of the 17th and the beginning of the 18th century The invention is due to Abraham Cowley, who, probably in Paris—“a place where he had no other books to direct him”—and perhaps in 1650, found a text of Pindar and determined to imitate the Greek poetry in English, without having comprehended the system upon which Pindar's prosody was built up. Cowley published, however, in 1656, fifteen Pindarique Odes, which became the model on which countless imitators founded their pindarics The erroneous form of these poems, which were absolutely without discipline of structure, was first exposed by Congreve, exactly half a century later, he very justly describing them as “bundles of rambling incoherent thoughts, expressed in a like parcel of irregular stanzas, which also consist of such another complication of disproportioned, uncertain and perplexed verses and rhymes.” This is harsh, but it describes a pindaric with absolute justice. Cowley had not been aware that “there is nothing more regular than the Odes of Pindar,” and that his poems were constructed in harmony with rigid prosodical laws in strophe, antistrophe and epode; “the liberty which Pindar took in his numbers, which has been so much misunderstood and misapplied by his pretended imitators, was only in varying the stanzas in different odes; but in each particular ode they are ever correspondent one to another in their turns, and according to the order of the ode.” These excellent critical remarks were made by Congreve in his Discourse on the Pindarique Ode of 1706, and from that date forward the use of pindarics ceased to be so lax and frantic as it had been during the previous fifty years. The time had now passed in which such a critic as Sprat could praise “this loose and unconfined measure” as having “all the grace and harmony of the most confined” It began to be felt that the English pindaric was a blunder founded upon a misconception. If we examine Cowley's “Resurrection,” which was considered in the 17th century to be a model of the style, and “truly pindarical,” we find it to be a shapeless poem of 64 lines, arbitrarily divided, not into strophes but into four stanzas of unequal volume and structure. the lines which form these stanzas are of lengths varying from three feet to seven feet, with rhymes repeated in wilful disorder, the whole forming a mere vague caricature of Pindar's brilliant odes. The very laxity of these pindarics attracted the poets of the unlyrical close of the 17th century, and they served the purpose not only of Dryden and Pope, but of a score of lesser poets among whom Oldham, Mrs Behn, Otway, Sprat, Flatman and many others ere prominent. The pindaric became the almost necessary form in which to indite a poem of compliment on a birth, a wedding or a funeral. Although the vogue of these forms hardly survived the age of Anne, something of the vicious tradition of them still remained, and even in the odes of Wordsworth, Shelley and Coleridge the broken versification of Cowley's pindarics occasionally survives. Tennyson's Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington (1852) is the latest important specimen of a pindaric in English literature. (E. G.)
PINDARIS, a word of uncertain origin, applied to the irregular horsemen who accompanied the Mahratta armies in India
during the 18th century when the Mughal Empire was breaking
up, loosely organized under self-chosen leaders, each band was
usually attached to one or other of the great Mahratta chieftains.
Their special characteristic was that they received no pay,
but rather purchased the privilege of plundering on their own
account. The majority of them seem to have been Mahommedans:
when the regular forces of the Mahrattas had been
broken up in the campaigns conducted by Sir Arthur Wellesley
and Lord Lake in 1802–04, the Pindaris made their headquarters
in Malwa, under the tacit protection of Sindhia and Holkar.
They ere accustomed to assemble every year at the beginning
of November, and sally forth into British territory in search
of plunder In one such raid upon the Masulipatam coast they
plundered 339 villages, killing or wounding 682 persons, torturing
3600 and carrying off property worth a quarter of a million.
In 1808-09 they plundered Gujarat, and in 1812 Mirzapur In
1814 they were reckoned at 25,000 to 30,000 horsemen, half of
them well armed. At last the evil became intolerable, and in
1817 the marquess of Hastings obtained the consent of the East
India Company to the organized campaign, known as the Pindari
War. The Pindaris were surrounded on all sides by a great
army, consisting of 120,000 men and 300 guns, which converged
upon them from Bengal, the Deccan and Gujarat under the
supreme command of Lord Hastings in person. Sindhia was
overawed and forced to sign the treaty of Gwalior, consenting
to aid in the extirpation of the Pindaris, whom he had hitherto
protected. The Peshwa at Poona, the Bhonsla raja at Nagpur
and the army of the infant Holkar each took up arms, but were
separately defeated. The Pindaris themselves offered little
opposition. Amir Khan, by far their most powerful leader,
accepted the conditions offered to him; and his descendant is
now Nawab of the state of Tonk in Rajputana. The rest
surrendered or were hunted down, the fate of Chitu, one of the
most notorious, being to perish in a tiger's den. These military
operations were followed by the pacification of Central India
under the administration of Sir John Malcolm.
See J. Grant Duff, History of the Mahrattas (1826); and Major Ross of Bladensburg, Marquess of Hastings (Rulers of India Series) (1893).
PIND DADAN KHAN, a town of British India, in the Jhelum district of the Punjab, situated near the right bank of the river Jhelum, on the Sind-Sagar branch of the North-Western railway. Pop. (1901), 13,770. It is an important centre of trade, and its manufactures include boats, brass-ware, pottery, embroidered scarves and riding-whips.
PINDUS, the ancient name of the rugged group of mountains which separates Thessaly from Epirus, and branches south in
various directions. The geographical name is sometimes
extended over all these branches, and so reaches from Aetolia
to the Gulf of Lamia. The northern part of the ridge was know n
as Lacmon. There is no modern name covering the whole
range, but its different parts have separate names. Several of
them attain a height of 7000 ft. or more.
PINE (Lat. Pinus, Gr. πίτυς), a name given by the ancients to some of the resinous cone-bearing trees to which it is now
applied, and, as limited by modern botanists, the designation
of a large genus of true conifers, differing from the firs in their
hard woody cone-scales being thickened at the apex, and in
their slender needle-shaped leaves growing from a membranous
sheath, either in pairs or from three to five together—each tuft
representing an abortive branch, springing from the axil of a
partially deciduous scale-leaf, the base of which remains closely
adherent to the stem. The numerous male catkins are generally
arranged in dense whorls around the bases of the young shoots;
the anther-scales, surmounted by a crest-like appendage, shed
their abundant pollen by longitudinal slits; the two ovules at
the base of the inner side of each fertile cone-scale develop into
a pair of winged seeds, which drop from the opening scales when
mature—as in the allied genera.
The pines are widely distributed over the north temperate zone, in the southern portions chiefly confined to the mountains, along which, in Central America, a few are found within the tropic; in more northern regions they frequently form extensive forests, sometimes hardly mingled with other trees. Their soft, straight-grained, resinous and often durable wood gives to many kinds a high economic value, and some are among the most esteemed of timber trees.
Of the two-leaved species, P. sylvestris, the pine of northern Europe, may be taken as a type. When growing in perfection it is one of the finest of the group, and perhaps the most picturesque of forest trees; attaining a height of from 70 to 120 ft., it is of conical growth when young, but in maturity acquires a spreading cedar or mushroom-like top, with a straight trunk of from 2 to 4 ft. in diameter at the base, and gnarled twisted boughs, densely clothed at the extremities with glaucous green foliage, which contrasts strongly with the fiery red-brown bark. The leaves are rather short, curved, and often twisted; the male catkins, in dense cylindrical whorls, fill the air of the forest with their sulphur-like pollen in May or June, and fecundate the purple female flowers, which, at first sessile and erect, then
