← Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" / Volume 4, Part 4
Chapter 2
Preface (part 2)
Two eminent Baptists, with whom Bunyan had been engaged in controversy, were in great peril and distress. Danvers was in danger of being hanged; and Kiffin's grandsons were actually hanged. The tradition is that, during those evil days, Bunyan was forced to disguise himself as a wagoner, and that he preached to his congregation at Bedford in a smock-frock, with a cart-whip in his hand. But soon a great change took place. James II. was at open war with the church, and found it necessary to court the dissenters. Some of the creatures of the government tried to secure the aid of Bunyan. They probably knew that he had written in praise of the indulgence of 1672, and therefore hoped that he might be equally pleased with the indulgence of 1687. But fifteen years of thought, observation and commerce with the world had made him wiser. Nor were the cases exactly parallel. Charles was a professed Protestant; James was a professed Papist. The object of Charles's indulgence was disguised; the object of James's indulgence was patent. Bunyan was not deceived. He exhorted his hearers to prepare themselves by fasting and prayer for the danger which menaced their civil and religious liberties, and refused even to speak to the courtier who came down to remodel the corporation of Bedford, and who, as was supposed, had it in charge to offer some municipal dignity to the bishop of the Baptists.
Bunyan did not live to see the Revolution. In the summer of 1688 he undertook to plead the cause of a son with an angry father, and at length prevailed on the old man not to disinherit the young one. This good work cost the benevolent intercessor his life. He had to ride through heavy rain. He came drenched to his lodgings on Snow Hill, was seized with a violent fever, and died in a few days (August 31). He was buried in Bunhill Fields; and many Puritans, to whom the respect paid by Roman Catholics to the reliques and tombs of saints seemed childish or sinful, are said to have begged with their dying breath that their coffins might be placed as near as possible to the coffin of the author of the Pilgrim's Progress.
The fame of Bunyan during his life, and during the century which followed his death, was indeed great, but was almost entirely confined to religious families of the middle and lower classes. Very seldom was he during that time mentioned with respect by any writer of great literary eminence. Young coupled his prose with the poetry of the wretched D'Urfey. In the Spiritual Quixote, the adventures of Christian are ranked with those of Jack the Giant-Killer and John Hickathrift. Cowper ventured to praise the great allegorist, but did not venture to name him. It is a significant circumstance that, for a long time all the numerous editions of the Pilgrim's Progress were evidently meant for the cottage and the servants' hall. The paper, the printing, the plates, were all of the meanest description. In general, when the educated minority and the common people differ about the merit of a book, the opinion of the educated minority finally prevails. The Pilgrim's Progress is perhaps the only book about which the educated minority has come over to the opinion of the common people.
The attempts which have been made to improve and to imitate this book are not to be numbered. It has been done into verse; it has been done into modern English. The Pilgrimage of Tender Conscience, the Pilgrimage of Good Intent, the Pilgrimage of Seek Truth, the Pilgrimage of Theophilus, the Infant Pilgrim, the Hindoo Pilgrim, are among the many feeble copies of the great original. But the peculiar glory of Bunyan is that those who most hated his doctrines have tried to borrow the help of his genius. A Catholic version of his parable may be seen with the head of the virgin in the title-page. On the other hand, those Antinomians for whom his Calvinism is not strong enough, may study the Pilgrimage of Hephzibah, in which nothing will be found which can be construed into an admission of free agency and universal redemption. But the most extraordinary of all the acts of Vandalism by which a fine work of art was ever defaced was committed in the year 1853. It was determined to transform the Pilgrim's Progress into a Tractarian book. The task was not easy; for it was necessary to make two sacraments the most prominent objects in the allegory, and of all Christian theologians, avowed Quakers excepted, Bunyan was the one in whose system the sacraments held the least prominent place. However, the Wicket Gate became a type of baptism, and the House Beautiful of the eucharist. The effect of this change is such as assuredly the ingenious person who made it never contemplated. For, as not a single pilgrim passes through the Wicket Gate in infancy, and as Faithful hurries past the House Beautiful without stopping, the lesson which the fable in its altered shape teaches, is that none but adults ought to be baptized, and that the eucharist may safely be neglected. Nobody would have discovered from the original Pilgrim's Progress that the author was not a Paedobaptist. To turn his book into a book against Paedobaptism, was an achievement reserved for an Anglo-Catholic divine. Such blunders must necessarily be committed by every man who mutilates parts of a great work, without taking a comprehensive view of the whole.
(M.)
The above article has been slightly corrected as to facts, as compared with its form in the 9th edition. Bunyan's works were first partially collected in a folio volume (1692) by his friend Charles Doe. A larger edition (2 vols., 1736-1737) was edited by Samuel Wilson of the Barbican. In 1853 a good edition (3 vols., Glasgow) was produced by George Offer. Southey's edition (1830) of the Pilgrim's Progress contained his Life of Bunyan. Since then various editions of the Pilgrim's Progress, many illustrated (by Cruikshank, Byam Shaw, W. Strang and others), have appeared. An interesting life by "the author of Mark Rutherford" (W. Hale White) was published in 1904. Other lives are by J.A. Froude (1880) in the "English Men of Letters" series, and E. Venables (1888); but the standard work on the subject is John Bunyan; his Life, Times and Work (1885), by the Rev. J. Brown of Bedford. A bronze statue, by Boehm, was presented to the town by the duke of Bedford in 1874.
The name, in various forms as Buignon, Buniun, Bonyon or Binyan, appears in the local records of Elstow and the neighbouring parishes at intervals from as far back as 1199. They were small freeholders, but all the property except the cottage had been lost in the time of Bunyan's grandfather. Bunyan's own account of his family as the "meanest and most despised of all the families of the land" must be put down to his habitual self-depreciation. Thomas Bunyan had a forge and workshop at Elstow.
There is no direct evidence to show on which side he fought, but the balance of probability justifies this view.
There is no means of identifying the place besieged. It has been assumed to be Leicester, which was captured by the Royalists in May 1645, and recovered by Fairfax in the next month.
Bunyan had joined, in 1653, the nonconformist community which met under a certain Mr Gifford at St John's church, Bedford. This congregation was not Baptist, properly so called, as the question of baptism, with other doctrinal points, was left open. When Bunyan removed to Bedford in 1655, he became a deacon of this church, and two years later he was formally recognized as a preacher, his fame soon spreading through the neighbouring counties. His wife died soon after their removal to Bedford, and he also lost his friend and pastor, Mr Gifford. His earliest work was directed against Quaker mysticism and appeared in 1656. It was entitled Some Gospel Truths Opened; it was followed in the same year by a second tract in the same sense, A Vindication of Gospel Truths.
He was not, however, as has often been stated, confined in the old gaol which stood on the bridge over the Ouse, but in the county gaol.
His formal pardon is dated the 13th of September 1672; but five months earlier he had received a royal licence to preach, and acted for the next three years as pastor of the nonconformist body to which he belonged, in a barn on the site of which stands the present Bunyan Meeting.
It is now generally supposed that Bunyan wrote his Pilgrim's Progress, not during his twelve years' imprisonment, but during a short period of incarceration in 1675, probably in the old gaol on the bridge.
He had resumed his pastorate in Bedford after his imprisonment of 1675, and, although he frequently preached in London to crowded congregations, and is said in the last year of his life to have been, of course unofficially, chaplain to Sir John Shorter, lord mayor of London, he remained faithful to his own congregation.
BUNZLAU, a town of Germany, in Prussian Silesia, on the right bank of the Bober, 27 m. from Liegnitz on the Berlin-Breslau railway, which crosses the river by a great viaduct. Pop. (1900) 14,590. It has a handsome market square, an Evangelical and a Roman Catholic church, and monuments to the Russian field marshal Kutusov, who died here, and to the poet Martin Opitz von Boberfeld. The Bunzlau pottery is famous; woollen and linen cloth are manufactured, and there is a considerable trade in grain and cattle. Bunzlau (Boleslavia) received its name in the 12th century from Duke Boleslav, who separated it from the duchy of Glogau. Its importance was increased by numerous privileges and the possession of extensive mining works. It was frequently captured and recaptured in the wars of the 17th century, and in 1739 was completely destroyed by fire. On the 30th of August 1813 the French were here defeated on the retreat from the Katzbach by the Silesian army of the allies.
BUONAFEDE, APPIANO (1716-1793), Italian philosopher, was born at Comachio, in Ferrara, and died in Rome. He became professor of theology at Naples in 1740, and, entering the religious body of the Celestines, rose to be general of the order. His principal works, generally published under the assumed name of "Agatopisto Cromazione," are on the history of philosophy:—Della Istoria e delle Indole di ogni Filosofia, 7 vols., 1772 seq.; and Della Restaurazione di ogni Filosofia ne' Secoli, xvi., xvii., xviii., 3 vols., 1789 (German trans. by C. Heydenreich). The latter gives a valuable account of 16th-century Italian philosophy. His other works are Istoria critica e filosofica del suicidio (1761); Delle conquiste celebri esaminate col naturale diritto delle genti (1763); Storia critica del moderno diritto di natura e delle genti (1789); and a few poems and philosophic comedies.
BUOY (15th century "boye"; through O.Fr. or Dutch, from Lat. boia, fetter; the word is now usually pronounced as "boy," and it has been spelt in that form; but Hakluyt's Voyages spells it "bwoy," and this seems to indicate a different pronunciation, which is also given in some modern dictionaries), a floating body employed to mark the navigable limits of channels, their fairways, sunken dangers or isolated rocks, mined or torpedo grounds, telegraph cables, or the position of a ship's anchor after letting go; buoys are also used for securing a ship to instead of anchoring. They vary in size and construction from a log of wood to steel mooring buoys for battleships or a steel gas buoy.
In 1882 a conference was held upon a proposal to establish a uniform system of buoyage. It was under the presidency of the then duke of Edinburgh, and consisted of representatives from the various bodies interested. The questions of colour, visibility, shape and size were considered, and any modifications necessary owing to locality. The committee proposed the following uniform system of buoyage, and it is now adopted by the general lighthouse authorities of the United Kingdom:—
(1) The mariner when approaching the coast must determine his position on the chart, and note the direction of flood tide. (2) The term "starboard-hand" shall denote that side which would be on the right hand of the mariner either going with the main stream of the flood, or entering a harbour, river or estuary from seaward; the term "port-hand" shall denote the left hand of the mariner in the same circumstances. (3) Buoys showing the pointed top of a cone above water shall be called conical (fig. 1) and shall always be starboard-hand buoys, as above defined. (4) Buoys showing a flat top above water shall be called can (fig. 2) and shall always be port-hand buoys, as above defined. (5) Buoys showing a domed top above water shall be called spherical (fig. 3) and shall mark the ends of middle grounds. (6) Buoys having a tall central structure on a broad face shall be called pillar buoys (fig. 4), and like all other special buoys, such as bell buoys, gas buoys, and automatic sounding buoys, shall be placed to mark special positions either on the coast or in the approaches to harbours. (7) Buoys showing only a mast above water shall be called spar-buoys (fig. 5). (8) Starboard-hand buoys shall always be painted in one colour only. (9) Port-hand buoys shall be painted of another characteristic colour, either single or parti-colour. (10) Spherical buoys (fig. 3) at the ends of middle grounds shall always be distinguished by horizontal stripes of white colour, (11) Surmounting beacons, such as staff and globe and others, shall always be painted of one dark colour. (12) Staff and globe (fig. 1) shall only be used on starboard-hand buoys, staff and cage (fig. 2) on port hand; diamonds (fig. 7) at the outer ends of middle grounds; and triangles (fig. 3) at the inner ends. (13) Buoys on the same side of a channel, estuary or tideway may be distinguished from each other by names, numbers or letters, and where necessary by a staff surmounted with the appropriate beacon. (14) Buoys intended for moorings (fig. 6) may be of shape and colour according to the discretion of the authority within whose jurisdiction they are laid, but for marking submarine telegraph cables the colour shall be green with the word "Telegraph" painted thereon in white letters.
Buoying and Marking of Wrecks.—(15) Wreck buoys in the open sea, or in the approaches to a harbour or estuary, shall be coloured green, with the word "Wreck" painted in white letters on them. (16) When possible, the buoy should be laid near to the side of the wreck next to mid-channel. (17) When a wreck-marking vessel is used, it shall, if possible, have its top sides coloured green, with the word "Wreck" in white letters thereon, and shall exhibit by day, three balls on a yard 20 ft. above the sea, two placed vertically at one end and one at the other, the single ball being on the side nearer to the wreck; in fog a gong or bell is rung in quick succession at intervals not exceeding one minute (wherever practicable); by night, three white fixed lights are similarly arranged as the balls in daytime, but the ordinary riding lights are not shown. (18) In narrow waters or in rivers and harbours under the jurisdiction of local authorities, the same rules may be adopted, or at discretion, varied as follows:—When a wreck-marking vessel is used she shall carry a cross-yard on a mast with two balls by day, placed horizontally not less than 6 nor more than 12 ft. apart, and by night two lights similarly placed. When a barge or open boat only is used, a flag or ball may be shown in the daytime. (19) The position in which the marking vessel is placed with reference to the wreck shall be at the discretion of the local authority having jurisdiction. A uniform system by shape has been adopted by the Mersey Dock and Harbour Board, to assist a mariner by night, and, in addition, where practicable, a uniform colour; the fairway buoys are specially marked by letter, shape and colour.
British India has practically adopted the British system, United States and Canada have the same uniform system; in the majority of European maritime countries and China various uniform systems have been adopted. In Norway and Russia the compass system is used, the shape, colour and surmountings of the buoys indicating the compass bearing of the danger from the buoy; this method is followed in the open sea by Sweden. An international uniform system of buoyage, although desirable, appears impracticable. Germany employs yellow buoys to mark boundaries of quarantine stations. The question of shape versus colour, irrespective of size, is a disputed one; the shape is a better guide at night and colour in the daytime. All markings (figs. 8, 9, 10 and 11) should be subordinate to the main colour of the buoy; the varying backgrounds and atmospheric conditions render the question a complex one.
London Trinity House buoys are divided into five classes, their use depending on whether the spot to be marked is in the open sea or otherwise exposed position, or in a sheltered harbour, or according to the depth of water and weight of moorings, or the importance of the danger. Buoys are moored with specially tested cables; the eye at the base of the buoy is of wrought iron to prevent it becoming "reedy" and the cable is secured to blocks (see Anchor) or mushroom anchors according to the nature of the ground. London Trinity House buoys are built of steel, with bulkheads to lessen the risk of their sinking by collision, and, with the exception of bell buoys, do not contain water ballast. In 1878 gas buoys, with fixed and occulting lights of 10-candle power, were introduced. In 1896 Mr T. Matthews, engineer-in-chief in the London Trinity Corporation, developed the present design (fig. 12). It is of steel, the lower plates being 5/8 in. and the upper 7/16 in. in thickness, thus adding to the stability. The buoy holds 380 cub. ft. of gas, and exhibits an occulting light for 2533 hours. This light is placed 10 ft. above the sea, and, with an intensity of 50 candles, is visible 8 m. It occults every ten seconds, and there is seven seconds' visibility, with three seconds' obscuration. The occultations are actuated by a double valve arrangement. In the body of the apparatus there is a gas chamber having sufficient capacity, in the case of an occulting light, for maintaining the flame in action for seven seconds, and by means of a by-pass a jet remains alight in the centre of the burner. During the period of three seconds' darkness the gas chamber is re-charged, and at the end of that period is again opened to the main burner by a tripping arrangement of the valve, and remains in action seven seconds. The gas chamber of the buoy, charged to five atmospheres, is replenished from a steamer fitted with a pump and transport receivers carrying indicating valves, the receivers being charged to ten atmospheres. Practically no inconvenience has resulted from saline or other deposits, the glazing (glass) of the lantern being thoroughly cleaned when re-charging the buoy. Acetylene, generated from calcium carbide inside the buoy, is also used. Electric light is exhibited from some buoys in the United States. In England an automatic electric buoy has been suggested, worked by the motion of the waves, which cause a stream of water to act on a turbine connected with a dynamo generating electricity. Boat-shaped buoys are also used (river Humber) for carrying a light and bell. The Courtenay whistling buoy (fig. 13) is actuated by the undulating movement of the waves. A hollow cylinder extends from the lower part of the buoy to still water below the movement of the waves, ensuring that the water inside keeps at mean level, whilst the buoy follows the movements of the waves. By a special apparatus the compressed air is forced through the whistle at the top of the buoy, and the air is replenished by two tubes at the upper part of the buoy. It is fitted with a rudder and secured in the usual manner. Automatic buoys cannot be relied on in calm days with a smooth sea. The nun buoy (fig. 14) for indicating the position of an anchor after letting go, is secured to the crown of the anchor by a buoy rope. It is usually made of galvanized iron, and consists of two cones joined together at the base. It is painted red for the port anchor and green for the starboard.
Mooring buoys (fig. 6) for battleships are built of steel in four watertight compartments, and have sufficient buoyancy to keep afloat should a compartment be pierced; they are 13 ft. long with a diameter of 6½ ft. The mooring cable (bridle) passes through a watertight 16-in. trunk pipe, built vertically in the centre of the buoy, and is secured to a "rocking shackle" on the upper surface of the buoy. Large mooring buoys are usually protected by horizontal wooden battens and are fitted with life chains.
(J. W. D.)
In carrying out the above system the Northern Lights Commissioners have adopted a red colour for conical or starboard-hand buoys, and black colour for can or port-hand buoys, and this system is applicable to the whole of Scotland.
Useful where floating ice is encountered.
St George and St Andrew crosses are principally employed to surmount shore beacons.
BUPALUS AND ATHENIS, sons of Archermus, and members of the celebrated school of sculpture in marble which flourished in Chios in the 6th century B.C. They were contemporaries of the poet Hipponax (about 540 B.C.), whom they were said to have caricatured. Their works consisted almost entirely of draped female figures, Artemis, Fortune, the Graces, whence the Chian school has been well called a school of Madonnas. Augustus brought many of the works of Bupalus and Athenis to Rome, and placed them on the gable of the temple of Apollo Palatinus.
BUPHONIA, in Greek antiquities, a sacrificial ceremony, forming part of the Diipolia, a religious festival held on the 14th of the month Skirophorion (June-July) at Athens, when a labouring ox was sacrificed to Zeus Polieus as protector of the city in accordance with a very ancient custom. The ox was driven forward to the altar, on which grain was spread, by members of the family of the Kentriadae (from κέντρον, a goad), on whom this duty devolved hereditarily. When it began to eat, one of the family of the Thaulonidae advanced with an axe, slew the ox, then immediately threw away the axe and fled. The axe, as being polluted by murder, was now carried before the court of the Prytaneum (which tried inanimate objects for homicide) and there charged with having caused the death of the ox, for which it was thrown into the sea. Apparently this is an early instance analogous to deodand (q.v.). Although the slaughter of a labouring ox was forbidden, it was considered excusable in the exceptional circumstances; none the less it was regarded as a murder.
Porphyrius, De Abstinentia, ii. 29; Aelian, Var. Hist. viii. 3; Schol. Aristoph. Nubes, 485; Pausanias, i. 24, 28; see also Band, De Diipoliorum Sacro Atheniensium (1873).
BUR, or Burr (apparently the same word as Danish borre, burdock, cf. Swed. kard-boore), a prickly fruit or head of fruits, as of the burdock. In the sense of a woody outgrowth on the trunk of a tree, or "gnaur," the effect of a crowded bud-development, the word is probably adapted from the Fr. bourre, a vine-bud.
BURANO, a town of Venetia, in the province of Venice, on an island in the lagoons, 6 m. N.E. of Venice by sea. Pop. (1901) 8169. It is a fishing town, with a large royal school of lace-making employing some 500 girls. It was founded, like all the towns in the lagoons, by fugitives from the mainland cities at the time of the barbarian invasions. Torcello is a part of the commune of Burano.
BURAUEN, a town of the province of Leyte, island of Leyte, Philippine Islands, on the Dagitan river, 21 m. S. by W. of Tacloban, the capital. Pop. (1903) 18,197. Burauen is situated in a rich hemp-growing region, and hemp is its only important product. The language is Visayan.
BURBAGE, JAMES (d. 1597), English actor, is said to have been born at Stratford-on-Avon. He was a member of the earl of Leicester's players, probably for several years before he is first mentioned (1574) as being at the head of the company. In 1576, having secured the lease of land at Shoreditch, Burbage erected there the successful house which was known for twenty years as The Theatre from the fact that it was the first ever erected in London. He seems also to have been concerned in the erection of a second theatre in the same locality, the Curtain, and later, in spite of all difficulties and a great deal of local opposition, he started what became the most celebrated home of the rising drama,—the Blackfriars theatre, built in 1596 near the old Dominican friary.
His son Richard Burbage (c. 1567-1619), more celebrated than his father, was the Garrick of the Elizabethan stage, and acted all the great parts in Shakespeare's plays. He, too, is said to have been born at Stratford-on-Avon, and made his first appearance at an early age at one of his father's theatres. He had established a reputation by the time he was twenty, and in the next dozen years was the most popular English actor, the "Roscius" of his day. At the time of his father's death, a lawsuit was in progress against the lessor from whom James Burbage held the land on which The Theatre stood. This suit was continued by Richard and his brother Cuthbert, and in 1569 they pulled down the Shoreditch house and used the materials to erect the Globe theatre, famous for its connexion with Shakespeare. They occupied it as a summer playhouse, retaining the Blackfriars, which was roofed in, for winter performances. In this venture Richard Burbage had Shakespeare and others as his partners, and it was in one or the other of these houses that he gained his greatest triumphs, taking the leading part in almost every new play. He was specially famous for his impersonation of Richard III. and other Shakespearian characters, and it was in tragedy that he especially excelled. Every playwright of his day endeavoured to secure his services. He died on the 13th of March 1619. Richard Burbage was a painter as well as an actor. The Felton portrait of Shakespeare is attributed to him, and there is a portrait of a woman, undoubtedly by him, preserved at Dulwich College.
BURBOT, or Eel-Pout (Lota vulgaris), a fish of the family Gadidae, which differs from the ling in the dorsal and anal fins reaching the caudal, and in the small size of all the teeth. It exceeds a length of 3 ft. and is a freshwater fish, although examples are exceptionally taken in British estuaries and in the Baltic; some specimens are handsomely marbled with dark brown, with black blotches on the back and dorsal fins. It is very locally distributed in central and northern Europe, and an uncommon fish in England. Its flesh is excellent. The American burbot (Lota maculosa) is coarser, and not favoured for the table.
BURCKHARDT, JAKOB (1818-1897), Swiss writer on art, was born at Basel on the 25th of May 1818; he was educated there and at Neuchâtel, and till 1839 was intended to be a pastor. In 1838 he made his first journey to Italy, and also published his first important articles Bemerkungen über schweizerische Kathedralen. In 1839 he went to the university of Berlin, where he studied till 1843, spending part of 1841 at Bonn, where he was a pupil of Franz Kugler, the art historian, to whom his first book, Die Kunstwerke D. belgischen Städte (1842), was dedicated. He was professor of history at the university of Basel (1845-1847, 1849-1855 and 1858-1893) and at the federal polytechnic school at Zurich (1855-1858). In 1847 he brought out new editions of Kugler's two great works, Geschichte der Malerei and Kunstgeschichte, and in 1853 published his own work, Die Zeit Constantins des Grossen. He spent the greater part of the years 1853-1854 in Italy, where he collected the materials for one of his most famous works, Der Cicerone: eine Anleitung sum Genuss der Kunstwerke Italiens, which was dedicated to Kugler and appeared in 1855 (7th German edition, 1899; English translation of the sections relating to paintings, by Mrs A.H. Clough, London, 1873). This work, which includes sculpture and architecture, as well as painting, has become indispensable to the art traveller in Italy. About half of the original edition was devoted to the art of the Renaissance, so that Burckhardt was naturally led on to the preparation of his two other celebrated works, Die Cultur der Renaissance in Italien (1860, 5th German edition 1896, and English translation, by S.G.C. Middlemore, in 2 vols., London, 1878), and the Geschichte der Renaissance in Italien (1867, 3rd German edition 1891). In 1867 he refused a professorship at Tübingen, and in 1872 another (that left vacant by Ranke) at Berlin, remaining faithful to Basel. He died in 1897.
See Life by Hans Trog in the Basler Jahrbuch for 1898, pp. 1-172.
(W. A. B. C.)
BURCKHARDT, JOHN LEWIS [Johann Ludwig] (1784-1817), Swiss traveller and orientalist, was born at Lausanne on the 24th of November 1784. After studying at Leipzig and Göttingen he visited England in the summer of 1806, carrying a letter of introduction from the naturalist Blumenbach to Sir Joseph Banks, who, with the other members of the African Association, accepted his offer to explore the interior of Africa. After studying in London and Cambridge, and inuring himself to all kinds of hardships and privations, Burckhardt left England in March 1809 for Malta, whence he proceeded, in the following autumn, to Aleppo. In order to obtain a better knowledge of oriental life he disguised himself as a Mussulman, and took the name of Sheikh Ibrahim Ibn Abdallah. After two years passed in the Levant he had thoroughly mastered Arabic, and had acquired such accurate knowledge of the Koran, and of the commentaries upon its religion and laws, that after a critical examination the most learned Mussulmans entertained no doubt of his being really what he professed to be, a learned doctor of their law. During his residence in Syria he visited Palmyra, Damascus, Lebanon and thence journeyed via Petra to Cairo with the intention of joining a caravan to Fezzan, and of exploring from there the sources of the Niger. In 1812, whilst waiting for the departure of the caravan, he travelled up the Nile as far as Dar Mahass; and then, finding it impossible to penetrate westward, he made a journey through the Nubian desert in the character of a poor Syrian merchant, passing by Berber and Shendi to Suakin, on the Red Sea, whence he performed the pilgrimage to Mecca by way of Jidda. At Mecca he stayed three months and afterwards visited Medina. After enduring privations and sufferings of the severest kind, he returned to Cairo in June 1815 in a state of great exhaustion; but in the spring of 1816 he travelled to Mount Sinai, whence he returned to Cairo in June, and there again made preparations for his intended journey to Fezzan. Several hindrances prevented his prosecuting this intention, and finally, in April 1817, when the long-expected caravan prepared to depart, he was seized with illness and died on the 15th of October. He had from time to time carefully transmitted to England his journals and notes, and a very copious series of letters, so that nothing which appeared to him to be interesting in the various journeys he made has been lost. He bequeathed his collection of 800 vols. of oriental MSS. to the library of Cambridge University.
His works were published by the African Association in the following order:—Travels in Nubia (to which is prefixed a biographical memoir) (1819); Travels in Syria and the Holy Land (1822); Travels in Arabia (1829); Arabic Proverbs, or the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians (1830); Notes on the Bedouins and Wahabys (1831).
BURDEAU, AUGUSTE LAURENT (1851-1894), French politician, was the son of a labourer at Lyons. Forced from childhood to earn his own living, he was enabled to secure an education by bursarships at the Lycée at Lyons and at the Lycée Louis Le Grand in Paris. In 1870 he was at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, but enlisted in the army, and was wounded and made prisoner in 1871. In 1874 he became professor of philosophy, and translated several works of Herbert Spencer and of Schopenhauer into French. His extraordinary aptitude for work secured for him the position of chef de cabinet under Paul Bert, the minister of education, in 1881. In 1885 he was elected deputy for the department of the Rhone, and distinguished himself in financial questions. He was several times minister, and became minister of finance in the cabinet of Casimir-Périer (from the 3rd of November 1893 to the 22nd of May 1894). On the 5th of July 1894 he was elected president of the chamber of deputies. He died on the 12th of December 1894, worn out with overwork.
BURDEN, or Burthen, (1) (A.S. byrthen, from beran, to bear), a load, both literally and figuratively; especially the carrying capacity of a ship; in mining and smelting, the tops or heads of stream-work which lie over the stream of tin, and the proportion of ore and flux to fuel in the charge of a blast-furnace. In Scots and English law the term is applied to an encumbrance on real or personal property. (2) (From the Fr. bourdon, a droning, humming sound) an accompaniment to a song, or the refrain of a song; hence a chief or recurrent topic, as "the burden of a speech."
BURDER, GEORGE (1752-1832), English Nonconformist divine, was born in London on the 5th of June 1752. In early manhood he was an engraver, but in 1776 he began preaching, and was minister of the Independent church at Lancaster from 1778 to 1783. Subsequently he held charges at Coventry (1784-1803) and at Fetter Lane, London (1803-1832). He was one of the founders of the British and Foreign Bible Society, the Religious Tract Society, and the London Missionary Society, and was secretary to the last-named for several years. As editor of the Evangelical Magazine and author of Village Sermons, he commanded a wide influence. He died on the 29th of May 1832, and a Life (by H. Burder) appeared in 1833.
