Chapter Pelides to Penelope's Web of P by Brewer's Readers Handbook

Milton calls the name “Pellenore”. In fact each of the names in the last line of the following quotation is a dissyllable: Lance-lot!, or Pelle-as, or Pelle-nore.

Fair damsels, met in forests wide
By knights of Logres or of Lyones,
Lancelot, or Pelleas, or Pellenore.
   —Milton

Pelobates , one of the frog champions. The word means “mud-wader.” In the battle he flings a heap of mud against Psycarpax the Hector of the mice, and half blinds him; but the warrior mouse heaves a stone “whose bulk would need ten degenerate mice of modern days to lift,” and the mass, falling on the “mud-wader,” breaks his leg.—Parnell: Battle of the Frogs and Mice, iii. (about 1712).

Pelops’ Shoulder, ivory. The tale is that Demeter ate the shoulder of Pelops when it was served up by Tantalos for food. The gods restored Pelops to life by putting the dismembered body into a caldron, but found that it lacked a shoulder; whereupon Demeter supplied him with an ivory shoulder, and all his descendants bore this distinctive mark.

N.B.—It will be remembered that Pythagoras had a golden thigh.

Your forehead high,
And smooth as Pelops’ shoulder.

J.Fletcher: The Faithful Shepherdess, ii. 1 (1610).

Pelorus, Sicily; strictly speaking, the north-east promontory of that island, called Capo di Fero, from a pharos or lighthouse to Poseidon, which once stood there.

So reels Pelorus with convulsive throes,
When in his veins the burning earthquake glows;
Hoarse thro’ his entrails roars th’ infernal flame,
And central thunders rend his groaning frame.

Falconer: The Shipwreck, ii.4 (1756).

Pelos, father of Physignathos king of the frogs. The word means “mud.”—Parnell: Battle of the Frogs and Mice (about 1712).

Pembroke (The earl of), uncle to sir Aymer de Valence.—Sir W. Scott: Castle Dangerous (time, Henry I.).

Pembroke (The Rev. Mr.), chaplain at Waverley Honour.—Sir W. Scott: Waverley (time, George II.).

Pen, Philemon Holland, translator-general of the classics. Of him was the epigram written—

Holland, with his translations doth so fill us, He will not let Suetonius be Tranquillus.

(The point of which is, of course, that the name of the Roman historian was C. Suetonius Tranquillus.)

Many of these translations were written from beginning to end with one pen, and hence he himself wrote—

With one sole pen I writ this book,
Made of a grey goose-quill;
A pen it was when it I took,
And a pen I leave it still.

Pen Mightier than the Sword. (See Journalists, p. 555.)

Pencilling by the Way, gossips about men and places of note, by N.P. Willis (1835). (See People I Have Met.)

Pendennis, a novel by Thackeray (1849), in which much of his own history and experience is recorded with a novelist’s licence. The hero, Arthur Pendennis, reappears in the Adventures of Philip, and is