PERUGIA 



PESSIMISM 



83 



of painting. In 1860 it was made a part of the 

 kingdom of Italy. 



Perugia, LAKE OF. See TRASIMENE LAKE. 



Peruglno, a celebrated Italian painter, whose 

 real name was PIETRO VANNUCCI, was born at 

 Citta della Pieve in Unibria, in 1446, but estab- 

 lished himself in the neighbouring city of Perugia, 

 whence his usual appellation. Vasari says he 

 studied under Verrocchio at Florence. He exe- 

 cuted important works, no longer extant, at Flor- 

 ence, Perugia (1475), and Cerqneto (1478). At 

 Home, whither he went about 1483, Sixtus IV. 

 employed him in the Sistine Chapel ; his fresco of 

 ' Christ giving the Keys to Peter ' is the best of 

 those still visible others by him being destroyed 

 to make way for Michelangelo's ' Last Judgment.' 

 During his next sojourn at Florence (1486-99) he 

 had Raphael for his pupil. Here he was fined for 

 waylaying and assaulting a citizen, and became 

 somewhat too fond of money, repeating his works 

 and leaving much of the execution to pupils. At 

 Perugia (1499-1504) he adorned the Hall of the 

 Cumbio, with the assistance of Raphael and other 

 pupils ; but after 1500 his art visibly declined. In 

 hi* second Roman sojourn ( 1507-12) he also, along 

 with other painters, decorated the Stanze of the 

 Vatican ; and one of his works there, the Stanza 

 del Incendio, was the only fresco spared when 

 Raphael was commissioned to substitute his works 

 for those formerly painted on the walls and ceilings. 

 The new school, with Leonardo da Vinci, Michel- 

 angelo, and Raphael, was now in the ascendant, 

 anu Perugino's popularity waned. He was again 

 at Perugia in 1512, and painted a number of pictures 

 tli^re. He was painting frescoes in a church at 

 Castellodi Fontignauo, near Perugia (one of which 

 frescoes is now at South Kensington), when he was 

 seized by the plague, of which he died in 1524. 



Perugino's art was religious, though he is said 

 by Vasari (biased in all regards by Michelangelo's 

 contempt for Penigino) to have been an open dis- 

 believer in the immortality of the soul. In his 

 figures, very unequally drawn, there is a peculiar 

 tenderness of expression verging on mawkishness ; 

 his execution was delicate, his colour admirable. 

 But he is not remarkable for originality or intensity. 



Peruvian Bark. See CINCHONA. 

 Peruvian Gooseberry. See WINTER- 



OHXUY. 



Pes'aro (the ancient Fimunim), a town of 

 Italy, stands on the right bank of the Foglia, here 

 crossed by a bridge of Trajan's age, 1 mile from 

 the Adriatic and 37 miles NW. of Ancona by rail. 

 Its streets are broad, and adorned with palaces and 

 i-lmrches, and the town is surrounded with walls 

 and defended by a citadel ( 1474) and a fort. It is 

 a bishop's seat ; there are two cathedrals, one new, 

 the other old. .Silks, pottery, iron, and leather are 

 manufactured ; and an active trade is carried on 

 in these goods anil in wine, olive-oil, ami fruits. 

 l'"|>- 12,547. The city is associated in literary 

 lustory with the natne of Tasso, some of his MSS. 

 lif-ing preserved in one of the town museums ; it is 

 also the birthplace of Rossini. Made a Roman 

 i-olony in 184 B.C., it was destroyed by the Goths; 

 then, having been rebuilt by Belisarius, it became 

 "in- of the Pentapolis. From 755 to \285 it belonged 

 to the popes, then to the Malatestas till 1445, then 

 to the QforzM and Delle Roveres, in 1631 again to 

 the popes, and finally in 1860 to Italy. 



Pescadores Islands. See FORMOSA. 



Pesrhiera, a fortress of Italy, a member of the 

 Quadrilateral (q.v.), stands partly on an island in 

 the Mincio and partly on the right bank of that 

 river, at it* outlet from the Lnke of Garda, 14 

 miles by rail W. of Verona and 77 E. of Milan. 