BURDETT, SIR FRANCIS (1770-1844), English politician, was the son of Francis Burdett by his wife Eleanor, daughter of William Jones of Ramsbury manor, Wiltshire, and grandson of Sir Robert Burdett, Bart. Born on the 25th of January 1770, he was educated at Westminster school and Oxford, and afterwards travelled in France and Switzerland. He was in Paris during the earlier days of the French Revolution, a visit which doubtless influenced his political opinions. Returning to England he married in 1793 Sophia, daughter of Thomas Coutts the banker, and this lady brought him a large fortune. In 1796 he became member of parliament for Boroughbridge, having purchased this seat from the representatives of the 4th duke of Newcastle, and in 1797 succeeded his grandfather as fifth baronet. In parliament he soon became prominent as an opponent of Pitt, and as an advocate of popular rights. He denounced the war with France, the suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act, the proposed exclusion of John Horne Tooke from parliament, and quickly became the idol of the people. He was instrumental in securing an inquiry into the condition of Coldbath Fields prison, but as a result of this step he was for a time prevented by the government from visiting any prison in the kingdom. In 1797 he made the acquaintance of Horne Tooke, whose pupil he became, not only in politics, but also in philology. At the general election of 1802 Burdett was a candidate for the county of Middlesex, but his return was declared void in 1804, and in the subsequent contest he was defeated. In 1805 this return was amended in his favour, but as this was again quickly reversed, Burdett, who had spent an immense sum of money over the affair, declared he would not stand for parliament again.
At the general election of 1806 Burdett was a leading supporter of James Paull, the reform candidate for the city of Westminster; but in the following year a misunderstanding led to a duel between Burdett and Paull in which both combatants were wounded. At the general election in 1807 Burdett, in spite of his reluctance, was nominated for Westminster, and amid great enthusiasm was returned at the top of the poll. He took up again the congenial work of attacking abuses and agitating for reform, and in 1810 came sharply into collision with the House of Commons. A radical named John Gale Jones had been committed to prison by the House, a proceeding which was denounced by Burdett, who questioned the power of the House to take this step, and vainly attempted to secure the release of Jones. He then issued a revised edition of his speech on this occasion, and it was published by William Cobbett in the Weekly Register. The House voted this action a breach of privilege, and the speaker issued a warrant for Burdett's arrest. Barring himself in his house, he defied the authorities, while the mob gathered in his defence. At length his house was entered, and under an escort of soldiers he was conveyed to the Tower. Released when parliament was prorogued, he caused his supporters much disappointment by returning to Westminster by water, and so avoiding a demonstration in his honour. He then brought actions against the speaker and the serjeant-at-arms, but the courts upheld the action of the House. In parliament Burdett denounced corporal punishment in the army, and supported all attempts to check corruption, but his principal efforts were directed towards procuring a reform of parliament, and the removal of Roman Catholic disabilities. In 1809 he had proposed a scheme of parliamentary reform, and returning to the subject in 1817 and 1818 he anticipated the Chartist movement by suggesting universal male suffrage, equal electoral districts, vote by ballot, and annual parliaments; but his motions met with very little support. He succeeded, however, in carrying a resolution in 1825 that the House should consider the laws concerning Roman Catholics. This was followed by a bill embodying his proposals, which passed the Commons but was rejected by the Lords. In 1827 and 1828 he again proposed resolutions on this subject, and saw his proposals become law in 1829. In 1820 Burdett had again come into serious conflict with the government. Having severely censured its action with reference to the "Manchester massacre," he was prosecuted at Leicester assizes, fined £1000, and committed to prison for three months. After the passing of the Reform Bill in 1832 the ardour of the veteran reformer was somewhat abated, and a number of his constituents soon took umbrage at his changed attitude. Consequently he resigned his seat early in 1837, but was re-elected. However, at the general election in the same year he forsook Westminster and was elected member for North Wiltshire, which seat he retained, acting in general with the Conservatives, until his death on the 23rd of January 1844. He left a son, Robert, who succeeded to the baronetcy, and five daughters, the youngest of whom became the celebrated Baroness Burdett-Coutts. Impetuous and illogical, Burdett did good work as an advocate of free speech, and an enemy of corruption. He was exceedingly generous, and spent money lavishly in furthering projects of reform.
See A. Stephens, Life of Horne Tooke (London, 1813); Spencer Walpole, History of England (London, 1878-1886); C. Abbot, Baron Colchester, Diary and Correspondence (London, 1861).
(A. W. H.*)
BURDETT-COUTTS, ANGELA GEORGINA BURDETT-COUTTS, Baroness (1814-1906), English philanthropist, youngest daughter of Sir Francis Burdett, was born on the 21st of April 1814. When she was three-and-twenty, she inherited practically the whole of the immense wealth of her grandfather Thomas Coutts (approaching two millions sterling, a fabulous sum in those days), by the will of the duchess of St Albans, who, as the actress Henrietta Mellon, had been his second wife and had been left it on his death in 1821. Miss Burdett then took the name of Coutts in addition to her own. "The faymale heiress, Miss Anjaley Coutts," as the author of the Ingoldsby Legends called her in his ballad on the queen's coronation in that year (1837), at once became a notable subject of public curiosity and private cupidity; she received numerous offers of marriage, but remained resolutely single, devoting herself and her riches to philanthropic work, which made her famous for well-applied generosity. In May 1871 she was created a peeress, as Baroness Burdett-Coutts of Highgate and Brookfield, Middlesex. On the 18th of July 1872 she was presented at the Guildhall with the freedom of the city of London, the first case of a woman being admitted to that fellowship. It was not till 1881 that, when sixty-seven years old, she married William Lehman Ashmead-Bartlett, an American by birth, and brother of Sir E.A. Ashmead-Bartlett, the Conservative member of parliament; and he then took his wife's name, entering the House of Commons as member for Westminster, 1885. Full of good works, and of social interest and influence, the baroness lived to the great age of ninety-two, dying at her house in Stratton Street, Piccadilly, on the 30th of December 1906, of bronchitis. She was buried in Westminster Abbey.
The extent of her benefactions during her long and active life can only be briefly indicated; but the baroness must remain a striking figure in the social history of Victorian England, for the thoughtful and conscientious care with which she "held her wealth in trust" for innumerable good objects. It was her aim to benefit the working-classes in ways involving no loss of independence or self-respect. She carefully avoided taking any side in party politics, but she was actively interested in phases of Imperial extension which were calculated to improve the condition of the black races, as in Africa, or the education and relief of the poor or suffering in any part of the world. Though she made no special distinction of creed in her charities, she was a notable benefactor of the Church of England, building and endowing churches and church schools, endowing the bishoprics of Cape Town and of Adelaide (1847), and founding the bishopric of British Columbia (1857). Among her many educational endowments may be specified the St Stephen's Institute in Vincent Square, Westminster (1846); she started sewing schools in Spitalfields when the silk trade began to fail; helped to found the shoe-black brigade; and placed hundreds of destitute boys in training-ships for the navy and merchant service. She established Columbia fish market (1869) in Bethnal Green, and presented it to the city, but owing to commercial difficulties this effort, which cost her over £200,000, proved abortive. She supported various schemes of emigration to the colonies; and in Ireland helped to promote the fishing industry by starting schools, and providing boats, besides advancing £250,000 in 1880 for supplying seed to the impoverished tenants. She was devoted to the protection of animals and prevention of cruelty, and took up with characteristic zeal the cause of the costermongers' donkeys, building stables for them on her Columbia market estate, and giving prizes for the best-kept animals. She helped to inaugurate the society for the prevention of cruelty to children, and was a keen supporter of the ragged school union. Missionary efforts of all sorts; hospitals and nursing; industrial homes and refuges; relief funds, &c., found in her a generous supporter. She was associated with Louisa Twining and Florence Nightingale; and in 1877-1878 raised the Turkish compassionate fund for the starving peasantry and fugitives in the Russo-Turkish War (for which she obtained the order of the Medjidieh, a solitary case of its conference on a woman). She relieved the distressed in far-off lands as well as at home, her helping hand being stretched out to the Dyaks of Borneo and the aborigines of Australia. She was a liberal patroness of the stage, literature and the arts, and delighted in knowing all the cultured people of the day. In short, her position in England for half a century may well be summed up in words attributed to King Edward VII., "after my mother (Queen Victoria) the most remarkable woman in the kingdom."
BURDON-SANDERSON, SIR JOHN SCOTT, Bart. (1828-1905), English physiologist, was born at West Jesmand, near Newcastle, on the 21st of December 1828. A member of a well-known Northumbrian family, he received his medical education at the university of Edinburgh and at Paris. Settling in London, he became medical officer of health for Paddington in 1856 and four years later physician to the Middlesex and the Brompton Consumption hospitals. When diphtheria appeared in England in 1858 he was sent to investigate the disease at the different points of outbreak, and in subsequent years he carried out a number of similar inquiries, e.g. into the cattle plague and into cholera in 1866. He became first principal of the Brown Institution at Lambeth in 1871, and in 1874 was appointed Jodrell professor of physiology at University College, London, retaining that post till 1882. When the Waynflete chair of physiology was established at Oxford in 1882, he was chosen to be its first occupant, and immediately found himself the object of a furious anti-vivisectionist agitation. The proposal that the university should spend £10,000 in providing him with a suitable laboratory, lecture-rooms, &c., in which to carry on his work, was strongly opposed, by some on grounds of economy, but largely because he was an upholder of the usefulness and necessity of experiments upon animals. It was, however, eventually carried by a small majority (88 to 85), and in the same year the Royal Society awarded him a royal medal in recognition of his researches into the electrical phenomena exhibited by plants and the relations of minute organisms to disease, and of the services he had rendered to physiology and pathology. In 1885 the university of Oxford was asked to vote £500 a year for three years for the purposes of the laboratory, then approaching completion. This proposal was fought with the utmost bitterness by Sanderson's opponents, the anti-vivisectionists including E.A. Freeman, John Ruskin and Bishop Mackarness of Oxford. Ultimately the money was granted by 412 to 244 votes. In 1895 Sanderson was appointed regius professor of medicine at Oxford, resigning the post in 1904; in 1899 he was created a baronet. His attainments, both in biology and medicine, brought him many honours. He was Croonian lecturer to the Royal Society in 1867 and 1877 and to the Royal College of Physicians in 1891; gave the Harveian oration before the College of Physicians in 1878; acted as president of the British Association at Nottingham in 1893; and served on three royal commissions—Hospitals (1883), Tuberculosis, Meat and Milk (1890), and University for London (1892). He died at Oxford on the 23rd of November 1905.
BURDWAN, or Bardwan, a town of British India, in Bengal, which gives its name to a district and to a division. It has a station on the East Indian railway, 67 m. N.W. from Calcutta. Pop. (1901) 35,022. The town consists really of numerous villages scattered over an area of 9 sq. m., and is entirely rural in character. It contains several interesting ancient tombs, and at Nawab Hat, some 2 m. distant, is a group of 108 Siva lingam temples built in 1788. The place was formerly very unhealthy, but this has been to a large extent remedied by the establishment of water-works, a good supply of water being derived from the river Banka. Within the town, the principal objects of interest are the palaces and gardens of the maharaja. The chief educational institution is the Burdwan Raj college, which is entirely supported out of the maharaja's estate.
The town owes its importance entirely to being the headquarters of the maharaja of Burdwan, the premier nobleman of lower Bengal, whose rent-roll is upwards of £300,000. The raj was founded in 1657 by Abu Ra Kapur, of the Kapur Khatri family of Kotli in Lahore, Punjab, whose descendants served in turn the Mogul emperors and the British government. The great prosperity of the raj was due to the excellent management of Maharaja Mahtab Chand (d. 1879), whose loyalty to the government—especially during the Santal rebellion of 1855 and the mutiny of 1857—was rewarded with the grant of a coat of arms in 1868 and the right to a personal salute of 13 guns in 1877. Maharaja Bijai Chand Mahtab (b. 1881), who succeeded his adoptive father in 1888, earned great distinction by the courage with which he risked his life to save that of Sir Andrew Fraser, the lieutenant-governor of Bengal, on the occasion of the attempt to assassinate him made by Bengali malcontents on the 7th of November 1908.
The District of Burdwan lies along the right bank of the river Bhagirathi or Hugli. It has an area of 2689 sq. m. It is a flat plain, and its scenery is uninteresting. Chief rivers are the Bhagirathi, Damodar, Ajai, Banka, Kunur and Khari, of which only the Bhagirathi is navigable by country cargo boats throughout the year. The district was acquired by the East India Company under the treaty with Nawab Mir Kasim in 1760, and confirmed by the emperor Shah Alam in 1765. The land revenue was fixed in perpetuity with the zemindar in 1793. In 1901 the population was 1,532,475, showing an increase of 10% in the decade. There are several indigo factories. The district suffered from drought in 1896-1897. The Eden Canal, 20 m. long, has been constructed for irrigation. The weaving of silk is the chief native industry. As regards European industries, Burdwan takes the first place in Bengal. It contains the great coal-field of Raniganj, first opened in 1874, with an output of more than three million tons. The Barrakur ironworks produce pig-iron, which is reported to be as good as that of Middlesbrough. Apart from Burdwan town and Raniganj, the chief places are the river-marts of Katwa and Kalna. The East Indian railway has several lines running through the district.
The Division of Burdwan comprises the six districts of Burdwan, Birbhum, Bankura, Midnapore, Hugli and Howrah, with a total area of 13,949 sq. m., and a population in 1901 of 8,240,076.
BUREAU (a Fr. word from burel or bureau, a coarse cloth used for coverings), a writing-table or desk (q.v.), also in America a low chest of drawers. From the meaning of "desk," the word is applied to an office or place of business, and particularly a government department; in the United States the term is used of certain subdivisions of the executive departments, as the bureau of statistics, a division of the treasury department. The term "bureaucracy" is often employed to signify the concentration of administrative power in bureaux or departments, and the undue interference by officials not only in the details of government, but in matters outside the scope of state interference. The word is also frequently used in the sense of "red-tapism."
BURFORD, a market town in the Woodstock parliamentary division of Oxfordshire, England, 18 m. W.N.W. of Oxford. Pop. (1901) 1146. It is pleasantly situated in the valley of the Windrush, the broad, picturesque main street sloping upward from the stream, beside which stands the fine church, to the summit of the ridge flanking the valley on the south, along which runs the high road from Oxford. The church of St John the Baptist has a nave and aisles, mainly Perpendicular in appearance owing to alterations in that period, but actually of earlier construction, the south aisle flanked by two beautiful chapels and an ornate porch; transepts and a central tower, and choir with flanking chapels. The massive Norman tower contrasts strongly with the delicate Perpendicular spire rising upon it. The church contains many interesting memorials, and, in the nave, a Perpendicular shrine dedicated to St Peter. Near the church is the half-ruined priory house, built in the 17th century, and containing much fine plaster ornament characteristic of the period; a curious chapel adjoins it. William Lenthall, speaker of the Long Parliament, was granted this mansion, died here in 1662, and is buried in the church. In the High Street nearly every house is of some antiquity. The Tolsey or old town hall is noteworthy among them; and under one of the houses is an Early English crypt. Burford is mentioned as the scene of a synod in 705; in 752 Cuthred, king of the West Saxons, fighting for independence, here defeated Æthelbald, king of Mercia; and in 1649 the town and district were the scene of victorious operations by Cromwell.
BURG, a town of Germany, in Prussian Saxony, on the river Ihle, and the railway from Berlin to Magdeburg, 14 m. N.E. of the latter. Pop. (1900) 22,432. It is noted for its cloth manufactures and boot-making, which afford employment to a great part of its population. The town belonged originally to the lordship of Querfurt, passed with this into the possession of the archbishops of Magdeburg in 1496, and was ceded in 1635 with other portions of the Magdeburg territories to Saxony; in 1687 it was ceded to Brandenburg. It owes its prosperity to the large influx of industrious French, Palatinate and Walloon refugees, which took place about the end of the 17th century.
BURGAGE (from Lat. burgus, a borough), a form of tenure, both in England and Scotland, applicable to the property connected with the old municipal corporations and their privileges. In England, it was a tenure whereby houses or tenements in an ancient borough were held of the king or other person as lord at a certain rent. The term is of less practical importance in the English than in the Scottish system, where it held an important place in the practice of conveyancing, real property having been generally divided into feudal-holding and burgage-holding. Since the Conveyancing (Scotland) Act 1874, there is, however, not much distinction between burgage tenure and free holding. It is usual to speak of the English burgage-tenure as a relic of Saxon freedom resisting the shock of the Norman conquest and its feudalism, but it is perhaps more correct to consider it a local feature of that general exemption from feudality enjoyed by the municipia as a relic of their ancient Roman constitution. The reason for the system preserving for so long its specifically distinct form in Scottish conveyancing was because burgage-holding was an exception to the system of subinfeudation which remained prevalent in Scotland when it was suppressed in England. While other vassals might hold of a graduated hierarchy of overlords up to the crown, the burgess always held directly of the sovereign. It is curious that while in England the burgage-tenure was deemed a species of socage, to distinguish it from the military holdings, in Scotland it was strictly a military holding, by the service of watching and warding for the defence of the burgh. In England the franchises enjoyed by burgesses, freemen and other consuetudinary constituencies in burghs, were dependent on the character of the burgage-tenure. Tenure by burgage was subject to a variety of customs, the principal of which was Borough-English (q.v.).
See Pollock and Maitland, History of English Law (1898).
BURGAS (sometimes written Burghaz, Bourgas or Borgas, and, in the middle ages, Pyrgos), a seaport, and capital of the department of Burgas, in Bulgaria (Eastern Rumelia), on the gulf of Burgas, an inlet of the Black Sea, in 42° 27′ N. and 27° 35′ E. Pop. (1906) 12,846. Burgas is built on a low foreland, between the lagoons of Ludzha, on the north, and Kara-Yunus, on the west; it faces towards the open sea on the east, and towards its own harbour on the south. The principal approach is a broad isthmus on the north-west, along which runs the railway to Philippopolis and Adrianople. Despite its small population and the rivalry of Varna and the Turkish port of Dedeagatch, Burgas has a considerable transit trade. Its fine harbour, formally opened in 1904, has an average depth of five fathoms; large vessels can load at the quays, and the outer waters of the gulf are well lit by lighthouses on the islets of Hagios Anastasios and Megalo-Nisi. In 1904, the port accommodated over 1400 ships, of about 700,000 tons. These included upwards of 800 Bulgarian and Turkish sailing-vessels, engaged in the coasting trade. Fuel, machinery and miscellaneous goods are imported, chiefly from Austria-Hungary, Belgium, Germany and the United Kingdom; the exports include grain, wool, tallow, cheese, butter, attar of roses, &c. Pottery and pipes are manufactured from clay obtained in the neighbourhood.
BURGDORF (Fr. Berthoud), an industrial town in the Swiss canton of Bern. It is built on the left bank of the Emme and is 14 m. by rail N.E. of Bern. The lower (or modern) town is connected by a curious spiral street with the upper (or old) town. The latter is picturesquely perched on a hill, at a height of 1942 ft. above sea-level (or 167 ft. above the river); it is crowned by the ancient castle and by the 15th-century parish church, in the former of which Pestalozzi set up his educational establishment between 1798 and 1804. A large trade is carried on at Burgdorf in the cheese of the Emmenthal, while among the industrial establishments are railway works, and factories of cloth, white lead and tinfoil. In 1900 the population was 8404, practically all Protestants and German-speaking. A fine view of the Bernese Alps is obtained from the castle, while a still finer one may be enjoyed from the Lueg hill (2917 ft.), north-east of the town. The castle dates from the days of the dukes of Zäringen (11th-12th centuries), the last of whom (Berchtold V.) built walls round the town at its foot, and granted it a charter of liberties. On the extinction (1218) of that dynasty both castle and town passed to the counts of Kyburg, and from them, with the rest of their possessions, in 1272 by marriage to the cadet line of the Habsburgs. By that line they were sold in 1384, with Thun, to the town of Bern, whose bailiffs ruled in the castle till 1798.
(W. A. B. C.)
BURGEE (of unknown origin), a small three-cornered or swallow-tailed flag or pennant used by yachts or merchant vessels; also a kind of small coal burnt in engine furnaces.
BÜRGER, GOTTFRIED AUGUST (1748-1794), German poet, was born on the 1st of January 1748 at Molmerswende near Halberstadt, of which village his father was the Lutheran pastor. He was a backward child, and at the age of twelve was practically adopted by his maternal grandfather, Bauer, at Aschersleben, who sent him to the Pädagogium at Halle. Hence in 1764 he passed to the university, as a student of theology, which, however, he soon abandoned for the study of jurisprudence. Here he fell under the influence of C.A. Klotz (1738-1771), who directed Bürger's attention to literature, but encouraged rather than discouraged his natural disposition to a wild and unregulated life. In consequence of his dissipated habits, he was in 1767 recalled by his grandfather, but on promising to reform was in 1768 allowed to enter the university of Göttingen as a law student. As he continued his wild career, however, his grandfather withdrew his support and he was left to his own devices. Meanwhile he had made fair progress with his legal studies, and had the good fortune to form a close friendship with a number of young men of literary tastes. In the Göttingen Musenalmanach, edited by H. Boie and F.W. Gotter, Bürger's first poems were published, and by 1771 he had already become widely known as a poet. In 1772, through Boie's influence, Bürger obtained the post of "Amtmann" or district magistrate at Altengleichen near Göttingen. His grandfather was now reconciled to him, paid his debts and established him in his new sphere of activity. Meanwhile he kept in touch with his Göttingen friends, and when the "Göttinger Bund" or "Hain" was formed, Bürger, though not himself a member, kept in close touch with it. In 1773 the ballad Lenore was published in the Musenalmanach. This poem, which in dramatic force and in its vivid realization of the weird and supernatural remains without a rival, made his name a household word in Germany. In 1774 Bürger married Dorette Leonhart, the daughter of a Hanoverian official; but his passion for his wife's younger sister Auguste (the "Molly" of his poems and elegies) rendered the union unhappy and unsettled his life. In 1778 Bürger became editor of the Musenalmanach, and in the same year published the first collection of his poems. In 1780 he took a farm at Appenrode, but in three years lost so much money that he had to abandon the venture. Pecuniary troubles oppressed him, and being accused of neglecting his official duties, and feeling his honour attacked, he gave up his official position and removed in 1784 to Göttingen, where he established himself as Privat-docent. Shortly before his removal thither his wife died (30th of July 1784), and on the 29th of June in the next year he married his sister-in-law "Molly." Her death on the 9th of January 1786 affected him deeply. He appeared to lose at once all courage and all bodily and mental vigour. He still continued to teach in Göttingen; at the jubilee of the foundation of the university in 1787 he was made an honorary doctor of philosophy, and in 1789 was appointed extraordinary professor in that faculty, though without a stipend. In the following year he married a third time, his wife being a certain Elise Hahn, who, enchanted with his poems, had offered him her heart and hand. Only a few weeks of married life with his "Schwabenmädchen" sufficed to prove his mistake, and after two and a half years he divorced her. Deeply wounded by Schiller's criticism, in the 14th and 15th part of the Allgemeine Literaturzeitung of 1791, of the 2nd edition of his poems, disappointed, wrecked in fortune and health, Bürger eked out a precarious existence as a teacher in Göttingen until his death there on the 8th of June 1794.
Bürger's character, in spite of his utter want of moral balance, was not lacking in noble and lovable qualities. He was honest in purpose, generous to a fault, tender-hearted and modest. His talent for popular poetry was very considerable, and his ballads are among the finest in the German language. Besides Lenore, Das Lied vom braven Manne, Die Kuh, Der Kaiser und der Abt and Der wilde Jäger are famous. Among his purely lyrical poems, but few have earned a lasting reputation; but mention may be made of Das Blümchen Wunderhold, Lied an den lieben Mond, and a few love songs. His sonnets, particularly the elegies, are of great beauty.
Editions of Bürger's Samtliche Schriften appeared at Göttingen, 1817 (incomplete); 1829-1833 (8 vols.), and 1835 (one vol.); also a selection by E. Grisebach (5th ed., 1894). The Gedichte have been published in innumerable editions, the best being that by A. Sauer (2 vols., 1884). Briefe von und an Burger were edited by A. Strodtmann in 4 vols. (1874). On Bürger's life see the biography by H. Prohle (1856), the introduction to Sauer's edition of the poems, and W. von Wurzbach, G.A. Burger (1900).
BURGERS, THOMAS FRANÇOIS (1834-1881), president of the Transvaal Republic, was born in Cape Colony on the 15th of April 1834, and was educated at Utrecht, Holland, where he took the degree of doctor of theology. On his return to South Africa he was ordained minister of the Dutch Reformed Church, and stationed at Hanover in Cape Colony, where he exercised his ministrations for eight years. In 1862 his preaching attracted attention, and two years later an ecclesiastical tribunal suspended him for heretical opinions. He appealed, however, to the colonial government, which had appointed him, and obtained judgment in his favour, which was confirmed by the privy council of England on appeal in 1865. On the resignation of M.W. Pretorius and the refusal of President Brand of the Orange Free State to accept the office, Burgers was elected president of the Transvaal, taking the oath on the 1st of July 1872. In 1873 he endeavoured to persuade Montsioa to agree to an alteration in the boundary of the Barolong territory as fixed by the Keate award, but failed (see Bechuanaland). In 1875 Burgers, leaving the Transvaal in charge of Acting-President Joubert, went to Europe mainly to promote a scheme for linking the Transvaal to the coast by a railway from Delagoa Bay, which was that year definitely assigned to Portugal by the MacMahon award. With the Portuguese Burgers concluded a treaty, December 1875, providing for the construction of the railway. After meeting with refusals of financial help in London, Burgers managed to raise £90,000 in Holland, and bought a quantity of railway plant, which on its arrival at Delagoa Bay was mortgaged to pay freight, and this, so far as Burgers was concerned, was the end of the matter. In June 1876 he induced the raad to declare war against Sikukuni (Secocoeni), a powerful native chief in the eastern Transvaal. The campaign was unsuccessful, and with its failure the republic fell into a condition of lawlessness and insolvency, while a Zulu host threatened invasion. Burgers in an address to the raad (3rd of March 1877) declared "I would rather be a policeman under a strong government than the president of such a state. It is you—-you members of the raad and the Boers—who have lost the country, who have sold your independence for a drink." Sir Theophilus Shepstone, who had been sent to investigate the condition of affairs in the Transvaal, issued on the 12th of April a proclamation annexing the Transvaal to Great Britain. Burgers fully acquiesced in the necessity for annexation. He accepted a pension from the British government, and settled down to farming in Hanover, Cape Colony. He died at Richmond in that colony on the 9th of December 1881, and in the following year a volume of short stories, Tooneelen uit ons dorp, originally written by him for the Cape Volksblad, was published at the Hague for the benefit of his family. A patriot, a fluent speaker both in Dutch and in English, and possessed of unbounded energy, the failure of Burgers was due to his fondness for large visionary plans, which he attempted to carry out with insufficient means (see Transvaal: History).
For the annexation period see John Martineau, The Life of Sir Bartle Frere, vol. ii. chap, xviii. (London, 1895).
BURGERSDYK, or Burgersdicius, FRANCIS (1590-1629), Dutch logician, was born at Lier, near Delft, and died at Leiden. After a brilliant career at the university of Leiden, he studied theology at Saumur, where while still very young he became professor of philosophy. After five years he returned to Leiden, where he accepted the chair of logic and moral philosophy, and afterwards that of natural philosophy. His Logic was at one time widely used, and is still valuable. He wrote also Idea Philosophiae Moralis (1644).
BURGES, GEORGE (1786-1864), English classical scholar, was born in India. He was educated at Charterhouse school and Trinity College, Cambridge, taking his degree in 1807, and obtaining one of the members' prizes both in 1808 and 1809. He stayed up at Cambridge and became a most successful "coach." He had a great reputation as a Greek scholar, and was a somewhat acrimonious critic of rival scholars, especially Bishop Blomfield. Subsequently he fell into embarrassed circumstances through injudicious speculation, and in 1841 a civil list pension of £100 per annum was bestowed upon him. He died at Ramsgate, on the 11th of January 1864. Burges was a man of great learning and industry, but too fond of introducing arbitrary emendations into the text of classical authors. His chief works are: Euripides' Troades (1807) and Phoenissae (1809); Aeschylus' Supplices (1821), Eumenides (1822) and Prometheus (1831); Sophocles' Philoctetes (1833); E.F. Poppo's Prolegomena to Thucydides (1837), an abridged translation with critical remarks; Hermesianactis Fragmenta (1839). He also edited some of the dialogues of Plato with English notes, and translated nearly the whole of that author and the Greek anthology for Bohn's Classical library. He was a frequent contributor to the Classical Journal and other periodicals, and dedicated to Byron a play called The Son of Erin, or, The Cause of the Greeks (1823).
