owing partly to his naturally stern and now embittered temper, and partly to the difficult position in which he was placed, was unfortunate. On the Coa in July 1810 Craufurd's division became involved in an action, and Picton, his nearest neighbour, refused to support him, as Wellington's direct orders were to avoid an engagement. Details of the incident will be found in Oman, Peninsular War, vol. iii. Shortly after this, however, at Busaco, Picton found and used his first great opportunity for distinction. Here he had a plain duty, that of repulsing the French attack, and he performed that duty with a skill and resolution which indicated his great powers as a troop-leader. After the winter in the lines of Torres Vedras, he added to his reputation and to that of his division, the 3rd, at Fuentes d'Onor. In September he was given the local rank of lieutenant-general, and in the same month the division won great glory by its rapid and orderly retirement under severe pressure from the French cavalry at El Bodon. In October Picton was appointed to the colonelcy of the 77th regiment. In the first operations of 1812 Picton and Craufurd, side by side for the last time, stormed the two breaches of Ciudad Rodrigo, Craufurd and Picton's second in command. Major-General Mackinnon, being mortally wounded. At Badajoz, a month later, the successful storming of the fortress was due to his daring self-reliance and penetration in converting the secondary attack on the castle, delivered by the 3rd division, into a real one. He was himself wounded in this terrible engagement, but would not leave the ramparts, and the day after, having recently inherited a fortune, he gave every survivor of his command a guinea. His wound, and an attack of fever, compelled him to return, to England to recruit his health, but he reappeared at the front in April 1813. While in England he was invested with the collar and badge of a K.B. by the prince regent, and in June he was made a lieutenant-general in the army. The conduct of the 3rd division under his leadership at the battle of Vittoria and in the engagements in the Pyrenees raised his reputation as a resolute and skilful fighting general to a still higher point. Early in 1814 he was offered, but after consulting Wellington declined, the command of the British forces operating on the side of Catalonia. He thus bore his share in the Orthez campaign and in the final victory before Toulouse.
On the break-up of the division the officers presented Picton with a valuable service of plate, and on the 24th of June 1814 he received for the seventh time the thanks of the House of Commons for his great services. Somewhat to his disappointment he was not included amongst the generals who were raised to the peerage, but early in 1815 he was made a G.C.B. When Napoleon returned from Elba, Picton, at Wellington's request, accepted a high command in the Anglo-Dutch army. He was severely wounded at Quatre Bras on the 16th of June, but concealed his wound and retained command of his troops, and at Waterloo on the 18th, while repulsing with impetuous valour “one of the most serious attacks made by the enemy on our position,” he was shot through the head by a musket ball. His body was brought home to London, and buried in the family vault at St George's, Hanover Square. A public monument was erected to his memory in St Paul's Cathedral, by order of parliament, and in 1823 another was erected at Carmarthen by subscription, the king contributing a hundred guineas thereto.
See Robinson's Life of Sir Thomas Picton (London, 1836), with which, however, compare Napier's and Oman's histories of the Peninsular War as to controversial points.
PICTOU, a seaport, port of entry, and capital of Pictou
county, Nova Scotia, 90 m. N.E. by N. of Halifax, on a branch
of the Intercolonial railway. Pop. (1901), 3235, It has
several valuable industries, and is the shipping port for the
adjacent coal-mines. The Academy, founded in 1818, played
an important part in the early educational history of the
province, and still enjoys a high reputation.