Besides a strong citadel and an arsenal, there is a 

 fortified camp. The fortress has played a pro- 

 minent part in the warlike events which have 

 taken place in North Italy, especially after the 

 Napoleonic wars began down to 1859. Pop. 1653. 



Peshawar, or PESHAWUR, a town of India, 

 104 miles from the entrance of the Khyber Pass, 

 190 E. by S. of Kabul, and 276 by rail NW. of 

 Lahore. Although a frontier town and occupying 

 a strategic position of the utmost importance, its 

 only defences are a mud wall and a small fort ; 

 but 2 miles west of the city are the cantonments, 

 with a garrison of six regiments and a battery 

 of Royal Artillery. The population in 1891 was 

 84,191, including the cantonments. Peshawar is the 

 seat of extensive commerce between Afghanistan 

 and India; gold, silver, lace, hides (all four from 

 Bokhara), horses, mules, fruits, woollen and skin 

 coats (all five from Kabul ) being exchanged for tea, 

 English piece-goods, wheat, salt, rice, butter, oil- 

 seeds, oil, and sugar. The district has an area of 

 2504 so. m. and a pop. of 592,674 ; the division, an 

 area of 8381 and a total pop. of 1,189,462. 



Peshito (Syriac plshitta, 'the simple'), the 

 Syriac Vulgate. See BIBLE, Vol. II. p. 126. 



Pessimism is the doctrine that on the whole 

 the world is bad rather than good. It does not 

 necessarily mean that the world is the worst possible 

 of all conceivable worlds, as the fact of its being 

 the verbal opposite to Optimism, the term employed 

 to describe the Leibnitzian philosophy, would seem 

 to imply ; it means simply that the world is so 

 bad that it would be better if it did not exist. 

 Pessimism presents itself in a twofold aspect ( 1 ) 

 as a settled attitude of mind or permanent mood of 

 feeling, and (2) as a philosophical system. The 

 former springs out of the contemplation of the 

 antagonism that exists in the world between 

 natural laws and moral laws, between the world as 

 it actually is and the world as it ought to lie ; it is 

 the outcome of reflection, and is largely conditioned 

 by individual temperament. Thus it is coeval 

 with the dawn of conscious intelligence, and early 

 found fit literary expression. The problem of the 

 existence of evil, the connection between suffering 

 and sin, is the burden of the ancient Hebrew Book 

 of Job ; and the Jewish thinker who wrote 

 Ecclesiastes rings the changes upon the nothing- 

 ness of life, and sums up his plaint in the hopeless 

 refrain, ' Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, all 

 is vanity.' Different forms of the same temper of 

 mind are given utterance to with more or less of 

 moral indignation in Innocent III.'s De Miseria 

 Humana Coniiitionis, and the satirical works of 

 Juvenal and Carlyle and others. The same ' world- 

 sadness ' ( Weltschmerz), though expressed in more 

 personal and passionate language, colours deeply 

 the poetry of Omar Khayyam, Leopardi, Heine, 

 and Byron ; and the negation of the problem, ' Is 

 life worth living?' forms an undercurrent in much 

 of our best modern literature. But the pessimist ir 

 temper, culminating in the persuasion of tl> 

 nothingness and vanity of human life, has had more 

 than an individual expression ; it has entered deeply 

 into the substance and structure of two of the 

 world's greatest religious beliefs viz. Christianity 

 and Buddhism. The Christian is familiar with the 

 doctrine that this earthly life is a vale of tears and 

 woe, and that its pleasures and joys are illusory, 

 being always accompanied with sin and suffering 

 and evil, from which he can only escape by fixing 

 his hopes upon a better life in the world to come. 

 Buddha's practical teaching (see BUDDHISM) turns 

 in great part upon the desire to escape from the 

 sorrows of life and the deceptive illusions of exist- 

 ence (may a). 



But here, in this latter point, the pessimistic 



