No less praiseworthy are the sisters three,
The honor of the noble family
Of which I, meanest, boast myself to be, ...
Phyllis, Charyllis, and sweet Amaryllis:
Phyllis the fair is eldest of the three.
Spenser, Colin Clout’s Come Home Again (1594).
Phyllis and Brunetta, rival beauties. Phyllis procured for a certain festival some marvellous fabric of gold brocade in order to eclipse her rival, but Brunetta dressed the slave who bore her train, in a robe of the same material and cut in precisely the same fashion, while she herself wore simple black. Phyllis died of mortification.—The Spectator (1711, 1712, 1714).
Phynnodderee, a Manx spirit, similar to the Scotch brownie. Phynnodderee is an outlawed fairy, who absented himself from Fairy-court on the great levée day of the harvest moon. Instead of paying his respects to King Oberon, he remained in the glen of Rushen, dancing with a pretty Manx maid whom he was courting.
Physic a Farce is (His). Sir John Hill began his career as an apothecary in St. Martin’s Lane, London; became author, and amongst other things wrote farces. Grarrick said of him:
For physic and farces, his equal there scarce is:
His farces are physic, his physic a farce is.
Physician (The Beloved), St. Luke, the evangelist (Col. iv. 14).
Physicians (The prince of), Avicenna, the Arabian (980-1037).
Physigna´thos, king of the frogs, and son of Pelus (“mud”). Being wounded in the battle of the frogs and mice by Troxartas, the mouse king, he flees ingloriously to a pool, “and half in anguish of the flight, expires” (bk. iii. 112). The word means “puffed chaps.”
Great Physignathos I from Pelus’ race,
Begot in fair Hydromedê’s embrace.
Parnell, Battle of the Frogs and Mice, i. (about 1712).
Pibrac (Seigneur de), poet and diplomatist, author of Cinquante Quatrains (1574). Gorgibus bids his daughter to study Pibrac instead of trashy novels and poetry.