BURGESS, DANIEL (1645-1713), English Presbyterian divine, was born at Staines, in Middlesex, where his father was minister. He was educated under Busby at Westminster school, and in 1660 was sent to Magdalen Hall, Oxford, but not being able conscientiously to subscribe the necessary formulae he quitted the university without taking his degree. In 1667, after taking orders, he was appointed by Roger Boyle, first Lord Orrery, to the headmastership of a school recently established by that nobleman at Charleville, Co. Cork, and soon after he became private chaplain to Lady Mervin, near Dublin. There he was ordained by the local presbytery, and on returning to England was imprisoned for preaching at Marlborough. He soon regained his liberty, and went to London, where he speedily gathered a large and influential congregation, as much by the somewhat excessive fervour of his piety as by the vivacious illustrations which he frequently employed in his sermons. He was a master of epigram, and theologically inclined to Calvinism. The Sacheverell mob gutted his chapel in 1710, but the government repaired the building. Besides preaching, he gave instruction to private pupils, of whom the most distinguished was Henry St John, afterwards Lord Bolingbroke. His son, Daniel Burgess (d. 1747), was secretary to the princess of Wales, and in 1723 obtained a regium donum or government grant of £500 half-yearly for dissenting ministers.
BURGESS, THOMAS (1756-1837), English divine, was born at Odiham, in Hampshire. He was educated at Winchester, and at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. Before graduating, he edited a reprint of John Burton's Pentalogia. In 1781 he brought out an annotated edition of Richard Dawes's Miscellanea Critica (reprinted, Leipzig, 1800). In 1783 he became a fellow of his college, and in 1785 was appointed chaplain to Shute Barrington, bishop of Salisbury, through whose influence he obtained a prebendal stall, which he held till 1803. In 1788 he published his Considerations on the Abolition of Slavery, in which he advocated the principle of gradual emancipation. In 1791 he accompanied Barrington to Durham, where he did evangelistic work among the poorer classes. In 1803 he was appointed to the vacant bishopric of St David's, which he held for twenty years with great success. He founded the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge in the diocese, and also St David's College at Lampeter, which he liberally endowed. In 1820 he was appointed first president of the recently founded Royal Society of Literature; and three years later he was promoted to the see of Salisbury, over which he presided for twelve years, prosecuting his benevolent designs with unwearied industry. As at St David's, so at Salisbury, he founded a Church Union Society for the assistance of infirm and distressed clergymen. He strenuously opposed both Unitarianism and Catholic emancipation. He died on the 19th of February 1837.
A list of his works, which are very numerous, will be found in his biography by J.S. Harford (2nd ed., 1841). In addition to those already referred to may be mentioned his Essay on the Study of Antiquities, The First Principles of Christian Knowledge; Reflections on the Controversial Writings of Dr Priestley, Emendationes in Suidam et Hesychium et alios Lexicographos Graecos; The Bible, and nothing but the Bible, the Religion of the Church of England.
BURGESS (Med. Lat. burgensis, from burgus, a borough, a town), a term, in its earliest sense, meaning an inhabitant of a borough, one who occupied a tenement therein, but now applied solely to a registered parliamentary, or more strictly, municipal voter. An early use of the word was to denote a member elected to parliament by his fellow citizens in a borough. In some of the American colonies (e.g. Virginia), a "burgess" was a member of the legislative body, which was termed the "House of Burgesses." Previously to the Municipal Reform Act 1835, burgess was an official title in some English boroughs, and in this sense is still used in some of the states of the United States, as in Connecticut, New Jersey, Pennsylvania. The Burgess-roll is the register or official list of burgesses in a borough.
BURGH [Bourke, Burke], the name of an historic Irish house, associated with Connaught for more than seven centuries. It was founded by William de Burgh, brother of Hubert de Burgh (q.v.). Before the death of Henry II. (1189) he received a grant of lands from John as lord of Ireland. At John's accession (1199) he was installed in Thomond and was governor of Limerick. In 1199-1201 he was supporting in turn Cathal Carrach and Cathal Crovderg for the native throne, but he was expelled from Limerick in 1203, and, losing his Connaught, though not his Munster estates, died in 1205. His son Richard, in 1227, received the land of "Connok" [Connaught], as forfeited by its king, whom he helped to fight. From 1228 to 1232 he held the high office of justiciar of Ireland. In 1234 he sided with the crown against Richard, earl marshal, who fell in battle against him. Dying in 1243, he was succeeded as lord of Connaught by his son Richard, and then (1248) by his younger son Walter, who carried on the family warfare against the native chieftains, and added greatly to his vast domains by obtaining (c. 1255) from Prince Edward a grant of "the county of Ulster," in consequence of which he was styled later earl of Ulster. At his death in 1271, he was succeeded by his son Richard as 2nd earl. In 1286 Richard ravaged and subdued Connaught, and deposed Bryan O'Neill as chief native king, substituting a nominee of his own. The native king of Connaught was also attacked by him, in favour of that branch of the O'Conors whom his own family supported. He led his forces from Ireland to support Edward I. in his Scottish campaigns, and on Edward Bruce's invasion of Ulster in 1315 Richard marched against him, but he had given his daughter Elizabeth in marriage to Robert Bruce, afterwards king of Scotland, about 1304. Occasionally summoned to English parliaments, he spent most of his forty years of activity in Ireland, where he was the greatest noble of his day, usually fighting the natives or his Anglo-Norman rivals. The patent roll of 1290 shows that in addition to his lands in Ulster, Connaught and Munster, he had held the Isle of Man, but had surrendered it to the king.
His grandson and successor William, the 3rd earl (1326-1333), was the son of John de Burgh by Elizabeth, lady of Clare, sister and co-heir of the last Clare earl of Hertford (d. 1314). He married a daughter of Henry, earl of Lancaster, and was appointed lieutenant of Ireland in 1331, but was murdered in his 21st year, leaving a daughter, the sole heiress, not only of the de Burgh possessions, but of vast Clare estates. She was married in childhood to Lionel, son of Edward III., who was recognized in her right as earl of Ulster, and their direct representative, the duke of York, ascended the throne in 1461 as Edward IV., since when the earldom of Ulster has been only held by members of the royal family.
On the murder of the 3rd earl (1333), his male kinsmen, who had a better right, by native Irish ideas, to the succession than his daughter, adopted Irish names and customs, and becoming virtually native chieftains succeeded in holding the bulk of the de Burgh territories. Their two main branches were those of "MacWilliam Eighter" in southern Connaught, and "MacWilliam Oughter" to the north of them, in what is now Mayo. The former held the territory of Clanricarde, lying in the neighbourhood of Galway, and in 1543 their chief, as Ulick "Bourck, alias Makwilliam," surrendered it to Henry VIII., receiving it back to hold, by English custom, as earl of Clanricarde and Lord Dunkellin. The 4th earl (1601-1635) distinguished himself on the English side in O'Neill's rebellion and afterwards, and obtained the English earldom of St Albans in 1628, his son Ulick receiving further the Irish marquessate of Clanricarde (1646). His cousin and heir, the 6th earl (1657-1666) was uncle of the 8th and 9th earls (1687-1722), both of whom fought for James II. and paid the penalty for doing so in 1691, but the 9th earl was restored in 1702, and his great-grandson, the 12th earl, was created marquess of Clanricarde in 1789. He left no son, but the marquessate was again revived in 1825, for his nephew the 14th earl, whose heir is the present marquess. The family, which changed its name from Bourke to de Burgh in 1752, and added that of Canning in 1862, still own a vast estate in County Galway.
In 1603 "the MacWilliam Oughter," Theobald Bourke, similarly resigned his territory in Mayo, and received it back to hold by English tenure. In 1627 he was created Viscount Mayo. The 2nd and 3rd viscounts (1629-1663) suffered at Cromwell's hands, but the 4th was restored to his estates (some 50,000 acres) in 1666. The peerage became extinct or dormant on the death of the 8th viscount in 1767. In 1781 John Bourke, a Mayo man, believed to be descended from the line of "MacWilliam Oughter," was created Viscount Mayo, and four years later earl of Mayo, a peerage still extant. In 1872 the 6th earl was murdered in the Andaman Islands when viceroy of India.
The baronies of Bourke of Connell (1580) and Bourke of Brittas (1618), both forfeited in 1691, were bestowed on branches of the family which has also still representatives in the baronetage and landed gentry of Ireland.
The lords Burgh or Borough of Gainsborough (1487-1599) were a Lincolnshire family believed to be descended from a younger son of Hubert de Burgh. The 5th baron was lord deputy of Ireland in 1597, and his younger brother, Sir John (d. 1594), a distinguished soldier and sailor.
(J. H. R.)
BURGH, HUBERT DE (d. 1243), chief justiciar of England in the reign of John and Henry III., entered the royal service in the reign of Richard I. He traced his descent from Robert of Mortain, half brother of the Conqueror and first earl of Cornwall; he married about 1200 the daughter of William de Vernon, earl of Devon; and thus, from the beginning of his career, he stood within the circle of the great ruling families. But he owed his high advancement to exceptional ability as an administrator and a soldier. Already in 1201 he was chamberlain to King John, the sheriff of three shires, the constable of Dover and Windsor castles, the warden of the Cinque Ports and of the Welsh Marches. He served with John in the continental wars which led up to the loss of Normandy. It was to his keeping that the king first entrusted the captive Arthur of Brittany. Coggeshall is our authority for the tale, which Shakespeare has immortalized, of Hubert's refusal to permit the mutilation of his prisoner; but Hubert's loyalty was not shaken by the crime to which Arthur subsequently fell a victim. In 1204 Hubert distinguished himself by a long and obstinate defence of Chinon, at a time when nearly the whole of Poitou had passed into French hands. In 1213 he was appointed seneschal of Poitou, with a view to the invasion of France which ended disastrously for John in the next year.
Both before and after the issue of the Great Charter Hubert adhered loyally to the king; he was rewarded, in June 1215, with the office of chief justiciar. This office he retained after the death of John and the election of William, the earl marshal, as regent. But, until the expulsion of the French from England, Hubert was entirely engaged with military affairs. He held Dover successfully through the darkest hour of John's fortunes; he brought back Kent to the allegiance of Henry III.; he completed the discomfiture of the French and their allies by the naval victory which he gained over Eustace the Monk, the noted privateer and admiral of Louis, in the Straits of Dover (Aug. 1217). The inferiority of the English fleet has been much exaggerated, for the greater part of the French vessels were transports carrying reinforcements and supplies. But Hubert owed his success to the skill with which he manœuvred for the weather-gage, and his victory was not less brilliant than momentous. It compelled Louis to accept the treaty of Lambeth, under which he renounced his claims to the crown and evacuated England. As the saviour of the national cause the justiciar naturally assumed after the death of William Marshal (1219) the leadership of the English loyalists. He was opposed by the legate Pandulf (1218-1221), who claimed the guardianship of the kingdom for the Holy See; by the Poitevin Peter des Roches, bishop of Winchester, who was the young king's tutor; by the foreign mercenaries of John, among whom Falkes de Bréauté took the lead; and by the feudal party under the earls of Chester and Albemarle. On Pandulf's departure the pope was induced to promise that no other legate should be appointed in the lifetime of Archbishop Stephen Langton. Other opponents were weakened by the audacious stroke of 1223, when the justiciar suddenly announced the resumption of all the castles, sheriffdoms and other grants which had been made since the king's accession. A plausible excuse was found in the next year for issuing a sentence of confiscation and banishment against Falkes de Bréauté. Finally in 1227, Hubert having proclaimed the king of age, dismissed the bishop of Winchester from his tutorship.
Hubert now stood at the height of his power. His possessions had been enlarged by four successive marriages, particularly by that which he contracted in 1221 with Margaret, the sister of Alexander II. of Scotland; in 1227 he received the earldom of Kent, which had been dormant since the disgrace of Odo of Bayeux. But the favour of Henry III. was a precarious foundation on which to build. The king chafed against the objections with which his minister opposed wild plans of foreign conquest and inconsiderate concessions to the papacy. They quarrelled violently in 1229, at Portsmouth, when the king was with difficulty prevented from stabbing Hubert, because a sufficient supply of ships was not forthcoming for an expedition to France. In 1231 Henry lent an ear to those who asserted that the justiciar had secretly encouraged armed attacks upon the aliens to whom the pope had given English benefices. Hubert was suddenly disgraced and required to render an account of his long administration. The blow fell suddenly, a few weeks after his appointment as justiciar of Ireland. It was precipitated by one of those fits of passion to which the king was prone; but the influence of Hubert had been for some time waning before that of Peter des Roches and his nephew Peter des Rievaux. Some colour was given to their attacks by Hubert's injudicious plea that he held a charter from King John which exempted him from any liability to produce accounts. But the other charges, far less plausible than that of embezzlement, which were heaped upon the head of the fallen favourite, are evidence of an intention to crush him at all costs. He was dragged from the sanctuary at Bury St Edmunds, in which he had taken refuge, and was kept in strait confinement until Richard of Cornwall, the king's brother, and three other earls offered to be his sureties. Under their protection he remained in honourable detention at Devizes Castle. On the outbreak of Richard Marshal's rebellion (1233), he was carried off by the rebels to the Marshal stronghold of Striguil, in the hope that his name would add popularity to their cause. In 1234 he was admitted, along with the other supporters of the fallen Marshal, to the benefit of a full pardon. He regained his earldom and held it till his death, although he was once in serious danger from the avarice of the king (1239), who was tempted by Hubert's enormous wealth to revive the charge of treason.
In his lifetime Hubert was a popular hero; Matthew Paris relates how, at the time of his disgrace, a common smith refused with an oath to put fetters on the man "who restored England to the English." Hubert's ambition of founding a great family was not realized. His earldom died with him, though he left two sons. In constitutional history he is remembered as the last of the great justiciars. The office, as having become too great for a subject, was now shorn of its most important powers and became politically insignificant.
See Roger of Wendover's Flores Historiarum, edited for the English Historical Society by H.O. Coxe (4 vols., 1841-1844); the Chronica Majora of Matthew Paris, edited by H.R. Luard for the Rolls Series (7 vols., 1872-1883); the Histoire des ducs de Normandie, edited by F. Michel for the Soc. de l'Hist. de France (Paris, 1840); the Histoire de Guillaume le Marechal, edited by Paul Meyer for the same society (3 vols., Paris, 1891, &c.); J.E. Doyle's Official Baronage of England, ii. pp. 271-274; R. Pauli's Geschichte von England, vol. iii.; W. Stubbs's Constitutional History of England, vol. ii.
(H. W. C. D.)
BURGHERSH, HENRY (1292-1340), English bishop and chancellor, was a younger son of Robert, Baron Burghersh (d. 1305), and a nephew of Bartholomew, Lord Badlesmere, and was educated in France. In 1320 owing to Badlesmere's influence Pope John XXII. appointed him bishop of Lincoln in spite of the fact that the chapter had already made an election to the vacant bishopric, and he secured the position without delay. After the execution of Badlesmere in 1322 Burghersh's lands were seized by Edward II., and the pope was urged to deprive him; about 1326, however, his possessions were restored, a proceeding which did not prevent him from joining Edward's queen, Isabella, and taking part in the movement which led to the deposition and murder of the king. Enjoying the favour of the new king, Edward III., the bishop became chancellor of England in 1328; but he failed to secure the archbishopric of Canterbury which became vacant about the same time, and was deprived of his office of chancellor and imprisoned when Isabella lost her power in 1330. But he was soon released and again in a position of influence. He was treasurer of England from 1334 to 1337, and high in the favour and often in the company of Edward III.; he was sent on several important errands, and entrusted with important commissions. He died at Ghent on the 4th of December 1340.
The bishop's brother, Bartholomew Burghersh (d. 1355), became Baron Burghersh on the death of his brother Stephen in 1310. He acted as assistant to Badlesmere until the execution of the latter; and then, trusted by Edward III., was constable of Dover Castle and warden of the Cinque Ports. He filled other important positions, served Edward III. both as a diplomatist and a soldier, being present at the battle of Crecy in 1346; and retaining to the last the royal confidence, died in August 1355. His son and successor, Bartholomew (d. 1369), was one of the first knights of the order of the Garter, and earned a great reputation as a soldier, specially distinguishing himself at the battle of Poitiers in 1356.
BURGHLEY, WILLIAM CECIL, Baron (1521-1508), was born, according to his own statement, on the 13th of September 1521 at the house of his mother's father at Bourne, Lincolnshire. Pedigrees, elaborated by Cecil himself with the help of Camden, the antiquary, associated him with the Cecils or Sitsyllts of Altyrennes in Herefordshire, and traced his descent from an Owen of the time of King Harold and a Sitsyllt of the reign of Rufus. The connexion with the Herefordshire family is not so impossible as the descent from Sitsyllt; but the earliest authentic ancestor of the lord treasurer is his grandfather, David, who, according to Burghley's enemies, "kept the best inn" in Stamford. David somehow secured the favour of Henry VII., to whom he seems to have been yeoman of the guard. He was serjeant-at-arms to Henry VIII. in 1526, sheriff of Northamptonshire in 1532, and a justice of the peace for Rutland. His eldest son, Richard, yeoman of the wardrobe (d. 1554), married Jane, daughter of William Heckington of Bourne, and was father of three daughters and Lord Burghley.
William, the only son, was put to school first at Grantham and then at Stamford. In May 1535, at the age of fourteen, he went up to St John's College, Cambridge, where he was brought into contact with the foremost educationists of the time, Roger Ascham and John Cheke, and acquired an unusual knowledge of Greek. He also acquired the affections of Cheke's sister, Mary, and was in 1541 removed by his father to Gray's Inn, without, after six years' residence at Cambridge, having taken a degree. The precaution proved useless, and four months later Cecil committed one of the rare rash acts of his life in marrying Mary Cheke. The only child of this marriage, Thomas, the future earl of Exeter, was born in May 1542, and in February 1543 Cecil's first wife died. Three years later he married (21st of December 1546) Mildred, daughter of Sir Anthony Cooke, who was ranked by Ascham with Lady Jane Grey as one of the two most learned ladies in the kingdom, and whose sister, Anne, became the wife of Sir Nicholas, and the mother of Sir Francis, Bacon.
Cecil, meanwhile, had obtained the reversion to the office of custos rotulorum brevium, and, according to his autobiographical notes, sat in parliament in 1543; but his name does not occur in the imperfect parliamentary returns until 1547, when he was elected for the family borough of Stamford. Earlier in that year he had accompanied Protector Somerset on his Pinkie campaign, being one of the two "judges of the Marshalsea," i.e. in the courts-martial. The other was William Patten, who states that both he and Cecil began to write independent accounts of the campaign, and that Cecil generously communicated his notes for Patten's narrative, which has been reprinted more than once.
In 1548 he is described as the protector's master of requests, which apparently means that he was clerk or registrar of the court of requests which the protector, possibly at Latimer's instigation, illegally set up in Somerset House "to hear poor men's complaints." He also seems to have acted as private secretary to the protector, and was in some danger at the time of the protector's fall (October 1549). The lords opposed to Somerset ordered his detention on the 10th of October, and in November he was in the Tower. On the 25th of January 1550 he was bound over in recognizances to the value of a thousand marks. However, he soon ingratiated himself with Warwick, and on the 15th of September 1550 he was sworn one of the king's two secretaries. He was knighted on the 11th of October 1551, on the eve of Somerset's second fall, and was congratulated on his success in escaping his benefactor's fate. In April he became chancellor of the order of the Garter. But service under Northumberland was no bed of roses, and in his diary Cecil recorded his release in the phrase ex misero aulico factus liber et mei juris. His responsibility for Edward's illegal "devise" of the crown has been studiously minimized by Cecil himself and by his biographers. Years afterwards, he pretended that he had only signed the "devise" as a witness, but in his apology to Queen Mary he did not venture to allege so flimsy an excuse; he preferred to lay stress on the extent to which he succeeded in shifting the responsibility on to the shoulders of his brother-in-law, Sir John Cheke, and other friends, and on his intrigues to frustrate the queen to whom he had sworn allegiance. There is no doubt that he saw which way the wind was blowing, and disliked Northumberland's scheme; but he had not the courage to resist the duke to his face. As soon, however, as the duke had set out to meet Mary, Cecil became the most active intriguer against him, and to these efforts, of which he laid a full account before Queen Mary, he mainly owed his immunity. He had, moreover, had no part in the divorce of Catherine or in the humiliation of Mary in Henry's reign, and he made no scruple about conforming to the religious reaction. He went to mass, confessed, and out of sheer zeal and in no official capacity went to meet Cardinal Pole on his pious mission to England in December 1554, again accompanying him to Calais in May 1555. It was rumoured in December 1554 that Cecil would succeed Sir William Petre as secretary, an office which, with his chancellorship of the Garter, he had lost on Mary's accession. Probably the queen had more to do with the falsification of this rumour than Cecil, though he is said to have opposed in the parliament of 1555—in which he represented Lincolnshire—a bill for the confiscation of the estates of the Protestant refugees. But the story, even as told by his biographer (Peck, Desiderata Curiosa, i. 11), does not represent Cecil's conduct as having been very courageous; and it is more to his credit that he found no seat in the parliament of 1558, for which Mary had directed the return of "discreet and good Catholic members."
By that time Cecil had begun to trim his sails to a different breeze. He was in secret communication with Elizabeth before Mary died, and from the first the new queen relied on Cecil as she relied on no one else. Her confidence was not misplaced; Cecil was exactly the kind of minister England then required. Personal experience had ripened his rare natural gift for avoiding dangers. It was no time for brilliant initiative or adventurous politics; the need was to avoid Scylla and Charybdis, and a via media had to be found in church and state, at home and abroad. Cecil was not a political genius; no great ideas emanated from his brain. But he was eminently a safe man, not an original thinker, but a counsellor of unrivalled wisdom. Caution was his supreme characteristic; he saw that above all things England required time. Like Fabius, he restored the fortunes of his country by deliberation. He averted open rupture until England was strong enough to stand the shock. There was nothing heroic about Cecil or his policy; it involved a callous attitude towards struggling Protestants abroad. Huguenots and Dutch Were aided just enough to keep them going in the struggles which warded danger off from England's shores. But Cecil never developed that passionate aversion from decided measures which became a second nature to his mistress. His intervention in Scotland in 1559-1560 showed that he could strike on occasion; and his action over the execution of Mary, queen of Scots, proved that he was willing to take responsibility from which Elizabeth shrank. Generally he was in favour of more decided intervention on behalf of continental Protestants than Elizabeth would admit, but it is not always easy to ascertain the advice he gave. He has left endless memoranda lucidly setting forth the pros and cons of every course of action; but there are few indications of the line which he actually recommended when it came to a decision. How far he was personally responsible for the Anglican Settlement, the Poor Laws, and the foreign policy of the reign, how far he was thwarted by the baleful influence of Leicester and the caprices of the queen, remains to a large extent a matter of conjecture. His share in the settlement of 1559 was considerable, and it coincided fairly with his own somewhat indeterminate religious views. Like the mass of the nation, he grew more Protestant as time wore on; he was readier to persecute Papists than Puritans; he had no love for ecclesiastical jurisdiction, and he warmly remonstrated with Whitgift over his persecuting Articles of 1583. The finest encomium was passed on him by the queen herself, when she said, "This judgment I have of you, that you will not be corrupted with any manner of gifts, and that you will be faithful to the state."
From 1558 for forty years the biography of Cecil is almost indistinguishable from that of Elizabeth and from the history of England. Of personal incident, apart from his mission to Scotland in 1560, there is little. He represented Lincolnshire in the parliament of 1559, and Northamptonshire in that of 1563, and he took an active part in the proceedings of the House of Commons until his elevation to the peerage; but there seems no good evidence for the story that he was proposed as speaker in 1563. In January 1561 he was given the lucrative office of master of the court of wards in succession to Sir Thomas Parry, and he did something to reform that instrument of tyranny and abuse. In February 1559 he was elected chancellor of Cambridge University in succession to Cardinal Pole; he was created M.A. of that university on the occasion of Elizabeth's visit in 1564, and M.A. of Oxford on a similar occasion in 1566. On the 25th of February 1571 he was raised to the peerage as Baron Burghley of Burghley (or Burleigh); the fact that he continued to act as secretary after his elevation illustrates the growing importance of that office, which under his son became a secretaryship of state. In 1572, however, the marquess of Winchester, who had been lord high treasurer under Edward, Mary and Elizabeth, died, and Burghley succeeded to his post. It was a signal triumph over Leicester; and, although Burghley had still to reckon with cabals in the council and at court, his hold over the queen strengthened with the lapse of years. Before he died, Robert, his only surviving son by his second wife, was ready to step into his shoes as the queen's principal adviser. Having survived all his rivals, and all his children except Robert and the worthless Thomas, Burghley died at his London house on the 4th of August 1598, and was buried in St Martin's, Stamford.
Burghley's private life was singularly virtuous; he was a faithful husband, a careful father and a considerate master. A book-lover and antiquary, he made a special hobby of heraldry and genealogy. It was the conscious and unconscious aim of the age to reconstruct a new landed aristocracy on the ruins of the old, and Burghley was a great builder and planter. All the arts of architecture and horticulture were lavished on Burghley House and Theobalds, which his son exchanged for Hatfield. His public conduct does not present itself in quite so amiable a light. As the marquess of Winchester said of himself, he was sprung from the willow rather than the oak, and he was not the man to suffer for convictions. The interest of the state was the supreme consideration, and to it he had no hesitation in sacrificing individual consciences. He frankly disbelieved in toleration; "that state," he said, "could never be in safety where there was a toleration of two religions. For there is no enmity so great as that for religion; and therefore they that differ in the service of their God can never agree in the service of their country." With a maxim such as this, it was easy for him to maintain that Elizabeth's coercive measures were political and not religious. To say that he was Machiavellian is meaningless, for every statesman is so more or less; especially in the 16th century men preferred efficiency to principle. On the other hand, principles are valueless without law and order; and Burghley's craft and subtlety prepared a security in which principles might find some scope.
The sources and authorities for Burghley's life are endless. The most important collection of documents is at Hatfield, where there are some ten thousand papers covering the period down to Burghley's death; these have been calendared in 8 volumes by the Hist. MSS. Comm. At least as many others are in the Record Office and British Museum, the Lansdowne MSS. especially containing a vast mass of his correspondence; see the catalogues of Cotton, Harleian, Royal, Sloane, Egerton and Additional MSS. in the British Museum, and the Calendars of Domestic, Foreign, Spanish, Venetian, Scottish and Irish State Papers.
Other official sources are the Acts of the Privy Council (vols. i.-xxix.); Lords' and Commons' Journals, D'Ewes' Journals, Off. Ret. M.P.'s; Rymer's Foedera; Collins's Sydney State Papers; Nichols's Progresses of Elizabeth. See also Strype's Works (26 vols.), Parker, Soc. Publ. (56 vols.); Camden's Annales; Holinshed, Stow and Speed's Chron.; Hayward's Annals; Machyn's Diary, Leycester Corr., Egerton Papers (Camden Soc.). For Burghley's early life, see Cooper's Athenae Cantab.; Baker's St John's Coll., Camb., ed. Mayor; Letters and. Papers of Henry VIII.; Tytler's Edward VI.; Nichols's Lit. Remains of Edward VI.; Leadam's Court of Requests, Chron. of Queen Jane (Camden Soc.) and throughout Froude's Hist. No satisfactory life of Burghley has yet appeared; some valuable anonymous notes, probably by Burghley's servant Francis Alford, were printed in Peck's Desiderata Curiosa (1732), i. 1-66; other notes are in Naunton's Fragmenta Regalia. Lives by Collins (1732), Charlton and Melvil (1738), were followed by Nares's biography in three of the most ponderous volumes (1828-1831) in the language; this provoked Macaulay's brilliant but misleading essay. M.A.S. Hume's Great Lord Burghley (1898) is largely a piecing together of the references to Burghley in the same author's Calendar of Simancas MSS. The life by Dr Jessopp (1904) is an expansion of his article in the Dict. Nat. Biog.; it is still only a sketch, though the volume contains a mass of genealogical and other incidental information by other hands.
(A. F. P.)
This was the form always used by Cecil himself.
BURGKMAIR, HANS or John (1473-? 1531), German painter and engraver on wood, believed to have been a pupil of Albrecht Dürer, was born at Augsburg. Professor Christ ascribes to him about 700 woodcuts, most of them distinguished by that spirit and freedom which we admire in the works of his supposed master. His principal work is the series of 135 prints representing the triumphs of the emperor Maximilian I. They are of large size, executed in chiaroscuro, from two blocks, and convey a high idea of his powers. Burgkmair was also an excellent painter in fresco and in distemper, specimens of which are in the galleries of Munich and Vienna, carefully and solidly finished in the style of the old German school.
BURGLARY (burgi latrocinium; in ancient English law, hamesucken), at common law, the offence of breaking and entering the dwelling-house of another with intent to commit a felony. The offence and its punishment are regulated in England by the Larceny Act 1861. The four important points to be considered in connexion with the offence of burglary are (1) the time, (2) the place, (3) the manner and (4) the intent. The time, which is now the essence of the offence, was not considered originally to have been very material, the gravity of the crime lying principally in the invasion of the sanctity of a man's domicile. But at some period before the reign of Edward VI. it had become settled that time was essential to the offence, and it was not adjudged burglary unless committed by night. The day was then accounted as beginning at sunrise, and ending immediately after sunset, but it was afterwards decided that if there were left sufficient daylight or twilight to discern the countenance of a person, it was no burglary. This, again, was superseded by the Larceny Act 1861, for the purpose of which night is deemed to commence at nine o'clock in the evening of each day, and to conclude at six o'clock in the morning of the next succeeding day.
