Peasant-Bard (The), Robert Burns (1859-1796).
Peasant-Painter of Sweden, Hörberg. His chief paintings are altar-pieces.
The altar-piece painted by Hörberg.
Longfellow, The Children of the Lord’s Supper.
Peasant Poet of Northamptonshire, John Clare (1793-1864).
Peasant of the Danube (The), Louis Legendre, a member of the French National Convention (1755-1797); called in French Le Paysan du Danube, from his “éloquence sauvage.”
Peau de Chagrin, a story by Balzac. The hero becomes possessed of a magical wild ass’s skin, which yields him the means of gratifying every wish; but for every wish thus gratified, the skin shrank somewhat, and at last vanished, having been wished entirely away. Life is a peau d’ane, for every vital act diminishes its force, and when all its force is gone, life is gone (1834).
Peckhams (The), Silas Peckham, “a thorough Yankee, born on a windy part of the coast, and reared chiefly on salt-fish; keeps a young ladies’ school exactly as he would have kept a hundred head of cattle—for the simple, unadorned purpose of making just as much money in just as few years as can be safely done.”
Mrs. Peckham’s specialty is “to look after the feathering, cackling, roosting, rising, and general behavior of these hundred chicks. An honest, ignorant woman, she could not have passed an examination in the youngest class.”—Oliver Wendell Holmes Elsie Venner (1861).
Peck´sniff, “architect and land surveyor,” at Salisbury. He talks homilies even in drunkenness, prates about the beauty of charity, and duty of forgiveness, but is altogether a canting humbug, and is ultimately so reduced in position that he becomes a “drunken, begging, squalid, letter-writing man,” out at elbows, and almost shoeless. Pecksniff’s specialty is the “sleek, smiling abominations of hypocrisy.”
If ever man combined within himself all the mild qualities of the lamb with a considerable touch of the dove, and not a dash of the crocodile, or the least possible suggestion of the very mildest seasoning of the serpent, that man was Mr. Pecksniff, “the messenger of peace.”