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

followed her home, when her father, a rich squire, welcomed him as his guest, and talked with delight of his younger days when hawk and hound were his joy of joys. Florio took Julia for a sail on the lake, but the vessel was capsized, and, though Julia was saved from the water, she died on being brought to shore. It was Florio’s delight to haunt the places which Julia frequented—

Her charm around the enchantress Memory threw,
A charm that soothes the mind and sweetens too.
   —Pt. ii.

Pleiads (The, a cluster of seven stars in the constellation Taurus, and applied to a cluster of seven celebrated contemporaries. The stars were the seven daughters of Atlas: Maia, Electra, Taygetê , Asteropê, Meropê, Alcyonê, and Celeno.

The Pleiad of Alexandria consisted of Callimachos , Apollonios Rhodios, Aratos, Homer the Younger, Lycophron, Nicander, and Theocritos. All of Alexandria, in the time of Ptolemy Philadelphos.

The Pleiad of Charlemagne consisted of Alcuin, called “Albinus;” Angilbert, called “Homer;” Adelard, called “Augustine;” Riculfe, called “Damætas;” Varnefrid; Eginhard; and Charlemagne himself, who was called “David.”

The First French Pleiad (sixteenth century): Ronsard, Joachim du Bellay, Antoine de Baïf, Remi-Belleau, Jodelle, Ponthus de Thiard, and the seventh is either Dorat or Amadis de Jamyn. All under Henri III.

The Second French Pleiad (seventeenth century): Rapin, Commire, Larue, Santeuil, Ménage, Dupérier, and Petit.

We have also our English clusters. There were those born in the second half of the sixteenth century: Spenser (1553), Drayton (1563), Shakespeare and Marlowe (1564), Ben Jonson (1574), Fletcher (1576), Massinger (1585), Beaumont (Fletcher’s colleague) and Ford (1586). Besides these, there were Tusser (1515), Raleigh (1552), sir Philip Sidney (1554), Phineas Fletcher (1584), Herbert (1593), and several others.

Another cluster came a century later: Prior (1664), Swift (1667), Addison and Congreve (1672), Rowe (1673), Farquhar (1678), Young (1684), Gay and Pope (1688), Macklin (1690), etc.

The following were born in the latter half of the eighteenth century: Sheridan (1751), Crabbe (1754), Burns (1759), Rogers (1763), Wordsworth (1770), Scott (1771), Coleridge (1772), Southey (1774), Campbell (1777), Moore (1779), Byron (1788), Shelley and Keble (1792), and Keats (1796).

Butler (1600), Milton (1608), and Dryden (1630) came between the first and second clusters. Thomson (1700), Gray (1717), Collins (1720), Akenside (1721), Goldsmith (1728), and Cowper (1731), between the second and the third.

Pleonectes , Covetousness personified in The Purple Island, by Phineas Fletcher (1633). “His gold his god” … he “much fears to keep, much more to lose his lusting.” Fully described in canto viii. (Greek, pleonekès, “covetous.”)

Pleydell (Mr. Paulus), an advocate in Edinburgh, shrewd and witty. He was at one time the sheriff at Ellangowan.

Mr. counsellor Pleydell was a lively, sharp-looking gentleman, with a professional shrewdness in his eye, and, generally speaking, a professional formality in his manner; but this he could slip off on a Saturday evening, when…he joined in the ancient pastime of High Jinks.—Sir W.Scott: Guy Mannering, xxxix. (time, George II.).

Pliable, one of Christian’s neighbours, who accompanied him as far as the “Slough of Despond,” and then turned back.—Bunyan: Pilgrim’s Progress, i.(1678).