Chapter Pun to Pygmalion of P by Brewer's Readers Handbook

Come thou in by thyself, clad in ragged garments, and holding a bag in thy hand, and ask nothing but a bagful of food, and I will cause that if all the meat and liquor that are in these seven cantreves were put into it, it would be no fuller than before.—The Mabinogion (“Pwyll Prince of Dyved,” twelfth century).

Pygmalion, the statuary of Cyprus. He resolved never to marry, but became enamoured of his own ivory statue, which Venus endowed with life, and the statuary married.

(Morris has a poem on the subject in his Earthly Paradise (“August”), and Gilbert a comedy. In Gilbert’s comedy, Pygmalion provokes the jealousy of his wife Cynisca by his love for the statue, and she calls down blindness on him. Afterwards they become reconciled, Pygmalion’s sight is restored, and the Galatea becomes a statue again.)

Fall in loue with these,
As did Pygmalion with his carvèd tree.

Brooke: Treatie on Human Learning (1554–1628).

(Lord Brooke calls the statue “a carved tree.” There is a vegetable ivory, no doubt one of the palm species, and there is the ebon tree, the wood of which is black as jet. The former could not be known to Pygmalion, but the latter might, as Virgil speaks of it in his Georgics, ii. 117, “India nigrum fert ebenum.” Probably lord Brooke blundered from the resemblance between ebor (“ivory”) and ebon, in Latin “ebenum.”)