The place must, according to Sir E. Coke's definition, be a mansion-house, i.e. a man's dwelling-house or private residence. No building, although within the same curtilage as the dwelling-house, is deemed to be a part of the dwelling-house for the purposes of burglary, unless there is a communication between such building and dwelling-house either immediate or by means of a covered and enclosed passage leading from the one to the other. Chambers in a college or in an inn of court are the dwelling-house of the owner; so also are rooms or lodgings in a private house, provided the owner dwells elsewhere, or enters by a different outer door from his lodger, otherwise the lodger is merely an inmate and his apartment a parcel of the one dwelling-house.
As to the manner, there must be both a breaking and an entry. Both must be at night, but not necessarily on the same night, provided that in the breaking and in the entry there is an intent to commit a felony. The breaking may be either an actual breaking of any external part of a building; or opening or lifting any closed door, window, shutter or lock; or entry by means of a threat, artifice or collusion with persons inside; or by means of such a necessary opening as a chimney. If an entry is obtained through an open window, it will not be burglary, but if an inner door is afterwards opened, it immediately becomes so. Entry includes the insertion through an open door or window, or any aperture, of any part of the body or of any instrument in the hand to draw out goods. The entry may be before the breaking, for the Larceny Act 1861 has extended the definition of burglary to cases in which a person enters another's dwelling with intent to commit felony, or being in such house commits felony therein, and in either case breaks out of such dwelling-house by night.
Breaking and entry must be with the intent to commit a felony, otherwise it is only trespass. The felony need not be a larceny, it may be either murder or rape. The punishment is penal servitude for life, or any term not less than three years, or imprisonment not exceeding two years, with or without hard labour.
Housebreaking in English law is to be distinguished from burglary, in that it is not essential that it should be committed at night, nor in a dwelling-house. It may, according to the Larceny Act 1861, be committed in a school-house, shop, warehouse or counting-house. Every burglary involves housebreaking, but every housebreaking does not amount to burglary. The punishment for housebreaking is penal servitude for any term not exceeding fourteen years and not less than three years, or imprisonment for any term not exceeding two years, with or without hard labour.
In the United States the common-law definition of burglary has been modified by statute in many states, so as to cover what is defined in England as housebreaking; the maximum punishment nowhere exceeds imprisonment for twenty years.
Authorities.—Pollock and Maitland, History of English Law; Stephen, History of Criminal Law; Archbold, Pleading and Evidence in Criminal Cases; Russell, On Crimes and Misdemeanours; Stephen, Commentaries.
In Scots law, the word hamesucken meant the feloniously beating or assaulting a man in his own house.
BURGON, JOHN WILLIAM (1813-1888), English divine, was born at Smyrna on the 21st of August 1813, the son of a Turkey merchant, who was a skilled numismatist and afterwards became an assistant in the antiquities department of the British Museum. His mother was a Greek. After a few years of business life, Burgon went to Worcester College, Oxford, in 1841, gained the Newdigate prize, took his degree in 1845, and won an Oriel fellowship in 1846. He was much influenced by his brother-in-law, the scholar and theologian Henry John Rose (1800-1873), a churchman of the old conservative type, with whom he used to spend his long vacations. Burgon made Oxford his headquarters, while holding a living at some distance. In 1863 he was made vicar of St Mary's, having attracted attention by his vehement sermons against Essays and Reviews. In 1867 he was appointed Gresham professor of divinity. In 1871 he published a defence of the genuineness of the twelve last verses of St Mark's Gospel. He now began an attack on the proposal for a new lectionary for the Church of England, based largely upon his objections to the principles for determining the authority of MS. readings adopted by Westcott and Hort, which he assailed in a memorable article in the Quarterly Review for 1881. This, with his other articles, was reprinted in 1884 under the title of The Revision Revised. His biographical essays on H.L. Mansel and others were also collected, and published under the title of Twelve Good Men (1888). Protests against the inclusion of Dr Vance Smith among the revisers, against the nomination of Dean Stanley to be select preacher in the university of Oxford, and against the address in favour of toleration in the matter of ritual, followed in succession. In 1876 Burgon was made dean of Chichester. He died on the 4th of August 1888. His life was written by Dean E.M. Goulburn (1892). Vehement and almost passionate in his convictions, Burgon nevertheless possessed a warm and kindly heart. He may be described as a high churchman of the type prevalent before the rise of the Tractarian school. His extensive collection of transcripts from the Greek Fathers, illustrating the text of the New Testament, was bequeathed to the British Museum.
BURGONET, or Burganet (from Fr. bourguignote, Burgundian helmet), a form of light helmet or head-piece, which was in vogue in the 16th and 17th centuries. In its normal form the burgonet was a large roomy cap with a brim shading the eyes, cheek-pieces or flaps, a comb, and a guard for the back of the neck. In many cases a vizor, or other face protection, and a chin-piece are found in addition, so that this piece of armour is sometimes mistaken for an armet (q.v.), but it can always be distinguished by the projecting brim in front. The morion and cabasset have no face, cheek or neck protection. The typical head-piece of the 17th-century soldier in England and elsewhere is a burgonet skull-cap with a straight brim, neck-guard and often, in addition, a fixed vizor of three thin iron bars which are screwed into, and hang down from, the brim in front of the eyes.
BURGOS, a province of northern Spain; bounded on the N.E. by Biscay and Álava, E. by Logroño, S.E. by Soria, S. by Segovia, S.W. by Valladolid, W. by Palencia, and N.W. by Santander. Pop. (1900) 338,828; area, 5480 sq. m. Burgos includes the isolated county of Treviño, which is shut in on all sides by territory belonging to Álava. The northern and north-eastern districts of the province are mountainous, and the central and southern form part of the vast and elevated plateau of Old Castile. The extreme northern region is traversed by part of the great Cantabrian chain. Eastwards are the highest peaks of the province in the Sierra de la Demanda (with the Cerro de San Millan, 6995 ft. high) and in the Sierra de Neila. On the eastern frontier, midway between these highlands and the Cantabrian chain, two comparatively low ranges, running east and west of Pancorbo, kave a gap through which run the railway and roads connecting Castile with the valley of the Ebro. This Pancorbo Pass has often been called the "Iron Gates of Castile," as a handful of men could hold it against an army. South and west of this spot begins the plateau, generally covered with snow in winter, and swept by such cold winds that Burgos is considered, with Soria and Segovia, one of the coldest regions of the peninsula. The Ebro runs eastwards through the northern half of the province, but is not navigable. The Douro, or Duero, crosses the southern half, running west-north-west; it also is unnavigable in its upper valley. The other important streams are the Pisuerga, flowing south towards Palencia and Valladolid, and the Arlanzón, which flows through Burgos for over 75m.
The variations of temperature are great, as from 9° to 20° of frost have frequently been recorded in winter, while the mean summer temperature is 64° (Fahr.). As but little rain falls in summer, and the soil is poor, agriculture thrives only in the valleys, especially that of the Ebro. In live-stock, however, Burgos is one of the richest of Spanish provinces. Horses, mules, asses, goats, cattle and pigs are bred in considerable numbers, but the mainstay of the peasantry is sheep-farming. Vast ranges of almost uninhabited upland are reserved as pasture for the flocks, which at the beginning of the 20th century contained more than 500,000 head of sheep. Coal, china-clay and salt are obtained in small quantities, but, out of more than 150 mines registered, only 4 were worked in 1903. The other industries of the province are likewise undeveloped, although there are many small potteries, stone quarries, tanneries and factories for the manufacture of linen and cotton of the coarsest description. The ancient cloth and woollen industries, for which Burgos was famous in the past, have almost disappeared. Trade is greatly hindered by the lack of adequate railway communication, and even of good roads. The Northern railways from Madrid to the French frontier cross the province in the central districts; the Valladolid-Bilbao line traverses the Cantabrian mountains, in the north; and the Valladolid-Saragossa line skirts the Douro valley, in the south. The only important town in the province is Burgos, the capital (pop. 30,167). Few parts of Spain are poorer; education makes little progress, and least of all in the thinly peopled rural districts, with their widely scattered hamlets. The peasantry have thus every inducement to migrate to the Basque Provinces, Catalonia and other relatively prosperous regions; and consequently the population does not increase, despite the excess of births over deaths.
BURGOS, the capital formerly of Old Castile, and since 1833 of the Spanish province of Burgos, on the river Arlanzón, and on the Northern railways from Madrid to the French frontier. Pop. (1900) 30,167. Burgos, in the form of an amphitheatre, occupies the lower slopes of a hill crowned by the ruins of an ancient citadel. It faces the Arlanzón, a broad and swift stream, with several islands in mid-channel. Three stone bridges lead to the suburb of La Vega, on the opposite bank. On all sides, except up the castle hill, fine avenues and public gardens are laid out, notably the Paseo de la Isla, extending along the river to the west. Burgos itself was originally surrounded by a wall, of which few fragments remain; but although its streets and broad squares, such as the central Plaza Mayór, or Plaza de la Constitucion, have often quite a modern appearance, the city retains much of its picturesque character, owing to the number and beauty of its churches, convents and palaces. Unaffected by the industrial activity of the neighbouring Basque Provinces, it has little trade apart from the sale of agricultural produce and the manufacture of paper and leathern goods.
But it is rich in architectural and antiquarian interest. The citadel was founded in 884 by Diego Rodriguez Porcelos, count of Castile; in the 10th century it was held against the kings of Leon by Count Fernan Gonzalez, a mighty warrior; and even in 1812 it was successfully defended by a French garrison against Lord Wellington and his British troops. Within its walls the Spanish national hero, the Cid Campeador, was wedded to Ximena of Oviedo in 1074; and Prince Edward of England (afterwards King Edward I.) to Eleanor of Castile in 1254. Statues of Porcelos, Gonzalez and the Cid, of Nuño Rasura and Lain Calvo, the first elected magistrates of Burgos, during its brief period of republican rule in the 10th century, and of the emperor Charles V., adorn the massive Arco de Santa Maria, which was erected between 1536 and 1562, and commemorates the return of the citizens to their allegiance, after the rebellion against Charles V. had been crushed in 1522. The interior of this arch serves as a museum. Tradition still points to the site of the Cid's birthplace; and a reliquary preserved in the town hall contains his bones, and those of Ximena, brought hither after many changes, including a partial transference to Sigmaringen in Germany.
Other noteworthy buildings in Burgos are the late 15th century Casa del Cordón, occupied by the captain-general of Old Castile; the Casa de Miranda, which worthily represents the best domestic architecture of Spain in the 16th century; and the barracks, hospitals and schools. Burgos is the see of an archbishop, whose province comprises the diocese of Palencia, Pamplona, Santander and Tudela. The cathedral, founded in 1221 by Ferdinand III. of Castile and the English bishop Maurice of Burgos, is a fine example of florid Gothic, built of white limestone (see Architecture, Plate II. fig. 65). It was not completed until 1567, and the architects principally responsible for its construction were a Frenchman in the 13th century and a German in the 15th. Its cruciform design is almost hidden by the fifteen chapels added at all angles to the aisles and transepts, by the beautiful 14th-century cloister on the north-west and the archiepiscopal palace on the south-west. Over the three central doorways of the main or western façade rise two lofty and graceful towers. Many of the monuments within the cathedral are of considerable artistic and historical interest. The chapel of Corpus Christi contains the chest which the Cid is said to have filled with sand and subsequently pawned for a large sum to the credulous Jews of Burgos. The legend adds that he redeemed his pledge. In the aisleless Gothic church of Santa Agueda, or Santa Gadéa, tradition relates that the Cid compelled Alphonso VI. of Leon, before his accession to the throne of Castile in 1072, to swear that he was innocent of the murder of Sancho his brother and predecessor on the throne. San Estéban, completed between 1280 and 1350, and San Nicolás, dating from 1505, are small Gothic churches, each with a fine sculptured doorway. Many of the convents of Burgos have been destroyed, and those which survive lie chiefly outside the city. At the end of the Paseo de la Isla stands the nunnery of Santa Maria la Real de las Huelgas, originally a summer palace (huelga, "pleasure-ground") of the kings of Castile. In 1187 it was transformed into a Cistercian convent by Alphonso VIII., who invested the abbess with almost royal prerogatives, including the power of life and death, and absolute rule over more than fifty villages. Alphonso and his wife Eleanor, daughter of Henry II. of England, are buried here. The Cartuja de Miraflores, a Carthusian convent, founded by John II. of Castile (1406-1454), lies 2 m. south-east of Burgos. Its church contains a monument of exceptional beauty, carved by Gil de Siloë in the 15th century, for the tomb of John and his second wife, Isabella of Portugal. The convent of San Pedro de Cardeña, 7 m. south-east of Burgos, was the original burial-place of the Cid, in 1099, and of Ximena, in 1104. About 50 m. from the city is the abbey of Silos, which appears to have been founded under the Visigothic kings, as early as the 6th century. It was restored in 919 by Fernan Gonzalez, and in the 11th century became celebrated throughout Europe, under the rule of St Dominic or Domingo. It was reoccupied in 1880 by French Benedictine monks.
The known history of Burgos begins in 884 with the foundation of the citadel. From that time forward it steadily increased in importance, reaching the height of its prosperity in the 15th century, when, alternately with Toledo, it was occupied as a royal residence, but rapidly declining when the court was finally removed to Madrid in 1560. Being on one of the principal military roads of the kingdom, it suffered severely during the Peninsular War. In 1808 it was the scene of the defeat of the Spanish army by the French under Marshal Soult. It was unsuccessfully besieged by Wellington in 1812, but was surrendered to him at the opening of the campaign of the following year.
Of the extensive literature relating to Burgos, much remains unedited and in manuscript. A general description of the city and its monuments is given by A. Llacayo y Santa Maria in Burgos, &c. (Burgos, 1889). See also Architectural, Sculptural and Picturesque Studies in Burgos and its Neighbourhood, a valuable series of architectural drawings in folio, by J.B. Waring (London, 1852). The following are monographs on particular buildings:—Historia de la Catedral de Burgos, &c., by P. Orcajo (Burgos, 1856); El Castillo de Burgos, by E. de Oliver-Copons (Barcelona, 1893); La Real Cartuja de Miraflores, by F. Tarin y Juaneda (Burgos, 1896). For the history of the city see En Burgos, by V. Balaguér (Burgos, 1895); Burgos en las comunidades de Castilla and Cosas de la vieja Burgos, both by A. Salvá (Burgos, 1895 and 1892). The following relate both to the city and to the province of Burgos:—Burgos, &c., by R. Amador de los Ríos, in the series entitled España (Barcelona, 1888); Burgos y su provincia, anon. (Vitoria, 1898); Intento de un diccionario biográfico y bibliográfico de autores de la prov. de Burgos, by M. Anibarro and M. Rives (Madrid, 1890).
BURGOYNE, JOHN (1722-1792), English general and dramatist, entered the army at an early age. In 1743 he made a runaway marriage with a daughter of the earl of Derby, but soon had to sell his commission to meet his debts, after which he lived abroad for seven years. By Lord Derby's interest Burgoyne was then reinstated at the outbreak of the Seven Years' War, and in 1758 he became captain and lieutenant-colonel in the foot guards. In 1758-1759 he participated in expeditions made against the French coast, and in the latter year he was instrumental in introducing light cavalry into the British army. The two regiments then formed were commanded by Eliott (afterwards Lord Heathfield) and Burgoyne. In 1761 he sat in parliament for Midhurst, and in the following year he served as brigadier-general in Portugal, winning particular distinction by his capture of Valencia d'Alcantara and of Villa Velha. In 1768 he became M.P. for Preston, and for the next few years he occupied himself chiefly with his parliamentary duties, in which he was remarkable for his general outspokenness and, in particular, for his attacks on Lord Clive. At the same time he devoted much attention to art and drama (his first play, The Maid of the Oaks, being produced by Garrick in 1775), and gambled recklessly. In the army he had by this time become a major-general, and on the outbreak of the American War of Independence he was appointed to a command. In 1777 he was at the head of the British reinforcements designed for the invasion of the colonies from Canada. In this disastrous expedition he gained possession of Ticonderoga (for which he was made a lieutenant-general) and Fort Edward; but, pushing on, was detached from his communications with Canada, and hemmed in by a superior force at Saratoga (q.v.). On the 17th of October his troops, about 3500 in number, laid down their arms. The success was the greatest the colonists had yet gained, and it proved the turning-point in the war. The indignation in England against Burgoyne was great, but perhaps unjust. He returned at once, with the leave of the American general, to defend his conduct, and demanded, but never obtained, a trial. He was deprived of his regiment and a governorship which he held. In 1782, however, when his political friends came into office, he was restored to his rank, given a colonelcy, and made commander-in-chief in Ireland and a privy councillor. After the fall of the Rockingham government in 1783, Burgoyne withdrew more and more into private life, his last public service being his participation in the impeachment of Warren Hastings. In his latter years he was principally occupied in literary and dramatic work. His comedy, The Heiress, which appeared in 1786, ran through ten editions within a year, and was translated into several foreign tongues. He died suddenly on the 4th of June 1792. General Burgoyne, whose wife died in June 1776 during his absence in Canada, had several natural children (born between 1782 and 1788) by Susan Caulfield, an opera singer, one of whom became Field Marshal Sir J.F. Burgoyne. His Dramatic and Poetical Works appeared in two vols., 1808.
See E.B. de Fonblanque, Political and Military Episodes from the Life and Correspondence of Right Hon. J. Burgoyne (1876); and W.L. Stone, Campaign of Lieut.-Gen. J. Burgoyne, &c. (Albany, N.Y., 1877).
BURGOYNE, SIR JOHN FOX, Bart. (1782-1871), British field marshal, was an illegitimate son of General John Burgoyne (q.v.). He was educated at Eton and Woolwich, obtained his commission in 1798, and served in 1800 in the Mediterranean. In 1805, when serving on the staff of General Fox in Sicily, he was promoted second captain. He accompanied the unfortunate Egyptian expedition of 1807, and was with Sir John Moore in Sweden in 1808 and in Portugal in 1808-9. In the Corunna campaign Burgoyne held the very responsible position of chief of engineers with the rear-guard of the British army (see Peninsular War). He was with Wellesley at the Douro in 1809, and was promoted captain in the same year, after which he was engaged in the construction of the lines of Torres Vedras in 1810. He blew up Fort Concepcion on the river Turones, and was present at Busaco and Torres Vedras. In 1811 he was employed in the unsuccessful siege of Badajoz, and in 1812 he won successively the brevets of major and lieutenant-colonel, for his skilful performance of engineer duties at the historic sieges of Ciudad Rodrigo and Badajoz. He was present in the same year (1812) at the siege and battle of Salamanca, and after the battle of Vittoria in 1813 he became commanding engineer on Lord Wellington's staff. At the close of the war he received the C.B., a reward which, he justly considered, was not commensurate with his services. In 1814-1815 he served at New Orleans and Mobile. Burgoyne was largely employed, during the long peace which followed Waterloo, in other public duties as well as military work. He sat on numerous commissions, and served for fifteen years as chairman of the Irish board of public works. He became a major-general and K.C.B. in 1838, and inspector-general of fortifications in 1845. In 1851 he was promoted lieutenant-general, and in the following year received the G.C.B. When the Crimean War broke out he accompanied Lord Raglan's headquarters to the East, superintended the disembarkation at Old Fort, and was in effect the principal engineer adviser to the English commander during the first part of the siege of Sevastopol. He was recalled early in 1855, and though he was at first bitterly criticized by the public for his part in the earlier and unsuccessful operations against the fortress the wisdom of his advice was ultimately recognized. In 1856 he was created a baronet, and promoted to the full rank of general. In 1858 he was present at the second funeral of Napoleon I. as Queen Victoria's representative, and in 1865 he was made constable of the Tower of London. Three years later, on resigning his post as inspector-general of fortifications, he was made a field marshal. Parliament granted him, at the same time, a pension of £1500. He died on the 7th of October 1871, a year after the tragic death of his only son, Captain Hugh Talbot Burgoyne, V.C. (1833-1870), who was in command of H.M.S. "Captain" when that vessel went down in the Bay of Biscay (September 7, 1870).
See Life and Correspondence of F.M. Sir John Fox Burgoyne (edited by Lt.-Col. Hon. G. Wrottesley, R.E., London, 1873); Sir Francis Head, A Sketch of the Life and Death of F.M. Sir John Burgoyne (London, 1872); Military Opinions of General Sir John Burgoyne (ed. Wrottesley, London, 1859), a collection of the most important of Burgoyne's contributions to military literature.
BURGRAVE, the Eng. form, derived through the Fr., of the Ger. Burggraf and Flem. burg or burch-graeve (med. Lat. burcgravius or burgicomes), i.e. count of a castle or fortified town. The title is equivalent to that of castellan (Lat. castellanus) or châtelain (q.v.). In Germany, owing to the peculiar conditions of the Empire, though the office of burgrave had become a sinecure by the end of the 13th century, the title, as borne by feudal nobles having the status of princes of the Empire, obtained a quasi-royal significance. It is still included among the subsidiary titles of several sovereign princes; and the king of Prussia, whose ancestors were burgraves of Nuremberg for over 200 years, is still styled burgrave of Nuremberg.
BURGRED, king of Mercia, succeeded to the throne in 852, and in 852 or 853 called upon Æthelwulf of Wessex to aid him in subduing the North Welsh. The request was granted and the campaign proved successful, the alliance being sealed by the marriage of Burgred to Æthelswith, daughter of Æthelwulf. In 868 the Mercian king appealed to Æthelred and Alfred for assistance against the Danes, who were in possession of Nottingham. The armies of Wessex and Mercia did no serious fighting, and the Danes were allowed to remain through the winter. In 874 the march of the Danes from Lindsey to Repton drove Burgred from his kingdom. He retired to Rome and died there.
See Saxon Chronicle (Earle and Plummer), years 852-853, 868, 874.
BURGUNDIO, sometimes erroneously styled Burgundius, an Italian jurist of the 12th century. He was a professor at the university of Paris, and assisted at the Lateran Council in 1179, dying at a very advanced age in 1194. He was a distinguished Greek scholar, and is believed on the authority of Odofredus to have translated into Latin, soon after the Pandects were brought to Bologna, the various Greek fragments which occur in them, with the exception of those in the 27th book, the translation of which has been attributed to Modestinus. The Latin translations ascribed to Burgundio were received at Bologna as an integral part of the text of the Pandects, and form part of that known as The Vulgate in distinction from the Florentine text.
BURGUNDY. The name of Burgundy (Fr. Bourgogne, Lat. Burgundia) has denoted very diverse political and geographical areas at different periods of history and as used by different writers. The name is derived from the Burgundians (Burgundi, Burgondiones), a people of Germanic origin, who at first settled between the Oder and the Vistula. In consequence of wars against the Alamanni, in which the latter had the advantage, the Burgundians, after having taken part in the great invasion of Radagaisus in 407, were obliged in 411 to take refuge in Gaul, under the leadership of their chief Gundicar. Under the title of allies of the Romans, they established themselves in certain cantons of the Sequani and of upper Germany, receiving a part of the lands, houses and serfs that belonged to the inhabitants. Thus was founded the first kingdom of Burgundy, the boundaries of which were widened at different times by Gundicar and his son Gunderic; its chief towns being Vienne, Lyons, Besançon, Geneva, Autun and Mâcon. Gundibald (d. 516), grandson of Gunderic, is famous for his codification of the Burgundian law, known consequently as Lex Gundobada, in French Loi Gombette. His son Sigismund, who was canonized by the church, founded the abbey of St Maurice at Agaunum. But, incited thereto by Clotilda, the daughter of Chilperic (a brother of Gundibald, and assassinated by him), the Merovingian kings attacked Burgundy. An attempt made in 524 by Clodomer was unsuccessful; but in 534 Clotaire (Chlothachar) and his brothers possessed themselves of the lands of Gundimar, brother and successor of Sigismund, and divided them between them. In 561 the kingdom of Burgundy was reconstructed by Guntram, son of Clotaire I., and until 613 it formed a separate state under the government of a prince of the Merovingian family.
After 613 Burgundy was one of the provinces of the Frankish kingdom, but in the redistributions that followed the reign of Charlemagne the various parts of the ancient kingdom had different fortunes. In 843, by the treaty of Verdun, Autun, Chalon, Mâcon, Langres, &c., were apportioned to Charles the Bald, and Lyons with the country beyond the Saône to Lothair I. On the death of the latter the duchy of Lyons (Lyonnais and Viennois) was given to Charles of Provence, and the diocese of Besançon with the country beyond the Jura to Lothair, king of Lorraine. In 879 Boso founded the kingdom of Provence, wrongly called the kingdom of Cisjuran Burgundy, which extended to Lyons, and for a short time as far as Mâcon (see Provence).
In 888 the kingdom of Juran Burgundy was founded by Rudolph I., son of Conrad, count of Auxerre, and the German king Arnulf could not succeed in expelling the usurper, whose authority was recognized in the diocese of Besançon, Basel, Lausanne, Geneva and Sion. For a short time his son and successor Rudolph II. (912-937) disputed the crown of Italy with Hugh of Provence, but finally abandoned his claims in exchange for the ancient kingdom of Provence, i.e. the country bounded by the Rhône, the Alps and the Mediterranean. His successor, Conrad the Peaceful (93 7-993), whose sister Adelaide married Otto the Great, was hardly more than a vassal of the German kings. The last king of Burgundy, Rudolph III. (993-1032), being deprived of all but a shadow of power by the development of the secular and ecclesiastical aristocracy—especially by that of the powerful feudal houses of the counts of Burgundy (see Franche-Comté), Savoy and Provence—died without issue, bequeathing his lands to the emperor Conrad II. Such was the origin of the imperial rights over the kingdom designated after the 13th century as the kingdom of Arles, which extended over a part of what is now Switzerland (from the Jura to the Aar), and included Franche-Comté, Lyonnais, Dauphiné, Savoy and Provence.
The name of Burgundy now gradually became restricted to the countship of that name, which included the district between the Jura and the Saône, in later times called Franche-Comté, and to the duchy which had been created by the Carolingian kings in the portion of Burgundy that had remained French, with the object of resisting Boso. This duchy had been granted to Boso's brother, Richard the Justiciary, count of Autun. It comprised at first the countships of Autun, Mâcon, Chalon-sur-Saône, Langres, Nevers, Auxerre and Sens, but its boundaries and designations changed many times in the course of the 10th century. Duke Henry died in 1002; and in 1015, after a war which lasted thirteen years, the French king Robert II. reunited the duchy to his kingdom, despite the opposition of Otto William, count of Burgundy, and gave it to his son Henry, afterwards King Henry I. As king of France, the latter in 1032 bestowed the duchy upon his brother Robert, from whom sprang that first ducal house of Burgundy which flourished until 1361. A grandson of this Robert, who went to Spain to fight the Arabs, became the founder of the kingdom of Portugal; but in general the first Capet dukes of Burgundy were pacific princes who took little part in the political events of their time, or in that religious movement which was so marked in Burgundy, at Cluny to begin with, afterwards among the disciples of William of St Bénigne of Dijon, and later still among the monks of Cîteaux. In the 12th and 13th centuries we may mention Duke Hugh III. (1162-1193), who played an active part in the wars that marked the beginning of Philip Augustus's reign; Odo (Eudes) III. (1193-1218), one of Philip Augustus's principal supporters in his struggle with King John of England; Hugh IV. (1218-1272), who acquired the countships of Châlon and Auxonne, Robert II. (1272-1309), one of whose daughters, Margaret, married Louis X. of France, and another, Jeanne, Philip of Valois; Odo (Eudes) IV. (1315-1350), who gained the countship of Artois in right of his wife, Jeanne of France, daughter of Philip V. the Tall and of Jeanne, countess of Burgundy.
In 1361, on the death of Duke Philip de Rouvres, son of Jeanne of Auvergne and Boulogne, who had married the second time John II. of France, surnamed the Good, the duchy of Burgundy returned to the crown of France. In 1363 John gave it, with hereditary rights, to his son Philip, surnamed the Bold, thus founding that second Capet house of Burgundy which filled such an important place in the history of France during the 14th and 15th centuries, acquiring as it did a territorial power which proved redoubtable to the kingship itself. By his marriage with Margaret of Flanders Philip added to his duchy, on the death of his father-in-law, Louis of Male, in 1384, the countships of Burgundy and Flanders; and in the same year he purchased the countship of Charolais from John, count of Armagnac. On the death of Charles V. in 1380 Philip and his brothers, the dukes of Anjou and Berry, had possessed themselves of the regency, and it was he who led Charles VI. against the rebellious Flemings, over whom the young king gained the victory of Roosebeke in 1382. Momentarily deprived of power during the period of the "Marmousets'" government, he devoted himself to the administration of his own dominions, establishing in 1386 an audit-office (chambre des comptes) at Dijon and another at Lille. In 1396 he refused to take part personally in the expedition against the Turks which ended in the disaster of Nicopolis, and would only send his son John, then count of Nevers. In 1392 the king's madness caused Philip's recall to power along with the other princes of the blood, and from this time dates that hostility between the party of Burgundy and the party of Orleans which was to become so intense when in May 1404 Duke Philip had been succeeded by his son, John the Fearless.
