Peg. Drink to your peg. King Edgar ordered “that pegs should be fastened into drinking-horns at stated distances and whoever drank beyond his peg at one draught should be obnoxious to a severe punishment.”
I had lately a peg-tankard in my hand. It had on the inside a row of eight pins, one above another, from bottom to top. It held two quarts, so that there was a gill of liquor between peg and peg. Whoever drank short of his pin or beyond it, was obliged to drink to the next, and so on till the tankard was drained to the bottom.—Sharpe, History of the Kings of England.
Peg-a-Ramsey, the heroine of an old song. Percy says it was an indecent ballad. Shakespeare alludes to it in his Twelfth Night, act ii. sc. 3 (1614).
James I. had been much struck with the beauty and embarrassment of the pretty Peg-a-Ramsey? as he called her.—Sir W. Scott.
Peg´asus, the winged horse of the Muses. It was caught by Bellerophon, who mounted thereon, and destroyed the Chimæra; but when he attempted to ascend to heaven, he was thrown from the horse, and Pegasus mounted alone to the skies, where it became the constellation of the same name.
To break Pegasus’s neck, to write halting poetry.
Some, free from rhyme or reason, rule or check,
Break Priscian’s head, and Pegasus’s neck.
Pope, The Dunciad, iii. 161 (1728).
*** To “break Priscian’s head,” is to write ungrammatically. Priscian was a great grammarian of the fifth century.
Pegg (Catharine), one of the mistresses of Charles II. She was the daughter of Thomas Pegg, Esq., of Yeldersay, in Derbyshire.
Peggot´ty (Clara), servant of Mrs. Copperfield, and the faithful old nurse of David Copperfield. Her name “Clara” was tabooed, because it was the name of Mrs. Copperfield. Clara Peggotty married Barkis, the carrier.