Chapter Platonic Love to Plon-Plon of P by Brewer's Readers Handbook

Platonic Love to Plon-Plon

Platonic Love, the innocent friendship of opposite sexes, wholly divested of all animal or amorous passion.

The noblest kind of love is love platonical.
   —Byron: Don Juan, ix. 76 (1824).

Platonic Puritan (The), John Howe, the puritan divine (1630–1706).

Plausible (Counsellor) and serjeant Eitherside, two pleaders in The Man of the World, by C. Macklin (1764).

Play called the Four P’s (The), by John Heywood (1569). It is a contention as to which of the four can tell the greatest lie, and the Palmer (who asserted that he never saw a woman out of temper) wins the prize. The other three P’s are the Pardoner, the Poticary, and the Pedlar.

Pleasant (Mrs.), in The Parson’s Wedding, by Tom Killigrew (1664).

Pleasure (A New).

’Tis said that Xerxes offered a reward
To those who could invent him a new pleasure.
   —Byron: Don Juan, i. 108 (1819).

Pleasures of Hope, a poem in two parts, by Thomas Campbell (1799). It opens with a comparison between the beauty of scenery and the ideal enchantments of fancy in which hope is never absent, but sustains the seaman on his watch, the soldier on his march, and Byron in his perilous adventures. He goes on to descant on the hope of a mother, the hope of a prisoner, the hope of the wanderer, the grand hope of the patriot, the hope of regenerating uncivilized nations, extending liberty, and ameliorating the condition of the poor. Pt. ii. speaks of the hope of love, and the hope of a future state, concluding with the episode of Conrad and Ellenore. Conrad was a felon, transported to New South Wales, but, though “a martyr to his crimes, was true to his daughter.’

But not, my child, with life’s precarious fire,
The immortal ties of Nature shall expire;
These shall resist the triumph of decay,
When time is o’er, and worlds have passed away.
Cold in the dust this perished heart may lie,
But that which warmed it once shall never die—
That spark, unburied in its mortal frame,
With living light, eternal, and the same,
Shall beam on Joy’s interminable years,
Unveiled by darkness, unassuaged by tears.
   —Pt. ii.

Pleasures of Imagination, a poem in three books, by Akenside (1744), All the pleasures of imagination arise from the perception of greatness, wonderfulness, or beauty. (1) The beauty of greatness—witness the pleasure of mountain scenery, of astronomy, of infinity. (2) The pleasure of what is wonderful—witness the delight of novelty, of the revelations of science, of tales of fancy. (3) The pleasure of beauty, which is always connected with truth—the beauty of colour, shape, and so on, in natural objects; the beauty of mind and the moral faculties. Bk. ii. contemplates accidental pleasures arising from contrivance and design, emotion and passion, such as sorrow, pity, terror, and indignation. Bk. iii. denounces morbid imagination as the parent of vice; and contrasts with it the delights of a well-trained imagination.

(The first book is by far the best. Akenside recast his poem in maturer life, but no one thinks he improved it by so doing. The first or original cast is the only one read, and parts of the first book are well known and much admired.)

Pleasures of Melancholy (The), a poem by Warton (1745).

Pleasures of Memory, a poem in two parts, by Samuel Rogers (1793). The first part is restricted to the pleasure of memory afforded by the five senses, as that arising from visiting celebrated places, and that afforded by pictures. Pt. ii. goes into the pleasures of the mind, as imagination, and memory of past griefs and dangers. The poem concludes with the supposition that in the life to come this faculty will be greatly enlarged. The episode is this: Florio, a young sportsman, accidentally met Julia in a grot, and