In 1407 the latter caused the assassination of his political rival, Louis of Orleans, the king's brother. Forced to quit Paris for a time, he soon returned, supported in particular by the gild of the butchers and by the university. The monk Jean Petit pronounced an apology for the murder (1408).
The victory of Hasbain which John achieved on the 23rd of September 1408 over the Liégeois, who had attacked his brother-in-law, John of Bavaria, bishop of Liége, still further strengthened his power and reputation, and during the following years the struggle between the Burgundians and the partisans of the duke of Orleans—or Armagnacs, as they were called—went on with varying results. In 1413 a reaction took place in Paris; John the Fearless was once more expelled from the capital, and only returned there in 1418, thanks to the treason of Perrinet Leclerc, who yielded up the town to him. In 1419, just when he was thinking of making advances towards the party of the dauphin (Charles VII.), he was assassinated by members of that party, during an interview between himself and the dauphin at the bridge of Montereau.
This event inclined the new duke of Burgundy, Philip the Good, towards an alliance with England. In 1420 he signed the treaty of Troyes, which recognized Henry V. as the legitimate successor of Charles VI.; in 1423 he gave his sister Anne in marriage to John, duke of Bedford; and during the following years the Burgundian troops supported the English pretender. But a dispute between him and the English concerning the succession in Hainaut, their refusal to permit the town of Orleans to place itself under his rule, and the defeats sustained by them, all combined to embroil him with his allies, and in 1435 he concluded the treaty of Arras with Charles VII. The king relieved the duke of all homage for his estates during his lifetime, and gave up to him the countships of Mâcon, Auxerre, Bar-sur-Seine and Ponthieu; and, reserving the right of redemption, the towns of the Somme (Roye, Montdidier, Péronne, &c.). Besides this Philip had acquired Brabant and Holland in 1433 as the inheritance of his mother. He gave an asylum to the dauphin Louis when exiled from Charles VII.'s court, but refused to assist him against his father, and henceforth rarely intervened in French affairs. He busied himself particularly with the administration of his state, founding the university of Dôle, having records made of Burgundian customs, and seeking to develop the commerce and industries of Flanders. A friend to letters and the arts, he was the protector of writers like Olivier de la Marche, and of sculptors of the school of Dijon. He also desired to revive ancient chivalry as he conceived it, and in 1429 founded the order of the Golden Fleece; while during the last years of his life he devoted himself to the preparation of a crusade against the Turks. Neither these plans, however, nor his liberality, prevented his leaving a well-filled treasury and enlarged dominions when he died in 1467.
Philip's successor was his son by his third wife, Isabel of Portugal, Charles, surnamed the Bold, count of Charolois, born in 1433. To him his father had practically abandoned his authority during his last years. Charles had taken an active part in the so-called wars "for the public weal," and in the coalitions of nobles against the king which were so frequent during the first years of Louis XI.'s reign. His struggle against the king is especially marked by the interview at Péronne in 1468, when the king had to confirm the duke in his possession of the towns of the Somme, and by a fruitless attempt which Charles the Bold made on Beauvais in 1472. Charles sought above all to realize a scheme already planned by his father. This was to annex territory which would reunite Burgundy with the northern group of her possessions (Flanders, Brabant, &c.), and to obtain the emperor's recognition of the kingdom of "Belgian Gaul." In 1469 he bought the landgraviate of Alsace and the countship of Ferrette from the archduke Sigismund of Austria, and in 1473 the aged duke Arnold ceded the duchy of Gelderland to him. In the same year he had an interview at Trier with the emperor Frederick III., when he offered to give his daughter and heiress, Mary of Burgundy, in marriage to the emperor's son Maximilian in exchange for the concession of the royal title. But the emperor, uneasy at the ambition of the "grand-duke of the West," did not pursue the negotiations.
Meanwhile the tyranny of the duke's lieutenant Peter von Hagenbach, who was established at Ferrette as governor (grand bailli or Landvogt) of Upper Alsace, had brought about an insurrection. The Swiss supported the cause of their allies, the inhabitants of the free towns of Alsace, and Duke René II. of Lorraine also declared war against Charles. In 1474 the Swiss invaded Franche-Comté and achieved the victory of Hericourt. In 1475 Charles succeeded in conquering Lorraine, but an expedition against the Swiss ended in the defeat of Grandson (February 1476). In the same year the duke was again beaten at Morat, and the Burgundian nobles had to abandon to the victors a considerable amount of booty. Finally the duke of Lorraine returned to his dominions; Charles advanced against him, but on the 6th of January 1477 he was defeated and killed before Nancy.
By his wife, Isabella of Bourbon, he only left a daughter, Mary, and Louis XI. claimed possession of her inheritance as guardian to the young princess. He succeeded in getting himself acknowledged in the duchy and countship of Burgundy, which were occupied by French garrisons. But Mary, alarmed by this annexation, and by the insurrection at Ghent (secretly fomented by Louis), decided to marry the archduke Maximilian of Austria, to whom she had already been promised (August 1477), and hostilities soon broke out between the two princes. Mary died through a fall from her horse in March 1482, and in the same year the treaty of Arras confirmed Louis XI. in possession of the duchy. Franche-Comté and Artois were to form the dowry of the little Margaret of Burgundy, daughter of Mary and Maximilian, who was promised in marriage to the dauphin. As to the lands proceeding from the succession of Charles the Bold, which had returned to the Empire (Brabant, Hainaut, Limburg, Namur, Gelderland, &c.), they constituted the "Circle of Burgundy" from 1512 onward.
We know that the title of duke of Burgundy was revived in 1682 for a short time by Louis XIV. in favour of his grandson Louis, the pupil of Fénelon. But from the 16th to the 18th century Burgundy constituted a military government bounded on the north by Champagne, on the south by Lyonnais, on the east by Franche-Comté, on the west by Bourbonnais and Nivernais. It comprised Dijonnais, Autunois, Auxois, and the pays de la montagne or Country of the Mountain (Châtillon-sur-Seine), with the "counties" of Chalonnais, Mâconnais, Auxerrois and Bar-sur-Seine, and, so far as administration went, the annexes of Bresse, Bugey, Valromey and the country of Gex. Burgundy was a pays d'états. The estates, whose privileges the dukes at first, and later Louis XI., had to swear to maintain, had their assembly at Dijon, usually under the presidency of the governor of the province, the bishop of Autun as representing the clergy, and the mayor of Dijon representing the third estate. In the judiciary point of view the greater part of Burgundy depended on the parlement of Dijon; but Auxerrois and Mâconnais were amenable to the parlement of Paris.
See also U. Plancher, Histoire générale et particulière de Bourgogne (Dijon, 1739—1781, 4 vols. 8vo); Courtépée, Description générale et particulière du duché de Bourgogne (Dijon, 1774-1785, 7 vols. 8vo); O. Jahn. Geschichte der Burgundionen (Halle, 1874, 2 vols. 8vo); E. Petit de Vausse, Histoire des dues de Bourgogne de la race capétienne (Paris, 1885-1905, 9 vols. 8vo); B. de Barante, Histoire des ducs de Bourgogne de la maison de Valois (Paris, 1833—1836, 13 vols. 8vo); the marquis Léon E.S.J. de Laborde, Les Ducs de Bourgogne: Études sur les lettres, les arts et l'industrie pendant le XV siècle (Paris, 1849-1851, 3 vols. 8vo).
(R. Po.)
BURHANPUR, a town of British India in the Nimar district of the Central Provinces, situated on the north bank of the river Tapti, 310 m. N.E. of Bombay, and 2 m. from the Great Indian Peninsula railway station of Lalbagh. It was founded in A.D. 1400 by a Mahommedan prince of the Farukhi dynasty of Khandesh, whose successors held it for 200 years, when the Farukhi kingdom was annexed to the empire of Akbar. It formed the chief seat of the government of the Deccan provinces of the Mogul empire till Shah Jahan removed the capital to Aurangabad in 1635. Burhanpur was plundered in 1685 by the Mahrattas, and repeated battles were fought in its neighbourhood in the struggle between that race and the Mussulmans for the supremacy of India. In 1739 the Mahommedans finally yielded to the demand of the Mahrattas for a fourth of the revenue, and in 1760 the Nizam of the Deccan ceded Burhanpur to the peshwa, who in 1778 transferred it to Sindhia. In the Mahratta War the army under General Wellesley, afterwards the duke of Wellington, took Burhanpur (1803), but the treaty of the same year restored it to Sindhia. It remained a portion of Sindhia's dominions till 1860-1861, when, in consequence of certain territorial arrangements, the town and surrounding estates were ceded to the British government. Under the Moguls the city covered an area of about 5 sq. m., and was about 10½ m. in circumference. In the Ain-í-Akbari it is described as a "large city, with many gardens, inhabited by all nations, and abounding with handicraftsmen." Sir Thomas Roe, who visited it in 1614, found that the houses in the town were "only mud cottages, except the prince's house, the chan's and some few others." In 1865-1866 the city contained 8000 houses, with a population of 34,137, which had decreased to 33,343 in 1901. Burhanpur is celebrated for its muslins, flowered silks, and brocades, which, according to Tavernier, who visited it in 1668, were exported in great quantities to Persia, Egypt, Turkey, Russia and Poland. The gold and silver wires used in the manufacture of these fabrics are drawn with considerable care and skill; and in order to secure the purity of the metals employed for their composition, the wire-drawing under the native rule was done under government inspection. The town of Burhanpur and its manufactures were long on the decline, but during recent times have made a slight recovery. The buildings of interest in the town are a palace, built by Akbar, called the Lal Kila or the Red Fort, and the Jama Masjid or Great Mosque, built by Ali Khan, one of the Farukhi dynasty, in 1588. A considerable number of Boras, a class of commercial Mahommedans, reside here.
BURI, or Bure, in Norse mythology, the grandfather of Odin. In the creation of the world he was born from the rocks, licked by the cow Andhumla (darkness). He was the father of Bor, and the latter, wedded to Bestla, the daughter of the giant Bolthorn (evil), became the father of Odin, the Scandinavian Jove.
BURIAL and BURIAL ACTS (in O. Eng. byrgels, whence byriels, wrongly taken as a plural, and so Mid. Eng. buryel, from O. Eng. byrgan, properly to protect, cover, to bury). The main lines of the law of burial in England may be stated very shortly. Every person has the right to be buried in the churchyard or burial ground of the parish where he dies, with the exception of executed felons, who are buried in the precincts of the prison or in a place appointed by the home office. At common law the person under whose roof a death takes place has a duty to provide for the body being carried to the grave decently covered; and the executors or legal representatives of the deceased are bound to bury or dispose of the body in a manner becoming the estate of the deceased, according to their discretion, and they are not bound to fulfil the wishes he may have expressed in this respect. The disposal must be such as will not expose the body to violation, or offend the feelings or endanger the health of the living; and cremation under proper restrictions is allowable. In the case of paupers dying in a parish house, or shipwrecked persons whose bodies are cast ashore, the overseers or guardians are responsible for their burial; and in the case of suicides the coroner has a similar duty. The expenses of burial are payable out of the deceased's estate in priority to all other debts. A husband liable for the maintenance of his wife is liable for her funeral expenses; the parents for those of their children, if they have the means of paying. Legislation has principally affected (1) places of burial, (2) mode of burial, (3) fees for burial, and (4) disinterment.
1. The overcrowded state of churchyards and burial grounds gradually led to the passing of a group of statutes known as the Burial Acts, extending from 1852 up to 1900. By these acts a general system was set up, the aim of which was to remedy the existing deficiencies of accommodation by providing new burial grounds and closing old ones which should be dangerous to health, and to establish a central authority, the home office (now for most purposes the Local Government Board) to superintend all burial grounds with a view to the protection of the public health and the maintenance of public decency in burials. The Local Government Board thus has the power to obtain by order in council the closing of any burial ground it thinks fit, while its consent is necessary to the opening of any new burial ground; and it also has power to direct inspection of any burial ground or cemetery, and to regulate burials in common graves in statutory cemeteries and to compel persons in charge of vaults or places of burial to take steps necessary for preventing their becoming dangerous or injurious to health. The vestry of any parish, whether a common-law or ecclesiastical one, was thus authorized to provide itself with a new burial ground, if its existing one was no longer available; such ground might be wholly or partly consecrated, and chapels might be provided for the performance of burial service. The ground was put under the management of a burial board, consisting of ratepayers elected by the vestry, and the consecrated portion of it took the place of the churchyard in all respects. Disused churchyards and burial grounds in the metropolis may be used as open spaces for recreation, and only buildings for religious purposes can be built on them (1881, 1884, 1887). The Local Government Act 1894 introduced a change into the government of burial grounds (consequent on the general change made in parochial government) by transferring, or allowing to be transferred, the powers, duties, property and liabilities of the burial boards in urban districts to the district councils, and in rural parishes to the parish councils and parish meetings; and by allowing rural parishes to adopt the Burials Acts, and provide and manage new burial grounds by the parish council, or a burial board elected by the parish meeting.
2. The mode of burial is a matter of ecclesiastical cognizance; in the case of churchyards and elsewhere it is in the discretion of the owners of the burial ground. The Local Government Board now makes regulations for burials in burial grounds provided under the Burial Acts; for cemeteries provided under the Public Health Act 1879. Private cemeteries and burial grounds make their own regulations. Burial may now take place either with or without a religious service in consecrated ground. Before 1880 no body could be buried in consecrated ground except with the service of the Church, which the incumbent of the parish or a person authorized by him was bound to perform; but the canons and prayer-book refused the use of the office for excommunicated persons, majori excommunicatione, for some grievous and notorious crime, and no person able to testify of his repentance, unbaptized persons, and persons against whom a verdict of felo de se had been found. But by the Burial Laws Amendment Act 1880, the bodies of persons entitled to be buried in parochial burial grounds, whether churchyards or graveyards, may be buried there, on proper notice being given to the minister, without the performance of the service of the Church of England, and either without any religious service or with a Christian and orderly religious service at the grave, which may be conducted by any person invited to do so by the person in charge of the funeral. Clergymen of the Church of England are also by the act allowed, but are not obliged, to use the burial service in any unconsecrated burial ground or cemetery, or building therein, in any case in which it could be used in consecrated ground. In cases where it may not be so used, and where such is the wish of those in charge of the service, the clergy may use a form of service approved by the bishop without being liable to any ecclesiastical or temporal penalty. Except as altered by this act, it is still the law that "the Church knows no such indecency as putting a body into consecrated ground without the service being at the same time performed"; and nothing in the act authorizes the use of the service on the burial of a felo de se, which, however, may take place in any way allowed by the act of 1880. The proper performance of the burial office is provided for by the Public Worship Regulation Act 1874. Statutory provision is made by the criminal law in this act for the preservation of order in burial grounds and protection of funeral services.
3. Fees are now payable by custom or under statutory powers on all burials. In a churchyard the parson must perform the office of burial for parishioners, even if the customary fee is denied, and it is doubtful who is liable to pay it. The custom must be immemorial and invariable. If not disputed, its payment can be enforced in the ecclesiastical court; if disputed, its validity must be tried by a temporal court. A special contract for the payment of an annual fee in the case of a non-parishioner can be enforced in the latter court. In the case of paupers and shipwrecked persons the fees are payable by the parish. In other parochial burial grounds and cemeteries the duties and rights to fees of the incumbents, clerks and sextons of the parishes for which the ground has been provided are the same as in burials in the churchyard. Burial authorities may fix the fees payable in such grounds, subject to the approval of the home secretary; but the fees for services rendered by ministers of religion and sextons must be the same in the consecrated as in the unconsecrated part of the burial ground, and no incumbent of a parish or a clerk may receive any fee upon burials except for services rendered by them (act of 1900). On burials under the act of 1880 the same fees are payable as if the burial had taken place with the service of the Church.
4. A corpse is not the subject of property, nor capable of holding property. If interred in consecrated ground, it is under the protection of the ecclesiastical court; if in unconsecrated, it is under that of the temporal court. In the former case it is an ecclesiastical offence, and in either case it is a misdemeanour, to disinter or remove it without proper authority, whatever the motive for such an act may be. Such proper authority is (1) a faculty from the ordinary, where it is to be removed from one consecrated place of burial to another, and this is often done on sanitary grounds or to meet the wishes of relatives, and has been done for secular purposes, e.g. widening a thoroughfare, by allowing part of the burial ground (disused) to be thrown into it; but it has been refused where the object was to cremate the remains, or to transfer them from a churchyard to a Roman Catholic burial ground; (2) a licence from the home secretary, where it is desired to transfer remains from one unconsecrated place of burial to another; (3) by order of the coroner, in cases of suspected crime. There has been considerable discussion as to the boundary line of jurisdiction between (1) and (2), and whether the disinterment of a body from consecrated ground for purposes of identification falls within, (1) only or within both (1) and (2); and an attempt by the ecclesiastical court to enforce a penalty for that purpose without a licence has been prohibited by the temporal court.
See also Churchyard; and, for methods of disposal of the dead, Cemetery; Cremation, and Funeral Rites.
Authorities.—Baker, Law of Burials (6th ed. by Thomas, London, 1898); Phillimore, Ecclestastical Law (2nd ed., London, 1895); Cripps, Law of Church and Clergy (6th ed., London, 1886).
(G. G. P.*)
BURIAL SOCIETIES, a form of friendly societies, existing mainly in England, and constituted for the purpose of providing by voluntary subscriptions, for insuring money to be paid on the death of a member, or for the funeral expenses of the husband, wife or child of a member, or of the widow of a deceased member. (See Friendly Societies.)
BURIATS, a Mongolian race, who dwell in the vicinity of the Baikal Lake, for the most part in the government of Irkutsk and the Trans-Baikal Territory. They are divided into various tribes or clans, which generally take their names from the locality they frequent. These tribes are subdivided according to kinship. The Buriats are a broad-shouldered race inclined to stoutness, with small slanting eyes, thick lips, high cheekbones, broad and flat noses and scanty beards. The men shave their heads and wear a pigtail like the Chinese. In summer they dress in silk and cotton gowns, in winter in furs and sheepskins. Their principal occupation is the rearing of cattle and horses. The Buriat horse is famous for its power of endurance, and the attachment between master and animal is very great. At death the horse should, according to their religion, be sacrificed at its owner's grave; but the frugal Buriat heir usually substitutes an old hack, or if he has to tie up the valuable steed to the grave to starve he does so only with the thinnest of cords so that the animal soon breaks his tether and gallops off to join the other horses. In some districts the Buriats have learned agriculture from the Russians, and in Irkutsk are really better farmers than the latter. They are extraordinarily industrious at manuring and irrigation. They are also clever at trapping and fishing. In religion the Buriats are mainly Buddhists; and their head lama (Khambo Lama) lives at the Goose Lake (Guisinoe Ozero). Others are Shamanists, and their most sacred spot is the Shamanic stone at the mouth of the river Angar. Some thousands of them around Lake Baikal are Christians. A knowledge of reading and writing is common, especially among the Trans-Baikal Buriats, who possess books of their own, chiefly translated from the Tibetan. Their own language is Mongolian, and of three distinct dialects. It was in the 16th century that the Russians first came in touch with the Buriats, who were long known by the name of Bratskiye, "Brotherly," given them by the Siberian colonists. In the town of Bratskiyostrog, which grew up around the block-house built in 1631 at the confluence of the Angara and Oka to bring them into subjection, this title is perpetuated. The Buriats made a vigorous resistance to Russian aggression, but were finally subdued towards the end of the 17th century, and are now among the most peaceful of Russian peoples.
See J.G. Gruelin, Siberia; Pierre Simon Pallas, Sammlungen historischer Nachrichten über die mongolischen Volkerschaften (St Petersburg, 1776-1802); M.A. Castrén, Versuch einer buriatischen Sprachlehre (1857); Sir H.H. Howorth, History of the Mongols (1876-1888).
BURIDAN, JEAN [Joannes Buridanus] (c. 1297-c. 1358), French philosopher, was born at Béthune in Artois. He studied in Paris under William of Occam. He was professor of philosophy in the university of Paris, was rector in 1327, and in 1345 was deputed to defend its interests before Philip of Valois and at Rome. He was more than sixty years old in 1358, but the year of his death is not recorded. The tradition that he was forced to flee from France along with other nominalists, and founded the university of Vienna in 1356, is unsupported and in contradiction to the fact that the university was founded by Frederick II. in 1237. An ordinance of Louis XI., in 1473, directed against the nominalists, prohibited the reading of his works. In philosophy Buridan was a rationalist, and followed Occam in denying all objective reality to universals, which he regarded as mere words. The aim of his logic is represented as having been the devising of rules for the discovery of syllogistic middle terms; this system for aiding slow-witted persons became known as the pons asinorum. The parts of logic which he treated with most minuteness are modal propositions and modal syllogisms. In commenting on Aristotle's Ethics he dealt in a very independent manner with the question of free will, his conclusions being remarkably similar to those of John Locke. The only liberty which he admits is a certain power of suspending the deliberative process and determining the direction of the intellect. Otherwise the will is entirely dependent on the view of the mind, the last result of examination. The comparison of the will unable to act between two equally balanced motives to an ass dying of hunger between two equal and equidistant bundles of hay is not found in his works, and may have been invented by his opponents to ridicule his determinism. That he was not the originator of the theory known as "liberty of indifference" (liberum arbitrium indifferentiae) is shown in G. Fonsegrive's Essai sur le libre arbitre, pp. 119, 199 (1887).
His works are:—Summula de dialectica (Paris, 1487); Compendium logicae (Venice, 1489); Quaestiones in viii. libros physicorum (Paris, 1516); In Aristotelis Metaphysica (1518); Quaestiones in x. libros ethicorum Aristotelis (Paris, 1489; Oxford, 1637); Quaestiones in viii. libros politicorum Aristotelis (1500). See K. Prantl's Geschichte der Logik, bk. iv. 14-38; Stöckl's Geschichte der Philosophie des Mittelalters, ii. 1023-1028; Herzog-Hauck, Realencyklopadie, s.v. (1897).
BURKE, EDMUND (1729-1797), British statesman and political writer. His is one of the greatest names in the history of political literature. There have been many more important statesmen, for he was never tried in a position of supreme responsibility. There have been many more effective orators, for lack of imaginative suppleness prevented him from penetrating to the inner mind of his hearers; defects in delivery weakened the intrinsic persuasiveness of his reasoning; and he had not that commanding authority of character and personality which has so often been the secret of triumphant eloquence. There have been many subtler, more original and more systematic thinkers about the conditions of the social union. But no one that ever lived used the general ideas of the thinker more successfully to judge the particular problems of the statesman. No one has ever come so close to the details of practical politics, and at the same time remembered that these can only be understood and only dealt with by the aid of the broad conceptions of political philosophy. And what is more than all for perpetuity of fame, he was one of the great masters of the high and difficult art of elaborate composition.
A certain doubtfulness hangs over the circumstances of Burke's life previous to the opening of his public career. The very date of his birth is variously stated. The most probable opinion is that he was born at Dublin on the 12th of January 1729, new style. Of his family we know little more than his father was a Protestant attorney, practising in Dublin, and that his mother was a Catholic, a member of the family of Nagle. He had at least one sister, from whom descended the only existing representatives of Burke's family; and he had at least two brothers, Garret Burke and Richard Burke, the one older and the other younger than Edmund. The sister, afterwards Mrs French, was brought up and remained throughout life in the religious faith of her mother; Edmund and his brothers followed that of their father. In 1741 the three brothers were sent to school at Ballitore in the county of Kildare, kept by Abraham Shackleton, an Englishman, and a member of the Society of Friends. He appears to have been an excellent teacher and a good and pious man. Burke always looked back on his own connexion with the school at Ballitore as among the most fortunate circumstances of his life. Between himself and a son of his instructor there sprang up a close and affectionate friendship, and, unlike so many of the exquisite attachments of youth, this was not choked by the dust of life, nor parted by divergence of pursuit. Richard Shackleton was endowed with a grave, pure and tranquil nature, constant and austere, yet not without those gentle elements that often redeem the drier qualities of his religious persuasion. When Burke had become one of the most famous men in Europe, no visitor to his house was more welcome than the friend with whom long years before he had tried poetic flights, and exchanged all the sanguine confidences of boyhood. And we are touched to think of the simple-minded guest secretly praying, in the solitude of his room in the fine house at Beaconsfield, that the way of his anxious and overburdened host might be guided by a divine hand.
In 1743 Burke became a student at Trinity College, Dublin, where Oliver Goldsmith was also a student at the same time. But the serious pupil of Abraham Shackleton would not be likely to see much of the wild and squalid sizar. Henry Flood, who was two years younger than Burke, had gone to complete his education at Oxford. Burke, like Goldsmith, achieved no academic distinction. His character was never at any time of the academic cast. The minor accuracies, the limitation of range, the treading and re-treading of the same small patch of ground, the concentration of interest in success before a board of examiners, were all uncongenial to a nature of exuberant intellectual curiosity and of strenuous and self-reliant originality. His knowledge of Greek and Latin was never thorough, nor had he any turn for critical niceties. He could quote Homer and Pindar, and he had read Aristotle. Like others who have gone through the conventional course of instruction, he kept a place in his memory for the various charms of Virgil and Horace, of Tacitus and Ovid; but the master whose page by night and by day he turned with devout hand, was the copious, energetic, flexible, diversified and brilliant genius of the declamations for Archias the poet and for Milo, against Catiline and against Antony, the author of the disputations at Tusculum and the orations against Verres. Cicero was ever to him the mightiest of the ancient names. In English literature Milton seems to have been more familiar to him than Shakespeare, and Spenser was perhaps more of a favourite with him than either.
It is too often the case to be a mere accident that men who become eminent for wide compass of understanding and penetrating comprehension, are in their adolescence unsettled and desultory. Of this Burke is a signal illustration. He left Trinity in 1748, with no great stock of well-ordered knowledge. He neither derived the benefits nor suffered the drawbacks of systematic intellectual discipline.
After taking his degree at Dublin he went in the year 1750 to London to keep terms at the Temple. The ten years that followed were passed in obscure industry. Burke was always extremely reserved about his private affairs. All that we know of Burke exhibits him as inspired by a resolute pride, a certain stateliness and imperious elevation of mind. Such a character, while free from any weak shame about the shabby necessities of early struggles, yet is naturally unwilling to make them prominent in after life. There is nothing dishonourable in such an inclination. "I was not swaddled and rocked and dandled into a legislator," wrote Burke when very near the end of his days: "Nitor in adversum is the motto for a man like me. At every step of my progress in life (for in every step I was traversed and opposed), and at every turnpike I met, I was obliged to show my passport. Otherwise no rank, no toleration even, for me."
All sorts of whispers have been circulated by idle or malicious gossip about Burke's first manhood. He is said to have been one of the numerous lovers of his fascinating countrywoman, Margaret Woffington. It is hinted that he made a mysterious visit to the American colonies. He was for years accused of having gone over to the Church of Rome, and afterwards recanting. There is not a tittle of positive evidence for these or any of the other statements to Burke's discredit. The common story that he was a candidate for Adam Smith's chair of moral philosophy at Glasgow, when Hume was rejected in favour of an obscure nobody (1751), can be shown to be wholly false. Like a great many other youths with an eminent destiny before them, Burke conceived a strong distaste for the profession of the law. His father, who was an attorney of substance, had a distaste still stronger for so vagrant a profession as letters were in that day. He withdrew the annual allowance, and Burke set to work to win for himself by indefatigable industry and capability in the public interest that position of power or pre-eminence which his detractors acquired either by accident of birth and connexions or else by the vile arts of political intrigue. He began at the bottom of the ladder, mixing with the Bohemian society that haunted the Temple, practising oratory in the free and easy debating societies of Covent Garden and the Strand, and writing for the booksellers.
In 1756 he made his first mark by a satire upon Bolingbroke entitled A Vindication of Natural Society. It purported to be a posthumous work from the pen of Bolingbroke, and to present a view of the miseries and evils arising to mankind from every species of artificial society. The imitation of the fine style of that magnificent writer but bad patriot is admirable. As a satire the piece is a failure, for the simple reason that the substance of it might well pass for a perfectly true, no less than a very eloquent statement of social blunders and calamities. Such acute critics as Chesterfield and Warburton thought the performance serious. Rousseau, whose famous discourse on the evils of civilization had appeared six years before, would have read Burke's ironical vindication of natural society without a suspicion of its irony. There have indeed been found persons who insist that the Vindication was a really serious expression of the writer's own opinions. This is absolutely incredible, for various reasons. Burke felt now, as he did thirty years later, that civil institutions cannot wisely or safely be measured by the tests of pure reason. His sagacity discerned that the rationalism by which Bolingbroke and the deistic school believed themselves to have overthrown revealed religion, was equally calculated to undermine the structure of political government. This was precisely the actual course on which speculation was entering in France at that moment. His Vindication is meant to be a reduction to an absurdity. The rising revolutionary school in France, if they had read it, would have taken it for a demonstration of the theorem to be proved. The only interest of the piece for us lies in the proof which it furnishes, that at the opening of his life Burke had the same scornful antipathy to political rationalism which flamed out in such overwhelming passion at its close.
