Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 19.djvu/419

Rh P L P L 403 to the death of Cicero (43 B.C.) or perhaps to the battle of Philippi (42 B.C.) or even later. This history, in the composition of which Pollio received assistance from the grammarian Ateius, was used as an authority by Plutarch and Appian. As a literary critic Pollio was very severe. He censured Sallust and Cicero and professed to detect in Livy s style certain provincialisms of his native Padua ; he attacked the Commentaries of Julius Ctesar, accusing their author of carelessness and credulity if not of deliberate falsification. Horace addressed one of his odes (ii. 1) to Pollio on the subject of his history. Pollio was the first Roman author who recited his writings to an audience of his friends, a practice which afterwards grew very common at Rome. All his writings are lost except a few fragments of his speeches (collected by Meyer, Orat. Rom. Frag. ), and three letters addressed to Cicero (Cic., Ad Fam., x. 31-33). POLLNITZ, KARL LUDWIG, FREIHERR VON (1692- 1775), known as a writer of memoirs, was born on the 25th February 1692. His father, G. Bernhard von Pollnitz, was a major-general and minister of state in the electorate of Brandenburg. Pollnitz was a man of restless and adventurous disposition, and after squandering his fortune travelled from court to court, his pleasant manners generally securing for him a kind reception. He was made reader to Frederick the Great, and afterwards the director of a theatre ; but before accepting these appoint ments he had served as a soldier in Austria, the States of the Church, and Spain. He was repeatedly converted to Catholicism and re-converted to the Reformed faith ; but he died a Catholic on the 23rd June 1775. The most famous work attributed to him is La Saxe galanie, which contains an account of the private life of Augustus of Saxony ; but it has been doubted whether he was the author of this book. His contemporaries expressed much admiration for the lively style of his Lettres et memoires, avec nouveaux memoires de sa vie et la relation de ses premiers voyages, and general interest was excited by his t.at abrege de la cour de Saxe sous le regne d Avguste III., roi de Pologne. He was probably the author of the Histoire secrete de la duchesse d Ifanovre, epouse de George L, roi de la Grande- Brctagnc. After his death Brunn issued Memoires de Pollnitz pour scrvir a I histoire des quatre derniers souverains de la maison de Brandebourg, royale de Prussc. POLLOK, ROBERT (1798-1827), was the author of The Course of Time, a poem that has passed through many editions, and is still a favourite in serious households in Scotland. The son of a small farmer, he was born in 1798 at Moorhouse, in the parish of Eaglesham in Renfrewshire, was originally destined for the plough, but trained himself for the university, took his degree at Glasgow, and studied for the ministry of the United Secession Church. Along with the very general ambition to wag his head in a pulpit he had a specific literary ambition ; he published Tales of the Covenanters while he was a divinity student, and planned and completed a poem on the spiritual life and destiny of man. This was the Course of Time. The unfortunate poet died within six months of its publica tion, at the age of twenty-nine. Excessive study had quickened a tendency to consumption. The poem was published in March 1827, and at once became popular. It is written in blank verse, in ten books, in the poetic diction of the 18th century, but with abundance of enthusiasm, impassioned elevation of feeling, and copious force of words and images. The poet s view of life was strongly Calvinistic. POLLOKSHAWS, a burgh of barony in Renfrewshire, Scotland, situated near the White Cart, on the Glasgow and Kilmarnock Railway, 2^ miles south by west of Glas gow, of which it is now reckoned a suburb, connected by tramway. The streets are irregular, but contain many good houses and shops. The principal buildings are the town-hall, the mechanics institute, and the public library and reading-room. The staple industries are cotton-spin ning, hand and power-loom weaving of silk and cotton fabrics, dyeing, bleaching, and calico-printing. There are also paper works, potteries, and large engineering works. The town