Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol. 3: A Revised American Edition of the Reader's HandbookBrewer, Ebenezer Cobham
General
Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol. 3: A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook
Brewer, Ebenezer Cobham
Allusions; Fiction -- Dictionaries; Literature -- Dictionaries
=Pangloss= (_Dr. Peter_), an LL.D. and A.S.S. He began life as a
muffin-maker in Milk Alley. Daniel Dowlas, when he was raised from the
chandler’s shop in Gosport to the peerage, employed the doctor “to larn
him to talk English;” and subsequently made him tutor to his son Dick,
with a salary of £300 a year. Dr. Pangloss was a literary prig of
ponderous pomposity. He talked of a “locomotive morning,” of one’s
“sponsorial and patronymic appellations,” and so on; was especially fond
of quotations, to all of which he assigned the author, as “Lend me your
ears. Shakespeare. Hem!” or “_Verbum sat._ Horace. Hem!” He also
indulged in an affected “He! he!”--G. Colman, _The Heir-at-Law_ (1797).
A.S.S. stands for _Artium Societatis Socius_ (“Fellow of the Society of
Arts”).
_Pangloss_, an optimist philosopher. (The word means “All
Tongue.”)--Voltaire, _Candide_.
=Panjam=, a male idol of the Oroungou tribes of Africa; his wife is Alēka,
and his priests are called _panjans_. Panjam is the special protector of
kings and governments.
=Panjandrum= (_The Grand_), and village potentate or Brummagem magnate.
The word occurs in S. Foote’s farrago of nonsense, which he wrote to
test the memory of old Macklin, who said in a lecture “he had brought
his own memory to such perfection that he could learn anything by rote
on once hearing it.”
He was the Great Panjandrum of the place.--Percy Fitzgerald.
⁂ The squire of a village is the Grand Panjandrum, and the small gentry
the Picninnies, Joblillies, and Garyulies.
Foote’s nonsense lines are these:
So she went into the garden to cut a cabbage leaf to make an apple
pie; and at the same time a great she-bear, coming up the street,
pops its head into the shop. “What! no soap?” So he died, and she
very imprudently married the barber! and there were present the
Picninnies, and the Joblillies, and the Garyulies, and the Grand
Panjandrum himself, with the little round button at top, and they
all fell to playing the game of catch as catch can, till the
gunpowder ran out at the heel of their boots.--S. Foote, _The
Quarterly Review_, xcv. 516, 517 (1854).
=Pan´ope= (3 _syl._), one of the nereids. Her “sisters” are the
sea-nymphs. Panopê was invoked by sailors in storms.
Sleek Panope with all her sisters played.
Milton, _Lycidas_, 95 (1638).
=Pansy Osmund=, daughter of Mr. Osmund and Madame Merle, but ignorant who
her mother is. After her father’s second marriage, the girl, who has
been brought up by the nuns, is extremely fond of her step-mother, and
when she grows under her fostering care into a lovely woman, becomes
attached to Edward Rosier, a man of small fortune. Her father, cold and
hard as stone, decrees that she shall marry an English lord, and upon
her refusal, sends her back to the convent.--Henry James, Jr., _Portrait
of a Lady_ (1881).
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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