In the same year (1756) appeared the Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas on the Sublime and Beautiful, a crude and narrow performance in many respects, yet marked by an independent use of the writer's mind, and not without fertile suggestion. It attracted the attention of the rising aesthetic school in Germany. Lessing set about the translation and annotation of it, and Moses Mendelssohn borrowed from Burke's speculation at least one of the most fruitful and important ideas of his own influential theories on the sentiments. In England the Inquiry had considerable vogue, but it has left no permanent trace in the development of aesthetic thought.
Burke's literary industry in town was relieved by frequent excursions to the western parts of England, in company with William Burke. There was a lasting intimacy between the two namesakes, and they seem to have been involved together in some important passages of their lives; but we have Edmund Burke's authority for believing that they were probably not kinsmen. The seclusion of these rural sojourns, originally dictated by delicate health, was as wholesome to the mind as to the body. Few men, if any, have ever acquired a settled mental habit of surveying human affairs broadly, of watching the play of passion, interest, circumstance, in all its comprehensiveness, and of applying the instruments of general conceptions and wide principles to its interpretation with respectable constancy, unless they have at some early period of their manhood resolved the greater problems of society in independence and isolation. By 1756 the cast of Burke's opinions was decisively fixed, and they underwent no radical change.
He began a series of Hints on the Drama. He wrote a portion of an Abridgment of the History of England, and brought it down as far as the reign of John. It included, as was natural enough in a warm admirer of Montesquieu, a fragment on law, of which he justly said that it ought to be the leading science in every well-ordered commonwealth. Burke's early interest in America was shown by an Account of the European Settlements on that continent. Such works were evidently a sign that his mind was turning away from abstract speculation to the great political and economic fields, and to the more visible conditions of social stability and the growth of nations. This interest in the concrete phenomena of society inspired him with the idea of the Annual Register (1759), which he designed to present a broad grouping of the chief movements of each year. The execution was as excellent as the conception, and if we reflect that it was begun in the midst of that momentous war which raised England to her climax of territorial greatness in East and West, we may easily realize how the task of describing these portentous and far-reaching events would be likely to strengthen Burke's habits of wide and laborious observation, as well as to give him firmness and confidence in the exercise of his own judgment. Dodsley gave him £100 for each annual volume, and the sum was welcome enough, for towards the end of 1756 Burke had married. His wife was the daughter of a Dr Nugent, a physician at Bath. She is always spoken of by his friends as a mild, reasonable and obliging person, whose amiability and gentle sense did much to soothe the too nervous and excitable temperament of her husband. She had been brought up, there is good reason to believe, as a Catholic, and she was probably a member of that communion at the time of her marriage. Dr Nugent eventually took up his residence with his son-in-law in London, and became a popular member of that famous group of men of letters and artists whom Boswell has made so familiar and so dear to all later generations. Burke, however, had no intention of being dependent. His consciousness of his own powers animated him with a most justifiable ambition, if ever there was one, to play a part in the conduct of national affairs. Friends shared this ambition on his behalf; one of these was Lord Charlemont. He introduced Burke to William Gerard Hamilton (1759), now only remembered by the nickname "single-speech," derived from the circumstance of his having made a single brilliant speech in the House of Commons, which was followed by years of almost unbroken silence. Hamilton was by no means devoid of sense and acuteness, but in character he was one of the most despicable men then alive. There is not a word too many nor too strong in the description of him by one of Burke's friends, as "a sullen, vain, proud, selfish, cankered-hearted, envious reptile." The reptile's connexion, however, was for a time of considerable use to Burke. When he was made Irish secretary, Burke accompanied him to Dublin, and there learnt Oxenstiern's eternal lesson, that awaits all who penetrate behind the scenes of government, quam parva sapientia mundus regitur.
The penal laws against the Catholics, the iniquitous restrictions on Irish trade and industry, the selfish factiousness of the parliament, the jobbery and corruption of administration, the absenteeism of the landlords, and all the other too familiar elements of that mischievous and fatal system, were then in full force. As was shown afterwards, they made an impression upon Burke that was never effaced. So much iniquity and so much disorder may well have struck deep on one whose two chief political sentiments were a passion for order and a passion for justice. He may have anticipated with something of remorse the reflection of a modern historian, that the absenteeism of her landlords has been less of a curse to Ireland than the absenteeism of her men of genius. At least he was never an absentee in heart. He always took the interest of an ardent patriot in his unfortunate country; and, as we shall see, made more than one weighty sacrifice on behalf of the principles which he deemed to be bound up with her welfare.
When Hamilton retired from his post, Burke accompanied him back to London, with a pension of £300 a year on the Irish Establishment. This modest allowance he hardly enjoyed for more than a single year. His patron having discovered the value of so laborious and powerful a subaltern, wished to bind Burke permanently to his service. Burke declined to sell himself into final bondage of this kind. When Hamilton continued to press his odious pretensions they quarrelled (1765), and Burke threw up his pension. He soon received a more important piece of preferment than any which he could ever have procured through Hamilton.
The accession of George III. to the throne in 1760 had been followed by the disgrace of Pitt, the dismissal of Newcastle, and the rise of Bute. These events marked the resolution of the court to change the political system which had been created by the Revolution of 1688. That system placed the government of the country in the hands of a territorial oligarchy, composed of a few families of large possessions, fairly enlightened principles, and shrewd political sense. It had been preserved by the existence of a Pretender. The two first kings of the house of Hanover could only keep the crown on their own heads by conciliating the Revolution families and accepting Revolution principles. By 1760 all peril to the dynasty was at an end. George III., or those about him, insisted on substituting for the aristocratic division of political power a substantial concentration of it in the hands of the sovereign. The ministers were no longer to be the members of a great party, acting together in pursuance of a common policy accepted by them all as a united body; they were to become nominees of the court, each holding himself answerable not to his colleagues but to the king, separately, individually and by department. George III. had before his eyes the government of his cousin the great Frederick; but not every one can bend the bow of Ulysses, and, apart from difference of personal capacity and historic tradition, he forgot that a territorial and commercial aristocracy cannot be dealt with in the spirit of the barrack and the drill-ground. But he made the attempt, and resistance to that attempt supplies the keynote to the first twenty-five years of Burke's political life.
Along with the change in system went high-handed and absolutist tendencies in policy. The first stage of the new experiment was very short. Bute, in a panic at the storm of unpopularity that menaced him, resigned in 1763. George Grenville and the less enlightened section of the Whigs took his place. They proceeded to tax the American colonists, to interpose vexatiously against their trade, to threaten the liberty of the subject at home by general warrants, and to stifle the liberty of public discussion by prosecutions of the press. Their arbitrary methods disgusted the nation, and the personal arrogance of the ministers at last disgusted the king. The system received a temporary check. Grenville fell, and the king was forced to deliver himself into the hands of the orthodox section of the Whigs. The marquess of Rockingham (July 10, 1765) became prime minister, and he was induced to make Burke his private secretary. Before Burke had begun his duties, an incident occurred which illustrates the character of the two men. The old duke of Newcastle, probably desiring a post for some nominee of his own, conveyed to the ear of the new minister various absurd rumours prejudicial to Burke,—that he was an Irish papist, that his real name was O'Bourke, that he had been a Jesuit, that he was an emissary from St Omer's. Lord Rockingham repeated these tales to Burke, who of course denied them with indignation. His chief declared himself satisfied, but Burke, from a feeling that the indispensable confidence between them was impaired, at once expressed a strong desire to resign his post. Lord Rockingham prevailed upon him to reconsider his resolve, and from that day until Lord Rockingham's death in 1782, their relations were those of the closest friendship and confidence.
The first Rockingham administration only lasted a year and a few days, ending in July 1766. The uprightness and good sense of its leaders did not compensate for the weakness of their political connexions. They were unable to stand against the coldness of the king, against the hostility of the powerful and selfish faction of Bedford Whigs, and, above all, against the towering predominance of William Pitt. That Pitt did not join them is one of the many fatal miscarriages of history, as it is one of the many serious reproaches to be made against that extraordinary man's chequered and uneven course. An alliance between Pitt and the Rockingham party was the surest guarantee of a wise and liberal policy towards the colonies. He went further than they did, in holding, like Lord Camden, the doctrine that taxation went with representation, and that therefore parliament had no right to tax the unrepresented colonists. The ministry asserted, what no competent jurist would now think of denying, that parliament is sovereign; but they went heartily with Pitt in pronouncing the exercise of the right of taxation in the case of the American colonists to be thoroughly impolitic and inexpedient. No practical difference, therefore, existed upon the important question of the hour. But Pitt's prodigious egoism, stimulated by the mischievous counsels of men of the stamp of Lord Shelburne, prevented the fusion of the only two sections of the Whig party that were at once able, enlightened and disinterested enough to carry on the government efficiently, to check the arbitrary temper of the king, and to command the confidence of the nation. Such an opportunity did not return.
The ministerial policy towards the colonies was defended by Burke with splendid and unanswerable eloquence. He had been returned to the House of Commons for the pocket borough of Wendover, and his first speech (January 27, 1766) was felt to be the rising of a new light. For the space of a quarter of a century, from this time down to 1790, Burke was one of the chief guides and inspirers of a revived Whig party. The "age of small factions" was now succeeded by an age of great principles, and selfish ties of mere families and persons were transformed into a union resting on common conviction and patriotic aims. It was Burke who did more than any one else to give to the Opposition, under the first half of the reign of George III., this stamp of elevation and grandeur. Before leaving office the Rockingham government repealed the Stamp Act; confirmed the personal liberty of the subject by forcing on the House of Commons one resolution against general warrants, and another against the seizure of papers; and relieved private houses from the intrusion of officers of excise, by repealing the cider tax. Nothing so good was done in an English parliament for nearly twenty years to come. George Grenville, whom the Rockinghams had displaced, and who was bitterly incensed at their formal reversal of his policy, printed a pamphlet to demonstrate his own wisdom and statesmanship. Burke replied in his Observations on a late Publication on the Present State of the Nation (1769), in which he showed for the first time that he had not only as much knowledge of commerce and finance, and as firm a hand, in dealing with figures as Grenville himself, but also a broad, general and luminous way of conceiving and treating politics, in which neither then nor since has he had any rival among English publicists.
It is one of the perplexing points in Burke's private history to know how he lived during these long years of parliamentary opposition. It is certainly not altogether mere impertinence to ask of a public man how he gets what he lives upon, for independence of spirit, which is so hard to the man who lays his head on the debtor's pillow, is the prime virtue in such men. Probity in money is assuredly one of the keys to character, though we must be very careful in ascertaining and proportioning all the circumstances. Now, in 1769, Burke bought an estate at Beaconsfield, in the county of Buckingham. It was about 600 acres in extent, was worth some £500 a year, and cost £22,000. People have been asking ever since how the penniless man of letters was able to raise so large a sum in the first instance, and how he was able to keep up a respectable establishment afterwards. The suspicions of those who are never sorry to disparage the great have been of various kinds. Burke was a gambler, they hint, in Indian stock, like his kinsmen Richard and William, and like Lord Verney, his political patron at Wendover. Perhaps again, his activity on behalf of Indian princes, like the raja of Tanjore, was not disinterested and did not go unrewarded. The answer to all these calumnious innuendoes is to be found in documents and title-deeds of decisive authority, and is simple enough. It is, in short, this. Burke inherited a small property from his elder brother, which he realized. Lord Rockingham advanced him a certain sum (£6000). The remainder, amounting to no less than two-thirds of the purchase-money, was raised on mortgage, and was never paid off during Burke's life. The rest of the story is equally simple, but more painful. Burke made some sort of income out of his 600 acres; he was for a short time agent for New York, with a salary of £700; he continued to work at the Annual Register down to 1788. But, when all is told, he never made as much as he spent; and in spite of considerable assistance from Lord Rockingham, amounting it is sometimes said to as much as £30,000, Burke, like the younger Pitt, got every year deeper into debt. Pitt's debts were the result of a wasteful indifference to his private affairs. Burke, on the contrary, was assiduous and orderly, and had none of the vices of profusion. But he had that quality which Aristotle places high among the virtues—the noble mean of Magnificence, standing midway between the two extremes of vulgar ostentation and narrow pettiness. He was indifferent to luxury, and sought to make life, not commodious nor soft, but high and dignified in a refined way. He loved art, filled his house with statues and pictures, and extended a generous patronage to the painters. He was a collector of books, and, as Crabbe and less conspicuous men discovered, a helpful friend to their writers. Guests were ever welcome at his board; the opulence of his mind and the fervid copiousness of his talk naturally made the guests of such a man very numerous. Non invideo equidem, miror magis, was Johnson's good-natured remark, when he was taken over his friend's fine house and pleasant gardens. Johnson was of a very different type. There was something in this external dignity which went with Burke's imperious spirit, his spacious imagination, his turn for all things stately and imposing. We may say, if we please, that Johnson had the far truer and loftier dignity of the two; but we have to take such men as Burke with the defects that belong to their qualities. And there was no corruption in Burke's outlay. When the Pitt administration was formed in 1766, he might have had office, and Lord Rockingham wished him to accept it, but he honourably took his fate with the party. He may have spent £3000 a year, where he would have been more prudent to spend only £2000. But nobody was wronged; his creditors were all paid in time, and his hands were at least clean of traffic in reversions, clerkships, tellerships and all the rest of the rich sinecures which it was thought no shame in those days for the aristocracy of the land and the robe to wrangle for, and gorge themselves upon, with the fierce voracity of famishing wolves. The most we can say is that Burke, like Pitt, was too deeply absorbed in beneficent service in the affairs of his country, to have for his own affairs the solicitude that would have been prudent.
In the midst of intense political preoccupations, Burke always found time to keep up his intimacy with the brilliant group of his earlier friends. He was one of the commanding figures at the club at the Turk's Head, with Reynolds and Garrick, Goldsmith and Johnson. The old sage who held that the first Whig was the Devil, was yet compelled to forgive Burke's politics for the sake of his magnificent gifts. "I would not talk to him of the Rockingham party," he used to say, "but I love his knowledge, his genius, his diffusion and affluence of conversation." And everybody knows Johnson's vivid account of him: "Burke, Sir, is such a man that if you met him for the first time in the street, where you were stopped by a drove of oxen, and you and he stepped aside to take shelter but for five minutes, he'd talk to you in such a manner that when you parted you would say, 'This is an extraordinary man.'" They all grieved that public business should draw to party what was meant for mankind. They deplored that the nice and difficult test of answering Berkeley had not been undertaken, as was once intended, by Burke, and sighed to think what an admirable display of subtlety and brilliance such a contention would have afforded them, had not politics "turned him from active philosophy aside." There was no jealousy in this. They did not grudge Burke being the first man in the House of Commons, for they admitted that he would have been the first man anywhere.
With all his hatred for the book-man in politics, Burke owed much of his own distinction to that generous richness and breadth of judgment which had been ripened in him by literature and his practice in it. He showed that books are a better preparation for statesmanship than early training in the subordinate posts and among the permanent officials of a public department. There is no copiousness of literary reference in his work, such as over-abounded in the civil and ecclesiastical publicists of the 17th century. Nor can we truly say that there is much, though there is certainly some, of that tact which literature is alleged to confer on those who approach it in a just spirit and with the true gift. The influence of literature on Burke lay partly in the direction of emancipation from the mechanical formulae of practical politics; partly in the association which it engendered, in a powerful understanding like his, between politics and the moral forces of the world, and between political maxims and the old and great sentences of morals; partly in drawing him, even when resting his case on prudence and expediency, to appeal to the widest and highest sympathies; partly, and more than all, in opening his thoughts to the many conditions, possibilities and "varieties of untried being," in human character and situation, and so giving an incomparable flexibility to his methods of political approach.
This flexibility is not to be found in his manner of composition. That derives its immense power from other sources; from passion, intensity, imagination, size, truth, cogency of logical reason. Those who insist on charm, on winningness in style, on subtle harmonies and fine exquisiteness of suggestion, are disappointed in Burke: they even find him stiff and over-coloured. And there are blemishes of this kind. His banter is nearly always ungainly, his wit blunt, as Johnson said, and often unseasonable. As is usual with a man who has not true humour, Burke is also without true pathos. The thought of wrong or misery moved him less to pity for the victim than to anger against the cause. Again, there are some gratuitous and unredeemed vulgarities; some images that make us shudder. But only a literary fop can be detained by specks like these.
The varieties of Burke's literary or rhetorical method are very striking. It is almost incredible that the superb imaginative amplification of the description of Hyder Ali's descent upon the Carnatic should be from the same pen as the grave, simple, unadorned Address to the King (1777), where each sentence falls on the ear with the accent of some golden-tongued oracle of the wise gods. His stride is the stride of a giant, from the sentimental beauty of the picture of Marie Antoinette at Versailles, or the red horror of the tale of Debi Sing in Rungpore, to the learning, positiveness and cool judicial mastery of the Report on the Lords' Journals (1794), which Philip Francis, no mean judge, declared on the whole to be the "most eminent and extraordinary" of all his productions. But even in the coolest and driest of his pieces there is the mark of greatness, of grasp, of comprehension. In all its varieties Burke's style is noble, earnest, deep-flowing, because his sentiment was lofty and fervid, and went with sincerity and ardent disciplined travail of judgment. He had the style of his subjects; the amplitude, the weightiness, the laboriousness, the sense, the high flight, the grandeur, proper to a man dealing with imperial themes, with the fortunes of great societies, with the sacredness of law, the freedom of nations, the justice of rulers. Burke will always be read with delight and edification, because in the midst of discussions on the local and the accidental, he scatters apophthegms that take us into the regions of lasting wisdom. In the midst of the torrent of his most strenuous and passionate deliverances, he suddenly rises aloof from his immediate subject, and in all tranquillity reminds us of some permanent relation of things, some enduring truth of human life or human society. We do not hear the organ tones of Milton, for faith and freedom had other notes in the 18th century. There is none of the complacent and wise-browed sagacity of Bacon, for Burke's were days of personal strife and fire and civil division. We are not exhilarated by the cheerfulness, the polish, the fine manners of Bolingbroke, for Burke had an anxious conscience, and was earnest and intent that the good should triumph. And yet Burke is among the greatest of those who have wrought marvels in the prose of our English tongue.
Not all the transactions in which Burke was a combatant could furnish an imperial theme. We need not tell over again the story of Wilkes and the Middlesex election. The Rockingham ministry had been succeeded by a composite government, of which it was intended that Pitt, now made Lord Chatham and privy seal, should be the real chief. Chatham's health and mind fell into disorder almost immediately after the ministry had been formed. The duke of Grafton was its nominal head, but party ties had been broken, the political connexions of the ministers were dissolved, and, in truth, the king was now at last a king indeed, who not only reigned but governed. The revival of high doctrines of prerogative in the crown was accompanied by a revival of high doctrines of privilege in the House of Commons, and the ministry was so smitten with weakness and confusion as to be unable to resist the current of arbitrary policy, and not many of them were even willing to resist it. The unconstitutional prosecution of Wilkes was followed by the fatal recourse to new plans for raising taxes in the American colonies. These two points made the rallying ground of the new Whig opposition. Burke helped to smooth matters for a practical union between the Rockingham party and the powerful triumvirate, composed of Chatham, whose understanding had recovered from its late disorder, and of his brothers-in-law, Lord Temple and George Grenville. He was active in urging petitions from the freeholders of the counties, protesting against the unconstitutional invasion of the right of election. And he added a durable masterpiece to political literature in a pamphlet which he called Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents (1770). The immediate object of this excellent piece was to hold up the court scheme of weak, divided and dependent administrations in the light of its real purpose and design; to describe the distempers which had been engendered in parliament by the growth of royal influence and the faction of the king's friends; to show that the newly formed Whig party had combined for truly public ends, and was no mere family knot like the Grenvilles and the Bedfords; and, finally, to press for the hearty concurrence both of public men and of the nation at large in combining against "a faction ruling by the private instructions of a court against the general sense of the people." The pamphlet was disliked by Chatham on the one hand, on no reasonable grounds that we can discover; it was denounced by the extreme popular party of the Bill of Rights, on the other hand, for its moderation and conservatism. In truth, there is as strong a vein of conservative feeling in the pamphlet of 1770 as in the more resplendent pamphlet of 1790. "Our constitution," he said, "stands on a nice equipoise, with steep precipices and deep waters upon all sides of it. In removing it from a dangerous leaning towards one side, there may be a risk of oversetting it on the other. Every project of a material change in a government so complicated as ours is a matter full of difficulties; in which a considerate man will not be too ready to decide, a prudent man too ready to undertake, or an honest man too ready to promise." Neither now nor ever had Burke any other real conception of a polity for England than government by the territorial aristocracy in the interests of the nation at large, and especially in the interests of commerce, to the vital importance of which in our economy he was always keenly and wisely alive. The policy of George III., and the support which it found among men who were weary of Whig factions, disturbed this scheme, and therefore Burke denounced both the court policy and the court party with all his heart and all his strength.
Eloquence and good sense, however, were impotent in the face of such forces as were at this time arrayed against a government at once strong and liberal. The court was confident that a union between Chatham and the Rockinghams was impossible. The union was in fact hindered by the waywardness and the absurd pretences of Chatham, and the want of force in Lord Rockingham. In the nation at large, the late violent ferment had been followed by as remarkable a deadness and vapidity, and Burke himself had to admit a year or two later that any remarkable robbery at Hounslow Heath would make more conversation than all the disturbances of America. The duke of Grafton went out, and Lord North became the head of a government, which lasted twelve years (1770-1782), and brought about more than all the disasters that Burke had foretold as the inevitable issue of the royal policy. For the first six years of this lamentable period Burke was actively employed in stimulating, informing and guiding the patrician chiefs of his party. "Indeed, Burke," said the duke of Richmond, "you have more merit than any man in keeping us together." They were well-meaning and patriotic men, but it was not always easy to get them to prefer politics to fox-hunting. When he reached his lodgings at night after a day in the city or a skirmish in the House of Commons, Burke used to find a note from the duke of Richmond or the marquess of Rockingham, praying him to draw a protest to be entered on the Journals of the Lords, and in fact he drew all the principal protests of his party between 1767 and 1782. The accession of Charles James Fox to the Whig party, which took place at this time, and was so important an event in its history, was mainly due to the teaching and influence of Burke. In the House of Commons his industry was almost excessive. He was taxed with speaking too often, and with being too forward. And he was mortified by a more serious charge than murmurs about superfluity of zeal. Men said and said again that he was Junius. His very proper unwillingness to stoop to deny an accusation, that would have been so disgraceful if it had been true, made ill-natured and silly people the more convinced that it was not wholly false. But whatever the London world may have thought of him, Burke's energy and devotion of character impressed the better minds in the country. In 1774 he received the great distinction of being chosen as one of its representatives by Bristol, then the second town in the kingdom.
In the events which ended in the emancipation of the American colonies from the monarchy, Burke's political genius shone with an effulgence that was worthy of the great affairs over which it shed so magnificent an illumination. His speeches are almost the one monument of the struggle on which a lover of English greatness can look back with pride and a sense of worthiness, such as a churchman feels when he reads Bossuet, or an Anglican when he turns over the pages of Taylor or of Hooker. Burke's attitude in these high transactions is really more impressive than Chatham's, because he was far less theatrical than Chatham; and while he was no less nobly passionate for freedom and justice, in his passion was fused the most strenuous political argumentation and sterling reason of state. On the other hand he was wholly free from that quality which he ascribed to Lord George Sackville, a man "apt to take a sort of undecided, equivocal, narrow ground, that evades the substantial merits of the question, and puts the whole upon some temporary, local, accidental or personal consideration." He rose to the full height of that great argument. Burke here and everywhere else displayed the rare art of filling his subject with generalities, and yet never intruding commonplaces. No publicist who deals as largely in general propositions has ever been as free from truisms; no one has ever treated great themes with so much elevation, and yet been so wholly secured against the pitfalls of emptiness and the vague. And it is instructive to compare the foundation of all his pleas for the colonists with that on which they erected their own theoretic declaration of independence. The American leaders were impregnated with the metaphysical ideas of rights which had come to them from the rising revolutionary school in France. Burke no more adopted the doctrines of Jefferson in 1776 than he adopted the doctrines of Robespierre in 1793. He says nothing about men being born free and equal, and on the other hand he never denies the position of the court and the country at large, that the home legislature, being sovereign, had the right to tax the colonies. What he does say is that the exercise of such a right was not practicable; that if it were practicable, it was inexpedient; and that, even if this had not been inexpedient, yet, after the colonies had taken to arms, to crush their resistance by military force would not be more disastrous to them than it would be unfortunate for the ancient liberties of Great Britain. Into abstract discussion he would not enter. "Show the thing you contend for to be reason; show it to be common sense; show it to be the means of attaining some useful end." "The question with me is not whether you have a right to render your people miserable, but whether it is not your interest to make them happy." There is no difference in social spirit and doctrine between his protests against the maxims of the English common people as to the colonists, and his protests against the maxims of the French common people as to the court and the nobles; and it is impossible to find a single principle either asserted or implied in the speeches on the American revolution which was afterwards repudiated in the writings on the revolution in France.
It is one of the signs of Burke's singular and varied eminence that hardly any two people agree precisely which of his works to mark as the masterpiece. Every speech or tract that he composed on a great subject becomes, as we read it, the rival of every other. But the Speech on Conciliation (1775) has, perhaps, been more universally admired than any of his other productions, partly because its maxims are of a simpler and less disputable kind than those which adorn the pieces on France, and partly because it is most strongly characterized by that deep ethical quality which is the prime secret of Burke's great style and literary mastery. In this speech, moreover, and in the only less powerful one of the preceding year upon American taxation, as well as in the Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol in 1777, we see the all-important truth conspicuously illustrated that half of his eloquence always comes of the thoroughness with which he gets up his case. No eminent man has ever done more than Burke to justify the definition of genius as the consummation of the faculty of taking pains. Labour incessant and intense, if it was not the source, was at least an inseparable condition of his power. And magnificent rhetorician though he was, his labour was given less to his diction than to the facts; his heart was less in the form than the matter. It is true that his manuscripts were blotted and smeared, and that he made so many alterations in the proofs that the printer found it worth while to have the whole set up in type afresh. But there is no polish in his style, as in that of Junius for example, though there is something a thousand times better than polish. "Why will you not allow yourself to be persuaded," said Francis after reading the Reflections, "that polish is material to preservation?" Burke always accepted the rebuke, and flung himself into vindication of the sense, substance and veracity of what he had written. His writing is magnificent, because he knew so much, thought so comprehensively, and felt so strongly.