was created a burgh of barony by royal charter in 1813, and is governed by a provost, a bailie, and six councillors. Population in 1871, 8921; in 1881, 9363. POLLUX. See CASTOR AND POLLUX. POLLUX, JULIUS, of Naucratis in Egypt, a Greek sophist of the 2d century. His education was begun by his father, a man of literary culture, and was continued by one Hadrian, but he is said neither to have attained to the excellencies nor fallen into the defects of his master. He taught at Athens, where, according to Philostratus, he was appointed to the professorship by the emperor Commodus on account of his melodious voice. He died at the age of fifty-eight, leaving a son behind him. Suidas gives a list of his rhetorical works, none of which have survived. Philostratus (Vit. Sopk., ii. 12) recognizes his natural abilities, but speaks of his rhetoric in very moderate terms. He was ridiculed by Athenodorus, a contemporary teacher at Athens. It is a disputed point whether or not he is the butt of Lucian s scathing satire in the Lexiphanes and Teacher of Rhetoric. In the Teacher of Rhetoric Lucian lashes a vile and ignorant person who gains a reputation as an orator by sheer effrontery ; the application of this probably grossly exaggerated- portrait to Pollux derives some colour from the remark of Philostratus that the speeches of Pollux were more remarkable for boldness than art. The Lexiphanes, a satire upon the use of obscure and obsolete words, may conceivably have been directed against Pollux as the author of the Onomasticon. This work, which we still possess, is a Greek dictionary in ten books dedicated to Commodus, and arranged not alphabetically but according to subject-matter. Though mainly a dictionary of synonyms and phrases, it supplies much rare and valuable information on many points of classical antiquity. It also contains numerous fragments of writers now lost. The first book treats of the gods and their worship, kings, speed and slowness, dyeing, traders and artisans, fertility and barren ness, times and seasons, houses, ships, war, horses, agriculture, the parts of the plough and the waggon, bees. Book ii. treats of the ages and names of man, the parts of his body, his mind and soul, &c. ; book iii. of kinship, marriage, citizenship, friend ship, love, the relation of master and slave, mines, journeying, rivers, health, sickness, wealth, poverty, &c. ; book iv. of the sciences and arts ; book v. of the chase, animals, compound words, love and hate, blame, fair greetings, inscriptions, &c. ; book vi. of feasts, wine, food, the talkative man, the flatterer, the passionate man, crimes, words compounded with 6/j.o, aw, &c. , gifts, laughter and weeping, &c. ; book vii. of trades ; book viii. of law and justice, magistrates, popular assemblies, &c. ; book ix. of cities, coins, games, synonyms of likeness and unlikeness, &c., compounds in en ; book x. of vessels, instruments, and tools. The chief editions of Pollux s Onomasticon are those of Aldus (Venice, 1502) ; J. H. Lederlin and Tib. Hemsterhuis (Amsterdam, 1706) ; &quot;W. Dindorf (Leipsic, 1824), containing the notes of previous commentators; Im. Bekker (Berlin, 1846), containing the Greek text only. POLO. This game, which is a species of &quot; hockey on horseback,&quot; is of Eastern origin, and seems to have been a favourite pastime in Persia, Tartary, and the frontiers of India from prehistoric times. Every district has a differ ent name for the game, and the rules under which it is played, although substantially identical, vary considerably on minor points. Thus in Little Tibet, Ladakh, and the adjacent districts the ground used is in the form of a parallelogram some hundred yards long with a goal at each end about 50 feet wide. Amongst the Manipuris, a semi-independent tribe on the north-east frontier of India, by whom the game is known as &quot; kunjai,&quot; the ground is about 120 yards by 50 yards and the whole of each end forms a goal. In other places the goals are about 400 yards apart, and the ground is 120 yards wide at each end, increasing in width towards the centre. In some of the early matches in the United Kingdom the ground was about 400 yards long and 200 yards wide, the width of the goal being from 30 to 35 yards. Under the present rules of the Hurlingham Club, which is now