PEABODY, GEORGE, philanthropist, born at Danvers, now Peabody, in Massachusetts, U.S.; made a large fortune as a dry-goods merchant in Baltimore and as a stockbroker as well in London; gave away for benevolent purposes in his lifetime a million and a half of money, and left to his relatives one million more; died in London; his body was laid beside his mother’s at South Danvers, U.S. (1795-1869).

PEACE SOCIETY, a society founded in 1816 for the promotion of permanent and universal peace; advocates a gradual, proportionate, and simultaneous disarmament of all nations and the principle of arbitration.

PEACOCK, THOMAS LOVE, English novelist, born at Weymouth; was pretty much a self-taught scholar, and no mean one, as his literary activity over half a century abundantly showed; held a post in the India House, his predecessor being James Mill and his successor John Stuart Mill; was an intimate friend of Shelley and the father-in-law of George Meredith; he made his first literary appearance as a poet in two small volumes of poems, and his first novel was “Headlong Hall” as his latest was “Gryll Grange,” all of them written in a vein of conventional satire, and more conspicuous for wit than humour; Thackeray owed not a little to him, little as the generality did, he being “too learned for a shallow age” (1785-1866).

PEARSON, JOHN, English prelate, born in Norfolk; held a succession of preferments in the Church, and in the end the bishopric of Chester, author of a very learned work “Exposition of the Creed,” of which Bentley said, “its very dross is gold” (1612-1686).

PEASANT WAR or BAUERNKRIEG, revolt of the peasantry in the S. and W. of Germany against the oppression and cruelty of the nobles and clergy which broke out at different times from 1500 to 1525, and which, resulting in their defeat, rendered their lot harder than before.  The cause of the Reformation, held answerable for the movement, suffered damage as well, but indeed the excesses of the insurgents were calculated to provoke the retribution that was meted out to them.

PECHILI, GULF OF, a great land-locked bay opening in the NW. of the Yellow Sea, receives the waters of the Hoang-ho, and on opposite tongues of land at the mouth of it stand Port Arthur and Wei-hai-Wei.

PECKSNIFF, a pronounced hypocrite in Dickens’s “Martin Chuzzlewit,” and who lies and cants whether he is drunk or sober.

PECOCK, REGINALD, bishop in succession of St. Asaph and Chichester, born in Wales; the author, among other works, of the “Repressor of Over Much Blaming of the Clergy” and the “Book of Faith”; he wrote on behalf of the Church against Lollards, but he offended Churchmen as well as the latter—­Churchmen because he agreed with the Lollards in regard to the Bible as the rule of faith, and the Lollards because he appealed to reason as the interpreter of the Bible; he displeased the clergy also by his adoption in theological debate of the mother-tongue, but figures since in literature as the first English theologian; he was accused of treating authority with disrespect as well as setting up reason above revelation, obliged to recant in a most humiliating manner, deprived of his bishopric, and condemned to solitary confinement, away from his books, all to a few, and denied the use of writing materials (1390-1460).