The succession of failures in America, culminating in Cornwallis's surrender at Yorktown in October 1781, wearied the nation, and at length the persistent and powerful attacks of the opposition began to tell. "At this time," wrote Burke, in words of manly self-assertion, thirteen years afterwards, "having a momentary lead (1780-1782), so aided and so encouraged, and as a feeble instrument in a mighty hand—I do not say I saved my country—I am sure I did my country important service. There were few indeed at that time that did not acknowledge it. It was but one voice, that no man in the kingdom better deserved an honourable provision should be made for him." In the spring of 1782 Lord North resigned. It seemed as if the court system which Burke had been denouncing for a dozen years was now finally broken, and as if the party which he had been the chief instrument in instructing, directing and keeping together must now inevitably possess power for many years to come. Yet in a few months the whole fabric had fallen, and the Whigs were thrown into opposition for the rest of the century. The story cannot be omitted in the most summary account of Burke's life. Lord Rockingham came into office on the fall of North. Burke was rewarded for services beyond price by being made paymaster of the forces, with the rank of a privy councillor. He had lost his seat for Bristol two years before, in consequence of his courageous advocacy of a measure of tolerance for the Catholics, and his still more courageous exposure of the enormities of the commercial policy of England towards Ireland. He sat during the rest of his parliamentary life (to 1794) for Malton, a pocket borough first of Lord Rockingham's, then of Lord Fitzwilliam's. Burke's first tenure of office was very brief. He had brought forward in 1780 a comprehensive scheme of economical reform, with the design of limiting the resources of jobbery and corruption which the crown was able to use to strengthen its own sinister influence in parliament. Administrative reform was, next to peace with the colonies, the part of the scheme of the new ministry to which the king most warmly objected. It was carried out with greater moderation than had been foreshadowed in opposition. But at any rate Burke's own office was not spared. While Charles Fox's father was at the pay-office (1765-1778) he realized as the interest of the cash balances which he was allowed to retain in his hands, nearly a quarter of a million of money. When Burke came to this post the salary was settled at £4000 a year. He did not enjoy the income long. In July 1782 Lord Rockingham died; Lord Shelburne took his place; Fox, who inherited from his father a belief in Lord Shelburne's duplicity, which his own experience of him as a colleague during the last three months had made stronger, declined to serve under him. Burke, though he had not encouraged Fox to take this step, still with his usual loyalty followed him out of office. This may have been a proper thing to do if their distrust of Shelburne was incurable, but the next step, coalition with Lord North against him, was not only a political blunder, but a shock to party morality, which brought speedy retribution. Either they had been wrong, and violently wrong, for a dozen years, or else Lord North was the guiltiest political instrument since Strafford. Burke attempted to defend the alliance on the ground of the substantial agreement between Fox and North in public aims. The defence is wholly untenable. The Rockingham Whigs were as substantially in agreement on public affairs with the Shelburne Whigs as they were with Lord North. The movement was one of the worst in the history of English party. It served its immediate purpose, however, for Lord Shelburne found himself (February 24, 1783) too weak to carry on the government, and was succeeded by the members of the coalition, with the duke of Portland for prime minister (April 2, 1783). Burke went back to his old post at the pay-office and was soon engaged in framing and drawing the famous India Bill. This was long supposed to be the work of Fox, who was politically responsible for it. We may be sure that neither he nor Burke would have devised any government for India which they did not honestly believe to be for the advantage both of that country and of England. But it cannot be disguised that Burke had thoroughly persuaded himself that it was indispensable in the interests of English freedom to strengthen the party hostile to the court. As we have already said, dread of the peril to the constitution from the new aims of George III. was the main inspiration of Burke's political action in home affairs for the best part of his political life. The India Bill strengthened the anti-court party by transferring the government of India to seven persons named in the bill, and neither appointed nor removable by the crown. In other words, the bill gave the government to a board chosen directly by the House of Commons; and it had the incidental advantage of conferring on the ministerial party patronage valued at £300,000 a year, which would remain for a fixed term of years out of reach of the king. In a word, judging the India Bill from a party point of view, we see that Burke was now completing the aim of his project of economic reform. That measure had weakened the influence of the crown by limiting its patronage. The measure for India weakened the influence of the crown by giving a mass of patronage to the party which the king hated. But this was not to be. The India Bill was thrown out by means of a royal intrigue in the Lords, and the ministers were instantly dismissed (December 18, 1783). Young William Pitt, then only in his twenty-fifth year, had been chancellor of the exchequer in Lord Shelburne's short ministry, and had refused to enter the coalition government from an honourable repugnance to join Lord North. He was now made prime minister. The country in the election of the next year ratified the king's judgment against the Portland combination; and the hopes which Burke had cherished for a political lifetime were irretrievably ruined.
The six years that followed the great rout of the orthodox Whigs were years of repose for the country, but it was now that Burke engaged in the most laborious and formidable enterprise of his life, the impeachment of Warren Hastings for high crimes and misdemeanours in his government of India. His interest in that country was of old date. It arose partly from the fact of William Burke's residence there, partly from his friendship with Philip Francis, but most of all, we suspect, from the effect which he observed Indian influence to have in demoralizing the House of Commons. "Take my advice for once in your life," Francis wrote to Shee; "lay aside 40,000 rupees for a seat in parliament: in this country that alone makes all the difference between somebody and nobody." The relations, moreover, between the East India Company and the government were of the most important kind, and occupied Burke's closest attention from the beginning of the American war down to his own India Bill and that of Pitt and Dundas. In February 1785 he delivered one of the most famous of all his speeches, that on the nabob of Arcot's debts. The real point of this superb declamation was Burke's conviction that ministers supported the claims of the fraudulent creditors in order to secure the corrupt advantages of a sinister parliamentary interest. His proceedings against Hastings had a deeper spring. The story of Hastings's crimes, as Macaulay says, made the blood of Burke boil in his veins. He had a native abhorrence of cruelty, of injustice, of disorder, of oppression, of tyranny, and all these things in all their degrees marked Hastings's course in India. They were, moreover, concentrated in individual cases, which exercised Burke's passionate imagination to its profoundest depths, and raised it to such a glow of fiery intensity as has never been rivalled in our history. For it endured for fourteen years, and was just as burning and as terrible when Hastings was acquitted in 1795, as in the select committee of 1781 when Hastings's enormities were first revealed. "If I were to call for a reward," wrote Burke, "it would be for the services in which for fourteen years, without intermission, I showed the most industry and had the least success, I mean in the affairs of India; they are those on which I value myself the most; most for the importance; most for the labour; most for the judgment; most for constancy and perseverance in the pursuit." Sheridan's speech in the House of Commons upon the charge relative to the begums of Oude probably excelled anything that Burke achieved, as a dazzling performance abounding in the most surprising literary and rhetorical effects. But neither Sheridan nor Fox was capable of that sustained and overflowing indignation at outraged justice and oppressed humanity, that consuming moral fire, which burst forth again and again from the chief manager of the impeachment, with such scorching might as drove even the cool and intrepid Hastings beyond all self-control, and made him cry out with protests and exclamations like a criminal writhing under the scourge. Burke, no doubt, in the course of that unparalleled trial showed some prejudice; made some minor overstatements of his case; used many intemperances; and suffered himself to be provoked into expressions of heat and impatience by the cabals of the defendant and his party, and the intolerable incompetence of the tribunal. It is one of the inscrutable perplexities of human affairs, that in the logic of practical life, in order to reach conclusions that cover enough for truth, we are constantly driven to premises that cover too much, and that in order to secure their right weight to justice and reason good men are forced to fling the two-edged sword of passion into the same scale. But these excuses were mere trifles, and well deserve to be forgiven, when we think that though the offender was in form acquitted, yet Burke succeeded in these fourteen years of laborious effort in laying the foundations once for all of a moral, just, philanthropic and responsible public opinion in England with reference to India, and in doing so performed perhaps the most magnificent service that any statesman has ever had it in his power to render to humanity.
Burke's first decisive step against Hastings was a motion for papers in the spring of 1786; the thanks of the House of Commons to the managers of the impeachment were voted in the summer of 1794. But in those eight years some of the most astonishing events in history had changed the political face of Europe. Burke was more than sixty years old when the states-general met at Versailles in the spring of 1789. He had taken a prominent part on the side of freedom in the revolution which stripped England of her empire in the West. He had taken a prominent part on the side of justice, humanity and order in dealing with the revolution which had brought to England new empire in the East. The same vehement passion for freedom, justice, humanity and order was roused in him at a very early stage of the third great revolution in his history—the revolution which overthrew the old monarchy in France. From the first Burke looked on the events of 1789 with doubt and misgiving. He had been in France in 1773, where he had not only the famous vision of Marie Antoinette at Versailles, "glittering like the morning star, full of life, and splendour and joy," but had also supped and discussed with some of the destroyers, the encyclopaedists, "the sophisters, economists and calculators." His first speech on his return to England was a warning (March 17, 1773) that the props of good government were beginning to fail under the systematic attacks of unbelievers, and that principles were being propagated that would not leave to civil society any stability. The apprehension never died out in his mind; and when he knew that the principles and abstractions, the un-English dialect and destructive dialectic, of his former acquaintances were predominant in the National Assembly, his suspicion that the movement would end in disastrous miscarriage waxed into certainty.
The scene grew still more sinister in his eyes after the march of the mob from Paris to Versailles in October, and the violent transport of the king and queen from Versailles to Paris. The same hatred of lawlessness and violence which fired him with a divine rage against the Indian malefactors was aroused by the violence and lawlessness of the Parisian insurgents. The same disgust for abstractions and naked doctrines of right that had stirred him against the pretensions of the British parliament in 1774 and 1776, was revived in as lively a degree by political conceptions which he judged to be identical in the French assembly of 1789. And this anger and disgust were exasperated by the dread with which certain proceedings in England had inspired him, that the aims, principles, methods and language which he so misdoubted or abhorred in France were likely to infect the people of Great Britain.
In November 1790 the town, which had long been eagerly expecting a manifesto from Burke's pen, was electrified by the Reflections on the Revolution in France, and on the proceedings in certain societies in London relative to that event. The generous Windham made an entry in his diary of his reception of the new book. "What shall be said," he added, "of the state of things, when it is remembered that the writer is a man decried, persecuted and proscribed; not being much valued even by his own party, and by half the nation considered as little better than an ingenious madman?" But the writer now ceased to be decried, persecuted and proscribed, and his book was seized as the expression of that new current of opinion in Europe which the more recent events of the Revolution had slowly set flowing. Its vogue was instant and enormous. Eleven editions were exhausted in little more than a year, and there is probably not much exaggeration in the estimate that 30,000 copies were sold before Burke's death seven years afterwards. George III. was extravagantly delighted; Stanislaus of Poland sent Burke words of thanks and high glorification and a gold medal. Catherine of Russia, the friend of Voltaire and the benefactress of Diderot, sent her congratulations to the man who denounced French philosophers as miscreants and wretches. "One wonders," Romilly said, by and by, "that Burke is not ashamed at such success." Mackintosh replied to him temperately in the Vindiciae Gallicae, and Thomas Paine replied to him less temperately but far more trenchantly and more shrewdly in the Rights of Man. Arthur Young, with whom he had corresponded years before on the mysteries of deep ploughing and fattening hogs, added a cogent polemical chapter to that ever admirable work, in which he showed that he knew as much more than Burke about the old system of France as he knew more than Burke about soils and roots. Philip Francis, to whom he had shown the proof-sheets, had tried to dissuade Burke from publishing his performance. The passage about Marie Antoinette, which has since become a stock piece in books of recitation, seemed to Francis a mere piece of foppery; for was she not a Messalina and a jade? "I know nothing of your story of Messalina," answered Burke; "am I obliged to prove judicially the virtues of all those I shall see suffering every kind of wrong and contumely and risk of life, before I endeavour to interest others in their sufferings?... Are not high rank, great splendour of descent, great personal elegance and outward accomplishments ingredients of moment in forming the interest we take in the misfortunes of men?... I tell you again that the recollection of the manner in which I saw the queen of France in 1774, and the contrast between that brilliancy, splendour and beauty, with the prostrate homage of a nation to her, and the abominable scene of 1780 which I was describing, did draw tears from me and wetted my paper. These tears came again into my eyes almost as often as I looked at the description,—they may again. You do not believe this fact, nor that these are my real feelings; but that the whole is affected, or as you express it, downright foppery. My friend, I tell you it is truth; and that it is true and will be truth when you and I are no more; and will exist as long as men with their natural feelings shall exist" (Corr. iii. 139).
Burke's conservatism was, as such a passage as this may illustrate, the result partly of strong imaginative associations clustering round the more imposing symbols of social continuity, partly of a sort of corresponding conviction in his reason that there are certain permanent elements of human nature out of which the European order had risen and which that order satisfied, and of whose immense merits, as of its mighty strength, the revolutionary party in France were most fatally ignorant. When Romilly saw Diderot in 1783, the great encyclopaedic chief assured him that submission to kings and belief in God would be at an end all over the world in a very few years. When Condorcet described the Tenth Epoch in the long development of human progress, he was sure not only that fulness of light and perfection of happiness would come to the sons of men, but that they were coming with all speed. Only those who know the incredible rashness of the revolutionary doctrine in the mouths of its most powerful professors at that time; only those who know their absorption in ends and their inconsiderateness about means, can feel how profoundly right Burke was in all this part of his contention. Napoleon, who had begun life as a disciple of Rousseau, confirmed the wisdom of the philosophy of Burke when he came to make the Concordat. That measure was in one sense the outcome of a mere sinister expediency, but that such a measure was expedient at all sufficed to prove that Burke's view of the present possibilities of social change was right, and the view of the Rousseauites and too sanguine Perfectibilitarians wrong. As we have seen, Burke's very first niece, the satire on Bolingbroke, sprang from his conviction that merely rationalistic or destructive criticism, applied to the vast complexities of man in the social union, is either mischievous or futile, and mischievous exactly in proportion as it is not futile.
To discuss Burke's writings on the Revolution would be to write first a volume upon the abstract theory of society, and then a second volume on the history of France. But we may make one or two further remarks. One of the most common charges against Burke was that he allowed his imagination and pity to be touched only by the sorrows of kings and queens, and forgot the thousands of oppressed and famine-stricken toilers of the land. "No tears are shed for nations," cried Francis, whose sympathy for the Revolution was as passionate as Burke's execration of it. "When the provinces are scourged to the bone by a mercenary and merciless military power, and every drop of its blood and substance extorted from it by the edicts of a royal council, the case seems very tolerable to those who are not involved in it. When thousands after thousands are dragooned out of their country for the sake of their religion, or sent to row in the galleys for selling salt against law,—when the liberty of every individual is at the mercy of every prostitute, pimp or parasite that has access to power or any of its basest substitutes,—my mind, I own, is not at once prepared to be satisfied with gentle palliatives for such disorders" (Francis to Burke, November 3, 1790). This is a very terse way of putting a crucial objection to Burke's whole view of French affairs in 1789. His answer was tolerably simple. The Revolution, though it had made an end of the Bastille, did not bring the only real practical liberty, that is to say, the liberty which comes with settled courts of justice, administering settled laws, undisturbed by popular fury, independent of everything but law, and with a clear law for their direction. The people, he contended, were no worse off under the old monarchy than they will be in the long run under assemblies that are bound by the necessity of feeding one part of the community at the grievous charge of other parts, as necessitous as those who are so fed; that are obliged to flatter those who have their lives at their disposal by tolerating acts of doubtful influence on commerce and agriculture, and for the sake of precarious relief to sow the seeds of lasting want; that will be driven to be the instruments of the violence of others from a sense of their own weakness, and, by want of authority to assess equal and proportioned charges upon all, will be compelled to lay a strong hand upon the possessions of a part. As against the moderate section of the Constituent Assembly this was just.
One secret of Burke's views of the Revolution was the contempt which he had conceived for the popular leaders in the earlier stages of the movement. In spite of much excellence of intention, much heroism, much energy, it is hardly to be denied that the leaders whom that movement brought to the surface were almost without exception men of the poorest political capacity. Danton, no doubt, was abler than most of the others, yet the timidity or temerity with which he allowed himself to be vanquished by Robespierre showed that even he was not a man of commanding quality. The spectacle of men so rash, and so incapable of controlling the forces which they seemed to have presumptuously summoned, excited in Burke both indignation and contempt. And the leaders of the Constituent who came first on the stage, and hoped to make a revolution with rose-water, and hardly realized any more than Burke did how rotten was the structure which they had undertaken to build up, almost deserved his contempt, even if, as is certainly true, they did not deserve his indignation. It was only by revolutionary methods, which are in their essence and for a time as arbitrary as despotic methods, that the knot could be cut. Burke's vital error was his inability to see that a root and branch revolution was, under the conditions, inevitable. His cardinal position, from which he deduced so many important conclusions, namely, that, the parts and organs of the old constitution of France were sound, and only needed moderate invigoration, is absolutely mistaken and untenable. There was not a single chamber in the old fabric that was not crumbling and tottering. The court was frivolous, vacillating, stone deaf and stone blind; the gentry were amiable, but distinctly bent to the very last on holding to their privileges, and they were wholly devoid both of the political experience that only comes of practical responsibility for public affairs, and of the political sagacity that only comes of political experience. The parliaments or tribunals were nests of faction and of the deepest social incompetence. The very sword of the state broke short in the king's hand. If the king or queen could either have had the political genius of Frederick the Great, or could have had the good fortune to find a minister with that genius, and the good sense and good faith to trust and stand by him against mobs of aristocrats and mobs of democrats; if the army had been sound and the states-general had been convoked at Bourges or Tours instead of at Paris, then the type of French monarchy and French society might have been modernized without convulsion. But none of these conditions existed.
When he dealt with the affairs of India Burke passed over the circumstances of our acquisition of power in that continent. "There is a sacred veil to be drawn over the beginnings of all government," he said. "The first step to empire is revolution, by which power is conferred; the next is good laws, good order, good institutions, to give that power stability." Exactly on this broad principle of political force, revolution was the first step to the assumption by the people of France of their own government. Granted that the Revolution was inevitable and indispensable, how was the nation to make the best of it? And how were surrounding nations to make the best of it? This was the true point of view. But Burke never placed himself at such a point. He never conceded the postulate, because, though he knew France better than anybody in England except Arthur Young, he did not know her condition well enough. "Alas!" he said, "they little know how many a weary step is to be taken before they can form themselves into a mass which has a true political personality."
Burke's view of French affairs, however consistent with all his former political conceptions, put an end to more than one of his old political friendships. He had never been popular in the House of Commons, and the vehemence, sometimes amounting to fury, which he had shown in the debates on the India Bill, on the regency, on the impeachment of Hastings, had made him unpopular even among men on his own side. In May 1789—that memorable month of May in which the states-general marched in impressive array to hear a sermon at the church of Notre Dame at Versailles—a vote of censure had actually been passed on him in the House of Commons for a too severe expression used against Hastings. Fox, who led the party, and Sheridan, who led Fox, were the intimates of the prince of Wales; and Burke would have been as much out of place in that circle of gamblers and profligates as Milton would have been out of place in the court of the Restoration. The prince, as somebody said, was like his father in having closets within cabinets and cupboards within closets. When the debates on the regency were at their height we have Burke's word that he was not admitted to the private counsels of the party. Though Fox and he were on friendly terms in society, yet Burke admits that for a considerable period before 1790 there had been between them "distance, coolness and want of confidence, if not total alienation on his part." The younger Whigs had begun to press for shorter parliaments, for the ballot, for redistribution of political power. Burke had never looked with any favour on these projects. His experience of the sentiment of the populace in the two greatest concerns of his life,—American affairs and Indian affairs,—had not been likely to prepossess him in favour of the popular voice as the voice of superior political wisdom. He did not absolutely object to some remedy in the state of representation (Corr. ii. 387), still he vigorously resisted such proposals as the duke of Richmond's in 1780 for manhood suffrage. The general ground was this:—"The machine itself is well enough to answer any good purpose, provided the materials were sound. But what signifies the arrangement of rottenness?"
Bad as the parliaments of George III. were, they contained their full share of eminent and capable men; and, what is more, their very defects were the exact counterparts of what we now look back upon as the prevailing stupidity in the country. What Burke valued was good government. His Report on the Causes of the Duration of Mr Hastings's Trial shows how wide and sound were his views of law reform. His Thoughts on Scarcity attest his enlightenment on the central necessities of trade and manufacture, and even furnished arguments to Cobden fifty years afterwards. Pitt's parliaments were competent to discuss, and willing to pass, all measures for which the average political intelligence of the country was ripe. Burke did not believe that altered machinery was at that time needed to improve the quality of legislation. If wiser legislation followed the great reform of 1832, Burke would have said this was because the political intelligence of the country had improved.
Though averse at all times to taking up parliamentary reform, he thought all such projects downright crimes in the agitation of 1791-1792. This was the view taken by Burke, but it was not the view of Fox, nor of Sheridan, nor of Francis, nor of many others of his party, and difference of opinion here was naturally followed by difference of opinion upon affairs in France. Fox, Grey, Windham, Sheridan, Francis, Lord Fitzwilliam, and most of the other Whig leaders, welcomed the Revolution in France. And so did Pitt, too, for some time. "How much the greatest event it is that ever happened in the world," cried Fox, with the exaggeration of a man ready to dance the carmagnole, "and how much the best!" The dissension between a man who felt so passionately as Burke, and a man who spoke so impulsively as Charles Fox, lay in the very nature of things. Between Sheridan and Burke there was an open breach in the House of Commons upon the Revolution so early as February 1790, and Sheridan's influence with Fox was strong. This divergence of opinion destroyed all the elation that Burke might well have felt at his compliments from kings, his gold medals, his twelve editions. But he was too fiercely in earnest in his horror of Jacobinism to allow mere party associations to guide him. In May 1791 the thundercloud burst, and a public rupture between Burke and Fox took place in the House of Commons.
The scene is famous in English parliamentary annals. The minister had introduced a measure for the division of the province of Canada and for the establishment of a local legislature in each division. Fox in the course of debate went out of his way to laud the Revolution, and to sneer at some of the most effective passages in the Reflections. Burke was not present, but he announced his determination to reply. On the day when the Quebec Bill was to come on again, Fox called upon Burke, and the pair walked together from Burke's house in Duke Street down to Westminster. The Quebec Bill was recommitted, and Burke at once rose and soon began to talk his usual language against the Revolution, the rights of man, and Jacobinism whether English or French. There was a call to order. Fox, who was as sharp and intolerant in the House as he was amiable out of it, interposed with some words of contemptuous irony. Pitt, Grey, Lord Sheffield, all plunged into confused and angry debate as to whether the French Revolution was a good thing, and whether the French Revolution, good or bad, had anything to do with the Quebec Bill. At length Fox, in seconding a motion for confining the debate to its proper subject, burst into the fatal question beyond the subject, taxing Burke with inconsistency, and taunting him with having forgotten that ever-admirable saying of his own about the insurgent colonists, that he did not know how to draw an indictment against a whole nation. Burke replied in tones of firm self-repression; complained of the attack that had been made upon him; reviewed Fox's charges of inconsistency; enumerated the points on which they had disagreed, and remarked that such disagreements had never broken their friendship. But whatever the risk of enmity, and however bitter the loss of friendship, he would never cease from the warning to flee from the French constitution. "But there is no loss of friends," said Fox in an eager undertone. "Yes," said Burke, "there is a loss of friends. I know the penalty of toy conduct. I have done my duty at the price of my friend—our friendship is at an end." Fox rose, but was so overcome that for some moments he could not speak. At length, his eyes streaming with tears, and in a broken voice, he deplored the breach of a twenty years' friendship on a political question. Burke was inexorable. To him the political question was so vivid, so real, so intense, as to make all personal sentiment no more than dust in the balance. Burke confronted Jacobinism with the relentlessness of a Jacobin. The rupture was never healed, and Fox and he had no relations with one another henceforth beyond such formal interviews as took place in the manager's box in Westminster Hall in connexion with the impeachment.
A few months afterwards Burke published the Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs, a grave, calm and most cogent vindication of the perfect consistency of his criticisms upon the English Revolution of 1688 and upon the French Revolution of 1789, with the doctrines of the great Whigs who conducted and afterwards defended in Anne's reign the transfer of the crown from James to William and Mary. The Appeal was justly accepted as a satisfactory performance for the purpose with which it was written. Events, however, were doing more than words could do, to confirm the public opinion of Burke's sagacity and foresight. He had always divined by the instinct of hatred that the French moderates must gradually be swept away by the Jacobins, and now it was all coming true. The humiliation of the king and queen after their capture at Varennes; the compulsory acceptance of the constitution; the plain incompetence of the new Legislative Assembly; the growing violence of the Parisian mob, and the ascendency of the Jacobins at the Common Hall; the fierce day of the 20th of June (1792), when the mob flooded the Tuileries, and the bloodier day of the 10th of August, when the Swiss guard was massacred and the royal family flung into prison; the murders in the prisons in September; the trial and execution of the king in January (1793); the proscription of the Girondins in June, the execution of the queen in October—if we realize the impression likely to be made upon the sober and homely English imagination by such a heightening of horror by horror, we may easily understand how people came to listen to Burke's voice as the voice of inspiration, and to look on his burning anger as the holy fervour of a prophet of the Lord.
Fox still held to his old opinions as stoutly as he could, and condemned and opposed the war which England had declared against the French republic. Burke, who was profoundly incapable of the meanness of letting personal estrangement blind his eyes to what was best for the commonwealth, kept hoping against hope that each new trait of excess in France would at length bring the great Whig leader to a better mind. He used to declaim by the hour in the conclaves at Burlington House upon the necessity of securing Fox; upon the strength which his genius would lend to the administration in its task of grappling with the sanguinary giant; upon the impossibility, at least, of doing either with him or without him. Fox's most important political friends who had long wavered, at length, to Burke's great satisfaction, went over to the side of the government. In July 1794 the duke of Portland, Lord Fitzwilliam, Windham and Grenville took office under Pitt. Fox was left with a minority which was satirically said not to have been more than enough to fill a hackney coach. "That is a calumny," said one of the party, "we should have filled two." The war was prosecuted with the aid of both the great parliamentary parties of the country, and with the approval of the great bulk of the nation. Perhaps the one man in England who in his heart approved of it less than any other was William Pitt. The difference between Pitt and Burke was nearly as great as that between Burke and Fox. Burke would be content with nothing short of a crusade against France, and war to the death with her rulers. "I cannot persuade myself," he said, "that this war bears any the least resemblance to any that has ever existed in the world. I cannot persuade myself that any examples or any reasonings drawn from other wars and other politics are at all applicable to it" (Corr. iv. 219). Pitt, on the other hand, as Lord Russell truly says, treated Robespierre and Carnot as he would have treated any other French rulers, whose ambition was to be resisted, and whose interference in the affairs of other nations was to be checked. And he entered upon the matter in the spirit of a man of business, by sending ships to seize some islands belonging to France in the West Indies, so as to make certain of repayment of the expenses of the war.
In the summer of 1794 Burke was struck to the ground by a blow to his deepest affection in life, and he never recovered from it. His whole soul was wrapped up in his only son, of whose abilities he had the most extravagant estimate and hope. All the evidence goes to show that Richard Burke was one of the most presumptuous and empty-headed of human beings. "He is the most impudent and opiniative fellow I ever knew," said Wolfe Tone. Gilbert Elliot, a very different man, gives the same account. "Burke," he says, describing a dinner party at Lord Fitzwilliam's in 1793, "has now got such a train after him as would sink anybody but himself: his son, who is quite nauseated by all mankind; his brother, who is liked better than his son, but is rather oppressive with animal spirits and brogue; and his cousin, William Burke, who is just returned unexpectedly from India, as much ruined as when he went years ago, and who is a fresh charge on any prospects of power Burke may ever have. Mrs Burke has in her train Miss French [Burke's niece], the most perfect She Paddy that ever was caught. Notwithstanding these disadvantages Burke is in himself a sort of power in the state. It is not too much to say that he is a sort of power in Europe, though totally without any of those means or the smallest share in them which give or maintain power in other men." Burke accepted the position of a power in Europe seriously. Though no man was ever more free from anything like the egoism of the intellectual coxcomb, yet he abounded in that active self-confidence and self-assertion which is natural in men who are conscious of great powers, and strenuous in promoting great causes. In the summer of 1791 he despatched his son to Coblenz to give advice to the royalist exiles, then under the direction of Calonne, and to report to him at Beaconsfield their disposition and prospects. Richard Burke was received with many compliments, but of course nothing came of his mission, and the only impression that remains with the reader of his prolix story is his tale of the two royal brothers, who afterwards became Louis XVIII. and Charles X., meeting after some parting, and embracing one another with many tears on board a boat in the middle of the Rhine, while some of the courtiers raised a cry of "Long live the king"—the king who had a few weeks before been carried back in triumph to his capital with Mayor Pétion in his coach. When we think of the pass to which things had come in Paris by this time, and of the unappeasable ferment that boiled round the court, there is a certain touch of the ludicrous in the notion of poor Richard Burke writing to Louis XVI. a letter of wise advice how to comport himself.
At the end of the same year, with the approval of his father he started for Ireland as the adviser of the Catholic Association. He made a wretched emissary, and there was no limit to his arrogance, noisiness and indiscretion. The Irish agitators were glad to give him two thousand guineas and to send him home. The mission is associated with a more important thing, his father's Letters to Sir Hercules Langrishe, advocating the admission of the Irish Catholics to the franchise. This short piece abounds richly in maxims of moral and political prudence. And Burke exhibited considerable courage in writing it; for many of its maxims seem to involve a contradiction, first, to the principles on which he withstood the movement in France, and second, to his attitude upon the subject of parliamentary reform. The contradiction is in fact only superficial. Burke was not the man to fall unawares into a trap of this kind. His defence of Catholic relief—and it had been the conviction of a lifetime—was very properly founded on propositions which were true of Ireland, and were true neither of France nor of the quality of parliamentary representation in England. Yet Burke threw such breadth and generality over all he wrote that even these propositions, relative as they were, form a short manual of statesmanship.
At the close of the session of 1794 the impeachment of Hastings had come to an end, and Burke bade farewell to parliament. Richard Burke was elected in his father's place at Malton. The king was bent on making the champion of the old order of Europe a peer. His title was to be Lord Beaconsfield, and it was designed to annex to the title an income for three lives. The patent was being made ready, when all was arrested by the sudden death of the son who was to Burke more than life. The old man's grief was agonizing and inconsolable. "The storm has gone over me," he wrote in words which are well known, but which can hardly be repeated too often for any who have an ear for the cadences of noble and pathetic speech,—"The storm has gone over me, and I lie like one of those old oaks which the late hurricane has scattered about me. I am stripped of all my honours; I am torn up by the roots and lie prostrate on the earth.... I am alone. I have none to meet my enemies in the gate.... I live in an inverted order. They who ought to have succeeded me have gone before me. They who should have been to me as posterity are in the place of ancestors."
