Fell in loue with these,
As did Pygmalion with his carvèd tree.
Lord 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.”
Pygmy, a dwarf. The pygmies were a nation of dwarfs always at war with the cranes of Scythia. They were not above a foot high, and lived somewhere at the “end of the earth”—either in Thrace, Ethiopia, India, or the Upper Nile. The pygmy women were mothers at the age of three, and old women at eight. Their houses were built of egg-shells. They cut down a blade of wheat with an axe and hatchet, as we fell huge forest trees.
One day, they resolved to attack Herculês in his sleep, and went to work as in a siege. An army attacked each hand, and the archers attacked the feet. Herculês awoke, and with the paw of his lion-skin overwhelmed the whole host, and carried them captive to King Eurystheus.
Swift has availed himself of this Grecian fable in his Gulliver’s Travels (“Lilliput,” 1726).
Pyke and Pluck (Messrs.), the tools and toadies of Sir Mulberry Hawk. They laugh at all his jokes, snub all who attempt to rival their patron, and are ready to swear to anything Sir Mulberry wishes to have confirmed.—C. Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby (1838).
Pylades and Orestes, inseparable friends. Pyladês was a nephew of King Agamemnon, and Orestês was Agamemnon’s son. The two cousins contracted a friendship which has become proverbial. Subsequently, Pyladês married Orestês’s sister, Electra.
Lagrange-Chancel has a French drama entitled Oreste et Pylade (1695). Voltaire also (Oreste, 1750). The two characters are introduced into a host of plays, Greek, Italian, French, and English. (See Andromache.)
Pynchons (The). Mr. Pynchon, a “representative of the highest and noblest class” in the Massachusetts Colony; one of the first settlers in Agawam (Springfield, Mass.).
Mrs. Pynchon (a second wife), a woman of excellent sense, with thorough reverence for her husband.