Chapter Peregrine Pickle to Periwinkle of P by Brewer's Readers Handbook

Peregrine Pickle to Periwinkle

Peregrine Pickle, the hero of a novel entitled The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, by Smollett (1751). Peregrine Pickle is a savage, ungrateful spendthrift, fond of practical jokes, and suffering with evil temper the misfortunes brought about by his own wilfulness.

“The Memoirs of a Lady of Quality” included in this novel are those of lady Vane, whose gallantries were matters of common talk.

Peregrinus Proteus, a cynic philosopher, born at Parium, on the Hellespont. After a youth spent in debauchery and crimes, he turned Christian; and, to obliterate the memory of his youthful ill practices, divided his inheritance among the people. Ultimately he burned himself to death in public at the Olympic games, A.D. 165. Lucan has held up this immolation to ridicule in his Death of Peregrinus.

(C. M. Wieland has an historic romance in German entitled Peregrinus Proteus, 1733–1813.)

Peres (Gil), a canon, and the eldest brother of Gil Blas’s mother. Gil was a little punchy man, three feet and a half high, with his head sunk between his shoulders. He lived well, and brought up his nephew and godchild Gil Blas. “In so doing, Perês taught himself also to read his breviary without stumbling.” He was the most illiterate canon of the whole chapter.—Lesage: Gil Blas, i. (1715).

Perez (Michael), the “copper captain.” A brave Spanish soldier, duped into marrying Estifania, a servant of intrigue, who passed herself off as a lady of property. Being reduced to great extremities, Estifania pawned the clothes and valuables of her husband; but these “valuables” were but of little worth—a jewel which sparkled as the “light of a dark lanthorn,” a “chain of whitings’ eyes” for pearls, and as for his clothes, she tauntingly says to her husband—

Put these and them [his jewels] on, and you’re a man of copper,
A copper, copper captain.

Fletcher: Rule a Wife and Have a Wife (1640).

Perfidious Albion. Great Britain was so called by Napoleon I.

Peri, plu. Peris, gentle, fairy-like beings of Eastern mythology, offspring of the fallen angels, and constituting a race of beings between angels and men. They direct with a wand the pure-minded the way to heaven, and dwell in Shadukiam and Ambre-abad, two cities subject to Eblis. (See Paradise and the Peri, p. 804.)

Are the peries coming down from their spheres?

Beckford: Vathek (1786).

Perichole, the heroine of Offenbach’s comic operetta. She is a street singer of Lima, in Peru.

Perichole (La), the chère amie of the late viceroy of Peru. She was a foreigner, and gave great offence by calling, in her bad Spanish, the creole ladies pericholas, which means “flaunting and bedizened creatures.” They, in retaliation, nicknamed the favourite La Perichole.

Pericles, the Athenian who raised himself to royal supremacy (died B. C. 429). On his death-bed he overheard his friends recalling his various merits, and told them they had forgotten his greatest of all: “that he had caused no Athenian through his administration to put on mourning,” i.e. he had caused no one to be put to death.

Pericles was a famous man of warre…
Yet at his death he rather did rejoice
In clemencie… “Be still,’ quoth he, “you grave Athenians”
(Who whisperéd and told his valiant acts);
“You have forgot my greatest glorie got:
For yet by me nor mine occasion
Was never sene a mourning garment worn.”

Gascoigne: The Steele Glas (died 1577).