Pococurante, one who cares little and knows less: a dabbler
Porridge Island, the slang name of an alley near St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields, which was pulled down c. 1830
Politian, a distinguished poet and scholar in the time of the Italian Renaissance; professor of Greek and Latin at Florence (1454-94)
Pompadour, Madame de, mistress of Louis XV., and virtually ruler of France from 1745 till her death in 1764
Prior, Matthew, a wit and poet of the early eighteenth century whose lyrics were pronounced by Thackeray to be “amongst the easiest, the richest, the most charmingly humorous” in the English language,
Pudding, Jack, a clown who swallows black puddings, etc. Cp. Germ. Hans Worst, Fr. Jean-potage
Pulci, a Florentine poet (noted for his humorous Sonnets), and friend of Lorenzo de’ Medici (1432-84)
Pye—the immediate—Cibber—more remote—predecessor of Southey in the Laureateship
Pyrgopolynices, a braggart character in Plautus’s Miles Gloriosus
Pyrrho, “the father of the Greek sceptics,” contemporary with Aristotle. Like, Carneades (ib.), he denied that there was any criterion of certainty in the natural or the moral world