outline of it. The chapters which contain the statements of the priest lover and Pompilia are full of tragic beauty and emotion. The pope’s soliloquy, though too prolonged, is a wonderful piece of literary metempsychosis.

=Rip Van Winkle.=--A tale by Washington Irving, adapted from the old German legend of Peter Klaus, a goatherd, who drank a miraculous draught of wine in a dell of the Harz mountains, which brought on sleep from which he did not wake until twenty years after, when he returned to his native village to find everything changed, and no one who knew him. In Irving’s tale the hero is a Dutchman living in America, and the scene is the Catskill mountains. The story is most picturesquely told, and has been effectively dramatized, the leading personage being illustrated by the genius of Jefferson.