PICUS, in Roman mythology, originally the woodpecker, the
favourite bird and symbol of Mars as the god of both nature
and war. He appears later as a spirit of the forests, endowed
with the gift of prophecy, haunting springs and streams, with
a special sanctuary in a grove on the Aventine. As a god of
agriculture, especially connected with manuring the soil, he is
called the son of Stercutus (from stercus, dung, a name of
Saturn). Again, Picus is the first king of Latium, son of Saturn
and father of Faunus Virgil (Aen. vii. 170) describes the
reception of the ambassadors of Aeneas by Latinus in an ancient
temple or palace, containing figures of his divine ancestors,
amongst them Picus, famous as an augur and soothsayer. According
to Ovid (Metam. xiv., 320), Circe, while gathering herbs
in the forest, saw the youthful hero out hunting, and immediately
fell in love with him. Picus rejected her advances, and the
goddess in her anger changed him into a woodpecker, which
pecks impotently at the branches of trees, but still retains
prophetic powers. The purple cloak which Picus wore fastened
by a golden clasp is preserved in the plumage of the bird. In
the simplest form of art, he was represented by a wooden pillar
surmounted by a woodpecker; later, as a young man with the
bird upon his head.
Picumnus is merely another form of Picus, and with him is associated his brother and double Pilummus. Picumnus, a rustic delty (like Picus) and husband of Pomona, is specially concerned with the manuring of the soil and hence called Sterquilmus, while Pilumnus is the inventor of the pounding of grain, so named from the pestle (pilum) used by bakers. Under a different aspect, the pair were regarded as the guardians of women in childbed and of new-born children. Before the child was taken up and formally recognized by the father, a couch was set out for them in the atrium, where their presence guarded it from all evil. Augustine (De civitate dei, vi 9) mentions a curious custom: to protect a woman in childbed from possible violence on the part of Silvanus, the assistance of three deities was invoked—Intercldona (the hewer), Pilumnus (the pounder) and Deverra (the sweeper). These deities were symbolically represented by three men who went round the house by night. One smote the threshold with an axe, another with a pestle, the third swept it with a broom—three symbols of culture (for trees were hewn down with the axe, grain pounded with the pestle, and the fruits of the field swept up with the broom) which Silvanus could not endure.
PIDGIN [or Pigeon] ENGLISH, the lingua franca of the seaports
of China, the Straits Settlements in the Far East, consisting
in a jargon of corrupted English words with some intermixture
of Portuguese and Malay, following Chinese idiomatic
usage. It is employed as a means of communication between
foreigners and the native Chinese. The word “pidgin” is the
Chinese corruption of “business.”
PIE. (1) The name of the bird more generally known as
the magpie (q.v.). The word comes through the French from
Lat. pica (q.v.). It is probably from the black and white or
spotted appearance of the bird that the name “pie” or “pye”
(Lat. pica) was given to the ordinal, a table or calendar which
supplemented that which gave the services for the fixed festivals,
&c., and pointed out the effect on them of the festivals rendered
movable by the changing date of Easter. An English act of
1549 (3 & 4 Edw. VI. c. 10) abolished “pies” with manuals,
legends, primers and other service books. The parti-coloured
appearance of the magpie also gives rise to the term “piebald,”
applied to an animal, more particularly a horse, which is marked
with large irregular patches of white and black; where the colour
is white and some colour other than black, the more appropriate
word is “skew-bald,” i.e. marked with “skew” or irregular
patches. (2) A dish made of meat, fish or other ingredients,
also of vegetables or fruit, baked in a covering of pastry; in
English usage, where “fruit” is the ingredient, the dish is
generally called a “tart,” except in the case of “apple-pie.”
The word appears early in the 14th century of meat or fish pies.
The expression “to eat humble-pie,” i.e. to make an apology, to retract or recant, is a facetious adaptation of “umbles” (O. Fr. nombles, connected with Lat. lumbus, loin or umbilicus, navel), the inner parts of a deer, to “humble” (Lat. humilis, lowly). An “umble-pie,” made of the inner parts of a deer or other animal, was once a favourite dish. “Printers' pie,” i.e. a mass of confused type, is a transferred sense of “pie,” the dish, or of “pie,” the ordinal, from the difficulty of decipherment.
PIEDMONT (Ital. Piemonle; Low Lat. Pedemons and Pedemontium),
a territorial division (compartimento) of northern