A pension of £2500 was all that Burke could now be persuaded to accept. The duke of Bedford and Lord Lauderdale made some remarks in parliament upon this paltry reward to a man who, in conducting a great trial on the public behalf, had worked harder for nearly ten years than any minister in any cabinet of the reign. But it was not yet safe to kick up heels in face of the dying lion. The vileness of such criticism was punished, as it deserved to be, in the Letter to a Noble Lord (1796), in which Burke showed the usual art of all his compositions in shaking aside the insignificances of a subject. He turned mere personal defence and retaliation into an occasion for a lofty enforcement of constitutional principles, and this, too, with a relevancy and pertinence of consummate skilfulness. There was to be one more great effort before the end.
In the spring of 1796 Pitt's constant anxiety for peace had become more earnest than ever. He had found out the instability of the coalition and the power of France. Like the thrifty steward he was, he saw with growing concern the waste of the national resources and the strain upon commerce, with a public debt swollen to what then seemed the desperate sum of £400,000,000. Burke at the notion of negotiation flamed out in the Letters on a Regicide Peace, in some respects the most splendid of all his compositions. They glow with passion, and yet with all their rapidity is such steadfastness, the fervour of imagination is so skilfully tempered by close and plausible reasoning, and the whole is wrought with such strength and fire, that we hardly know where else to look either in Burke's own writings or elsewhere for such an exhibition of the rhetorical resources of our language. We cannot wonder that the whole nation was stirred to the very depths, or that they strengthened the aversion of the king, of Windham and other important personages in the government against the plans of Pitt. The prudence of their drift must be settled by external considerations. Those who think that the French were likely to show a moderation and practical reasonableness in success, such as they had never shown in the hour of imminent ruin, will find Burke's judgment full of error and mischief. Those, on the contrary, who think that the nation which was on the very eve of surrendering itself to the Napoleonic absolutism was not in a hopeful humour for peace and the European order, will believe that Burke's protests were as perspicacious as they were powerful, and that anything which chilled the energy of the war was as fatal as he declared it to be.
When the third and most impressive of these astonishing productions came into the hands of the public, the writer was no more. Burke died on the 8th of July 1797. Fox, who with all his faults was never wanting in a fine and generous sensibility, proposed that there should be a public funeral, and that the body should lie among the illustrious dead in Westminster Abbey. Burke, however, had left strict injunctions that his burial should be private; and he was laid in the little church at Beaconsfield. It was the year of Campo Formio. So a black whirl and torment of rapine, violence and fraud was encircling the Western world, as a life went out which, notwithstanding some eccentricities and some aberrations, had made great tides in human destiny very luminous.
(J. Mo.)
Authorities.—Of the Collected Works, there are two main editions—the quarto and the octavo. (1) Quarto, in eight volumes, begun in 1792, under the editorship of Dr F. Lawrence; vols. i.-iii. were published in 1792; vols. iv.-viii., edited by Dr Walter King, sometime bishop of Rochester, were completed in 1827. (2) Octavo in sixteen volumes. This was begun at Burke's death, also by Drs Lawrence and King; vols. i.-viii. were published in 1803 and reissued in 1808, when Dr Lawrence died; vols. ix.-xii. were published in 1813 and the remaining four vols. in 1827. A new edition of vols. i.-viii. was published in 1823 and the contents of vols. i.-xii. in 2 vols. octavo in 1834. An edition in nine volumes was published in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1839. This contains the whole of the English edition in sixteen volumes, with a reprint of the Account of the European Settlements in America which is not in the English edition.
Among the numerous editions published later may be mentioned that in Bohn's British Classics, published in 1853. This contains the fifth edition of Sir James Prior's life; also an edition in twelve volumes, octavo, published by J.C. Nimmo, 1898. There is an edition of the Select Works of Burke with introduction and notes by E.J. Payne in the Clarendon Press series, new edition, 3 vols., 1897. The Correspondence of Edmund Burke, edited by Earl Fitzwilliam and Sir R. Bourke, with appendix, detached papers and notes for speeches, was published in 4 vols., 1844. The Speeches of Edmund Burke, in the House of Commons and Westminster Hall, were published in 4 vols., 1816. Other editions of the speeches are those On Irish Affairs, collected and arranged by Matthew Arnold, with a preface (1881), On American Taxation, On Conciliation with America, together with the Letter to the Sheriff of Bristol, edited with introduction and notes by F.G. Selby (1895).
The standard life of Burke is that by Sir James Prior, Memoir of the Life and Character of Edmund Burke with Specimens of his Poetry and Letters (1824). The lives by C. MacCormick (1798) by R. Bisset (1798, 1800) are of little value. Other lives are those by the Rev. George Croly (2 vols., 1847), and by T. MacKnight (3 vols., 1898). Of critical estimates of Burke's life the Edmund Burke of John Morley, "English Men of Letters" series (1879), is an elaboration of the above article; see also his Burke, a Historical Study (1867); "Three Essays on Burke," by Sir James Fitzjames Stephen in Horae Sabbaticae, series iii. (1892); and Peptographia Dublinensis, Memorial Discourses preached in the Chapel of Trinity College, Dublin, 1895-1902; Edmund Burke, by G. Chadwick, bishop of Derry (1902).
BURKE, SIR JOHN BERNARD (1814-1892), British genealogist, was born in London, on the 5th of January 1814, and was educated in London and in France. His father, John Burke (1787-1848), was also a genealogist, and in 1826 issued a Genealogical and Heraldic Dictionary of the Peerage and Baronetage of the United Kingdom. This work, generally known as Burke's Peerage, has been issued annually since 1847. While practising as a barrister Bernard Burke assisted his father in his genealogical work, and in 1848 took control of his publications. In 1853 he was appointed Ulster king-at-arms; in 1854 he was knighted; and in 1855 he became keeper of the state papers in Ireland. After having devoted his life to genealogical studies he died in Dublin on the 12th of December 1892. In addition to editing Burke's Peerage from 1847 to his death, Burke brought out several editions of a companion volume, Burke's Landed Gentry, which was first published between 1833 and 1838. In 1866 and 1883 he published editions of his father's Dictionary of the Peerages of England, Scotland and Ireland, extinct, dormant and in abeyance (earlier editions, 1831, 1840, 1846); in 1855 and 1876 editions of his Royal Families of England, Scotland and Wales (1st edition, 1847-1851); and in 1878 and 1883 enlarged editions of his Encyclopaedia of Heraldry, or General Armoury of England, Scotland and Ireland. Burke's own works include The Roll of Battle Abbey (1848); The Romance of the Aristocracy (1855); Vicissitudes of Families (1883 and several earlier editions); and The Rise of Great Families (1882). He was succeeded as editor of Burke's Peerage and Landed Gentry by his fourth son, Ashworth Peter Burke.
BURKE, ROBERT O'HARA (1820-1861), Australian explorer, was born at St Cleram, Co. Galway, Ireland, in 1820. Descended from a branch of the family of Clanricarde, he was educated in Belgium, and at twenty years of age entered the Austrian army, in which he attained the rank of captain. In 1848 he left the Austrian service, and became a member of the Royal Irish Constabulary. Five years later he emigrated to Tasmania, and shortly afterwards crossed to Melbourne, where he became an inspector of police. When the Crimean War broke out he went to England in the hope of securing a commission in the army, but peace had meanwhile been signed, and he returned to Victoria and resumed his police duties. At the end of 1857 the Philosophical Institute of Victoria took up the question of the exploration of the interior of the Australian continent, and appointed a committee to inquire into and report upon the subject. In September 1858, when it became known that John McDouall Stuart had succeeded in penetrating as far as the centre of Australia, the sum of £1000 was anonymously offered for the promotion of an expedition to cross the continent from south to north, on condition that a further sum of £2000 should be subscribed within a twelvemonth. The amount having been raised within the time specified, the Victorian parliament supplemented it by a vote of £6000, and an expedition was organized under the leadership of Burke, with W.J. Wills as surveyor and astronomical observer. The story of this expedition, which left Melbourne on the 21st of August 1860, furnishes perhaps the most painful episode in Australian annals. Ten Europeans and three Sepoys accompanied the expedition, which was soon torn by internal dissensions. Near Menindie on the Darling, Landells, Burke's second in command, became insubordinate and resigned, his example being followed by the doctor—a German. On the 11th of November Burke, with Wills and five assistants, fifteen horses and sixteen camels, reached Cooper's Creek in Queensland, where a depot was formed near good grass and abundance of water. Here Burke proposed waiting the arrival of his third officer, Wright, whom he had sent back from Torowoto to Menindie to fetch some camels and supplies. Wright, however, delayed his departure until the 26th of January 1861. Meantime, weary of waiting, Burke, with Wills, King and Gray as companions, determined on the 16th of December to push on across the continent, leaving an assistant named Brahe to take care of the depot until Wright's arrival. On the 4th of February 1861 Burke and his party, worn down by famine, reached the estuary of the Flinders river, not far from the present site of Normantown on the Gulf of Carpentaria. On the 26th of February began their return journey. The party suffered greatly from famine and exposure, and but for the rainy season, thirst would have speedily ended their miseries. In vain they looked for the relief which Wright was to bring them. On the 16th of April Gray died, and the emaciated survivors halted a day to bury his body. That day's delay, as it turned out, cost Burke and Wills their lives; they arrived at Cooper's Creek to find the depot deserted. But a few hours before Brahe, unrelieved by Wright, and thinking that Burke had died or changed his plans, had taken his departure for the Darling. With such assistance as they could get from the natives, Burke, and his two companions struggled on, until death overtook Burke and Wills at the end of June. King sought the natives, who cared for him until his relief by a search party in September. No one can deny the heroism of the men whose lives were sacrificed in this ill-starred expedition. But it is admitted that the leaders were not bushmen and had had no experience in exploration. Disunion and disobedience to orders, from the highest to the lowest, brought about the worst results, and all that now remains to tell the story of the failure of this vast undertaking is a monument to the memory of the foolhardy heroes, from the chisel of Charles Summers, erected on a prominent site in Melbourne.
BURKE, WILLIAM (1792-1829), Irish criminal, was born in Ireland in 1792. After trying his hand at a variety of trades there, he went to Scotland about 1817 as a navvy, and in 1827 was living in a lodging-house in Edinburgh kept by William Hare, another Irish labourer. Towards the end of that year one of Hare's lodgers, an old army pensioner, died. This was the period of the body-snatchers or Resurrectionists, and Hare and Burke, aware that money could always be obtained for a corpse, sold the body to Dr Robert Knox, a leading Edinburgh anatomist, for £7, 10s. The price obtained and the simplicity of the transaction suggested to Hare an easy method of making a profitable livelihood, and Burke at once fell in with the plan. The two men inveigled obscure travellers to Hare's or some other lodging-house, made them drunk and then suffocated them, taking care to leave no marks of violence. The bodies were sold to Dr Knox for prices averaging from £8 to £14. At least fifteen victims had been disposed of in this way when the suspicions of the police were aroused, and Burke and Hare were arrested. The latter turned king's evidence, and Burke was found guilty and hanged at Edinburgh on the 28th of January 1829. Hare found it impossible, in view of the strong popular feeling, to remain in Scotland. He is believed to have died in England under an assumed name. From Burke's method of killing his victims has come the verb "to burke," meaning to suffocate, strangle or suppress secretly, or to kill with the object of selling the body for the purposes of dissection.
See George Macgregor, History of Burke and Hare and of the Resurrectionist Times (Glasgow, 1884).
BURLAMAQUI, JEAN JACQUES (1694-1748), Swiss publicist, was born at Geneva on the 24th of June 1694. At the age of twenty-five he was designated honorary professor of ethics and the law of nature at the university of Geneva. Before taking up the appointment he travelled through France and England, and made the acquaintance of the most eminent writers of the period. On his return he began his lectures, and soon gained a wide reputation, from the simplicity of his style and the precision of his views. He continued to lecture for fifteen years, when he was compelled on account of ill-health to resign. His fellow-citizens at once elected him a member of the council of state, and he gained as high a reputation for his practical sagacity as he had for his theoretical knowledge. He died at Geneva on the 3rd of April 1748. His works were Principes du droit naturel (1747), and Principes du droit politique (1751). These have passed through many editions, and were very extensively used as text-books. Burlamaqui's style is simple and clear, and his arrangement of the material good. His fundamental principle may be described as rational utilitarianism, and in many ways it resembles that of Cumberland.
BURLESQUE (Ital. burlesco, from burla, a joke, fun, playful trick), a form of the comic in art, consisting broadly in an imitation of a work of art with the object of exciting laughter, by distortion or exaggeration, by turning, for example, the highly rhetorical into bombast, the pathetic into the mock-sentimental, and especially by a ludicrous contrast between the subject and the style, making gods speak like common men and common men like gods. While parody (q.v.), also based on imitation, relies for its effect more on the close following of the style of its counterpart, burlesque depends on broader and coarser effects. Burlesque may be applied to any form of art, and unconsciously, no doubt, may be found even in architecture. In the graphic arts it takes the form better known as "caricature" (q.v.). Its particular sphere is, however, in literature, and especially in drama. The Batrachomachia, or Battle of the Frogs and Mice, is the earliest example in classical literature, being a travesty of the Homeric epic. There are many true burlesque parts in the comedies of Aristophanes, e.g. the appearance of Socrates in the Clouds. The Italian word first appears in the Opere Burlesche of Francesco Berni (1497-1535). In France during part of the reign of Louis XIV., the burlesque attained to great popularity; burlesque Aeneids, Iliads and Odysseys were composed, and even the most sacred subjects were not left untravestied. Of the numerous writers of these, P. Scarron is most prominent, and his Virgile Travesti (1648-1653) was followed by numerous imitators. In English literature Chaucer's Rime of Sir Thopas is a burlesque of the long-winded medieval romances. Among the best-known true burlesques in English dramatic literature may be mentioned the 2nd duke of Buckingham's The Rehearsal, a burlesque of the heroic drama; Gay's Beggar's Opera, of the Italian opera; and Sheridan's The Critic. In the later 19th century the name "burlesque" was given to a form of musical dramatic composition in which the true element of burlesque found little or no place. These musical burlesques, with which the Gaiety theatre, London, and the names of Edward Terry, Fred Leslie and Nellie Farren are particularly connected, developed from the earlier extravaganzas of J.R. Planché, written frequently round fairy tales. The Gaiety type of burlesque has since given place to the "musical comedy," and its only survival is to be found in the modern pantomime.
BURLINGAME, ANSON (1820-1870), American legislator and diplomat, was born in New Berlin, Chenango county, New York, on the 14th of November 1820. In 1823 his parents took him to Ohio, and about ten years afterwards to Michigan. In 1838-1841 he studied in one of the "branches" of the university of Michigan, and in 1846 graduated at the Harvard law school. He practised law in Boston, and won a wide reputation by his speeches for the Free Soil party in 1848. He was a member of the Massachusetts constitutional convention in 1853, of the state senate in 1853-1854, and of the national House of Representatives from 1855 to 1861, being elected for the first term as a "Know Nothing" and afterwards as a member of the new Republican party, which he helped to organize in Massachusetts. He was an effective debater in the House, and for his impassioned denunciation (June 21, 1856) of Preston S. Brooks (1819-1857), for his assault upon Senator Charles Sumner, was challenged by Brooks. Burlingame accepted the challenge and specified rifles as the weapons to be used; his second chose Navy Island, above the Niagara Falls, and in Canada, as the place for the meeting. Brooks, however, refused these conditions, saying that he could not reach the place designated "without running the gauntlet of mobs and assassins, prisons and penitentiaries, bailiffs and constables." To Burlingame's appointment as minister to Austria (March 22, 1861) the Austrian authorities objected because in Congress he had advocated the recognition of Sardinia as a first-class power and had championed Hungarian independence. President Lincoln thereupon appointed him (June 14, 1861) minister to China. This office he held until November 1867, when he resigned and was immediately appointed (November 26) envoy extraordinary and minister plenipotentiary to head a Chinese diplomatic mission to the United States and the principal European nations. The embassy, which included two Chinese ministers, an English and a French secretary, six students from the Tung-wan Kwang at Peking, and a considerable retinue, arrived in the United States in March 1868, and concluded at Washington (28th of July 1868) a series of articles, supplementary to the Reed Treaty of 1858, and later known as "The Burlingame Treaty." Ratifications of the treaty were not exchanged at Peking until November 23, 1869. The "Burlingame Treaty" recognizes China's right of eminent domain over all her territory, gives China the right to appoint at ports in the United States consuls, "who shall enjoy the same privileges and immunities as those enjoyed by the consuls of Great Britain and Russia"; provides that "citizens of the United States in China of every religious persuasion and Chinese subjects in the United States shall enjoy entire liberty of conscience and shall be exempt from all disability or persecution on account of their religious faith or worship in either country"; and grants certain privileges to citizens of either country residing in the other, the privilege of naturalization, however, being specifically withheld. After leaving the United States, the embassy visited several continental capitals, but made no definite treaties. Burlingame's speeches did much to awaken interest in, and a more intelligent appreciation of, China's attitude toward the outside world. He died suddenly at St Petersburg, on the 23rd of February 1870.
His son Edward Livermore Burlingame (b. 1848) was educated at Harvard and at Heidelberg, was a member of the editorial staff of the New York Tribune in 1871-1872 and of the American Cyclopaedia in 1872-1876, and in 1886 became the editor of Scribner's Magazine.
BURLINGTON, a city and the county-seat of Des Moines county, Iowa, U.S.A., on the Mississippi river, in the S.E. part of the state. Pop. (1890) 22,565; (1900) 23,201; (1905, state census) 25,318 (4492 foreign-born); (1910) 24,324. It is served by the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy (which has extensive construction and repair shops here), the Chicago, Rock Island & Pacific, and the Toledo, Peoria & Western (Pennsylvania system) railways; and has an extensive river commerce. The river is spanned here by the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy railway bridge. Many of the residences are on bluffs commanding beautiful views of river scenery; and good building material has been obtained from the Burlington limestone quarries. Crapo Park, of 100 acres, along the river, is one of the attractions of the city. Among the principal buildings are the county court house, the free public library, the Tama building, the German-American savings bank building and the post office. Burlington has three well-equipped hospitals. Among the city's manufactures are lumber, furniture, baskets, pearl buttons, cars, carriages and wagons, Corliss engines, waterworks pumps, metallic burial cases, desks, boxes, crackers, flour, pickles and beer. The factory product in 1905 was valued at $5,779,337, or 29.9% more than in 1900. The first white man to visit the site of Burlington seems to have been Lieutenant Zebulon M. Pike, who came in 1805 and recommended the erection of a fort. The American Fur Company established a post here in 1829 or earlier, but settlement really began in 1833, after the Black Hawk War, and the place had a population of 1200 in 1838. It was laid out as a town and named Flint Hills (a translation of the Indian name, Shokokon) in 1834; but the name was soon changed to Burlington, after the city of that name in Vermont. Burlington was incorporated as a town in 1837, and was chartered as a city in 1838 by the territory of Wisconsin, the city charter being amended by the territory of Iowa in 1839 and 1841. The territorial legislature of Wisconsin met here from 1836 to 1838 and that of Iowa from 1838 to 1840. In 1837 a newspaper, the Wisconsin Territorial Gazette, now the Burlington Evening Gazette, and in 1839 another, the Burlington Hawk Eye, were founded; the latter became widely known in the years immediately following 1872 from the humorous sketches contributed to it by Robert Jones Burdette (b. 1844), an associate editor, known as the "Burlington Hawk Eye Man," who in 1903 entered the Baptist ministry and became pastor of the Temple Baptist church in Los Angeles, California, and among whose publications are Hawkeyetems (1877), Hawkeyes (1879), and Smiles Yoked with Sighs (1900).
BURLINGTON, a city of Burlington county, New Jersey, U.S.A., on the E. bank of the Delaware river, 18 m. N.E. of Philadelphia. Pop. (1890) 7264; (1900) 7392, of whom 636 were foreign-born and 590 were of negro descent; (1905) 8038; (1910) 8336. It is served by the Pennsylvania railway, and by passenger and freight steamboat lines on the Delaware river, connecting with river and Atlantic coast ports. Burlington is a pleasant residential city with a number of interesting old mansions long antedating the War of Independence, some of them the summer homes of old Philadelphia families. The Burlington Society library, established in 1757 and still conducted under its original charter granted by George II., is one of the oldest public libraries in America. At Burlington are St Mary's Hall (1837; Protestant Episcopal), founded by Bishop G.W. Doane, one of the first schools for girls to be established in the country, Van Rensselaer Seminary and the New Jersey State Masonic home. In the old St Mary's church (Protestant Episcopal), which was built in 1703 and has been called St Anne's as well as St Mary's, Daniel Coxe (1674-1739), first provincial grand master of the lodge of Masons in America, was buried; a commemorative bronze tablet was erected in 1907. Burlington College, founded by Bishop Doane in 1864, was closed as a college in 1877, but continued as a church school until 1900; the buildings subsequently passed into the hands of an iron manufacturer. Burlington's principal industries are the manufacture of shoes and cast-iron water and gas pipes. Burlington was settled in 1677 by a colony of English Quakers. The settlement was first known as New Beverly, but was soon renamed after Bridlington (Burlington), the Yorkshire home of many of the settlers. In 1682 the assembly of West Jersey gave to Burlington "Matinicunk Island," above the town, "for the maintaining of a school for the education of youth"; revenues from a part of the island are still used for the support of the public schools, and the trust fund is one of the oldest for educational purposes in the United States. Burlington was incorporated as a town in 1693 (re-incorporated, 1733), and became the seat of government of West Jersey. On the union of East and West Jersey in 1702, it became one of the two seats of government of the new royal province, the meetings of the legislature generally alternating between Burlington and Perth Amboy, under both the colonial and the state government, until 1790. In 1777 the New Jersey Gazette, the first newspaper in New Jersey, was established here; it was published (here and later in Trenton) until 1786, and was an influential paper, especially during the War of Independence. Burlington was chartered as a city in 1784.
See Henry Armitt Brown, The Settlement of Burlington (Burlington, 1878); George M. Hills, History of the Church in Burlington (Trenton, 1885); and Mrs A.M. Gummère, Friends in Burlington (Philadelphia, 1884).
BURLINGTON, a city, port of entry and the county-seat of Chittenden county, Vermont, U.S.A., on the E. shore of Lake Champlain, in the N.W. part of the state, 90 m. S.E. of Montreal, and 300 m. N. of New York. It is the largest city in the state. Pop. (1880) 11,365; (1890) 14,590; (1900) 18,640, of whom 3726 were foreign-born; (1910, census) 20,468. It is served by the Central Vermont and the Rutland railways, and by lines of passenger and freight steamboats on Lake Champlain. The city is attractively situated on an arm of Lake Champlain, being built on a strip of land extending about 6 m. south from the mouth of the Winooski river along the lake shore and gradually rising from the water's edge to a height of 275 ft.; its situation and its cool and equable summer climate have given it a wide reputation as a summer resort, and it is a centre for yachting, canoeing and other aquatic sports. During the winter months it has ice-boat regattas. Burlington is the seat of the university of Vermont (1791; non-sectarian and co-educational), whose official title in 1865 became "The University of Vermont and State Agricultural College." The university is finely situated on a hill (280 ft. above the lake) commanding a charming view of the city, lake, the Adirondacks and the Green Mountains. It has departments of arts, sciences and medicine, and a library of 74,800 volumes and 32,936 pamphlets housed in the Billings Library, designed by H.H. Richardson. The university received the Federal grants under the Morrill acts of 1862 and 1890, and in connexion with it the Vermont agricultural experiment station is maintained. At Burlington are also the Mt St Mary's academy (1889, Roman Catholic), conducted by the Sisters of Mercy; and two business colleges. Among the principal buildings are the city hall, the Chittenden county court house, the Federal and the Y.M.C.A. buildings, the Masonic temple, the Roman Catholic cathedral and the Edmunds high school. Burlington's charitable institutions include the Mary Fletcher hospital, the Adams mission home, the Lousia Howard mission, the Providence orphan asylum, and homes for aged women, friendless women and destitute children. The Fletcher free public library (47,000 volumes in 1908) is housed in a Carnegie building. In the city are two sanitariums. The city has two parks (one, Ethan Allen Park, is on a bluff in the north-west part of the city, and commands a fine view) and four cemeteries; in Green Mount Cemetery, which overlooks the Winooski valley, is a monument over the grave of Ethan Allen, who lived in Burlington from 1778 until his death. Fort Ethan Allen, a United States military post, is about 3 m. east of the city, with which it is connected by an electric line. Burlington is the most important manufacturing centre in the state; among its manufactures are sashes, doors and blinds, boxes, furniture and wooden-ware, cotton and woollen goods, patent medicines, refrigerators, house furnishings, paper and machinery. In 1905 the city's factory products were valued at $6,355,754, three-tenths of which was the value of lumber and planing mill products, including sashes, doors and blinds. The Winooski river, which forms the boundary between Burlington and the township of Colchester and which enters Lake Champlain N.W. of the city, furnishes valuable water-power, but most of the manufactories are operated by steam. Quantities of marble were formerly taken from quarries in the vicinity. The city is a wholesale distributing centre for all northern Vermont and New Hampshire, and is one of the principal lumber markets in the east, most of the lumber being imported from Canada. It is the port of entry for the Vermont customs district, whose exports and imports were valued respectively in 1907 at $8,333,024 and $5,721,034. A charter for a town to be founded here was granted by the province of New Hampshire in 1763, but no settlement was made until 1774. Burlington was chartered as a city in 1865.
BURMA, a province of British India, including the former kingdom of independent Burma, as well as British Burma, acquired by the British Indian government in the two wars of 1826 and 1852. It is divided into Upper and Lower Burma, the former being the territory annexed on 1st January 1886. The province lies to the east of the Bay of Bengal, and covers a range of country extending from the Pakchan river in 9° 55′ north latitude to the Naga and Chingpaw, or Kachin hills, lying roughly between the 27th and 28th degrees of north latitude; and from the Bay of Bengal on the west to the Mekong river, the boundary of the dependent Shan States on the east, that is to say, roughly, between the 92nd and 100th degrees of east longitude. The extreme length from north to south is almost 1200 m., and the broadest part, which is in about latitude 21° north, is 575 m. from east to west. On the N. it is bounded by the dependent state of Manipur, by the Mishmi hills, and by portions of Chinese territory; on the E. by the Chinese Shan States, portions of the province of Yunnan, the French province of Indo-China, and the Siamese Shan, or Lao States and Siam; on the S. by the Siamese Malay States and the Bay of Bengal; and on the W. by the Bay of Bengal and Chittagong. The coast-line from Taknaf, the mouth of the Naaf, in the Akyab district on the north, to the estuary of the Pakchan at Maliwun on the south, is about 1200 m. The total area of the province is estimated at 238,738 sq.m., of which Burma proper occupies 168,573 sq.m., the Chin hills 10,250 sq.m., and the Shan States, which comprise the whole of the eastern portion of the province, some 59,915 sq.m.
Natural Divisions.—The province falls into three natural divisions: Arakan with the Chin hills, the Irrawaddy basin, and the old province of Tenasserim, together with the portion of the Shan and Karen-ni states in the basin of the Salween, and part of Kengtung in the western basin of the Mekong. Of these Arakan is a strip of country lying on the seaward slopes of the range of hills known as the Arakan Yomas. It stretches from Cape Negrais on the south to the Naaf estuary, which divides it from the Chittagong division of Eastern Bengal and Assam on the north, and includes the districts of Sandoway, Kyaukpyu, Akyab and northern Arakan, an area of some 18,540 sq.m. The northern part of this tract is barren hilly country, but in the west and south are rich alluvial plains containing some of the most fertile lands of the province. Northwards lie the Chin and some part of the Kachin hills. To the east of the Arakan division, and separated from it by the Arakan Yornas, lies the main body of Burma in the basin of the Irrawaddy. This tract falls into four subdivisions. First, there is the highland tract including the hilly country at the sources of the Chindwin and the upper waters of the Irrawaddy, the Upper Chindwin, Katha, Bhamo, Myitkyina and Ruby Mines districts, with the Kachin hills and a great part of the Northern Shan states. In the Shan States there are a few open plateaus, fertile and well populated, and Maymyo in the Mandalay district, the hill-station to which in the hot weather the government of Burma migrates, stands in the Pyin-u-lwin plateau, some 3500 ft. above the sea. But the greater part of this country is a mass of rugged hills cut deep with narrow gorges, within which even the biggest rivers are confined. The second tract is that known as the dry zone of Burma, and includes the whole of the lowlands lying between the Arakan Yomas and the western fringe of the Southern Shan States. It stretches along both sides of the Irrawaddy from the north of Mandalay to Thayetmyo, and embraces the Lower Chindwin, Shwebo, Sagaing, Mandalay, Kyauksè, Meiktila, Yamèthin, Myingyan, Magwe, Pakôkku and Minbu districts. This tract consists mostly of undulating lowlands, but it is broken towards the south by the Pegu Yomas, a considerable range of hills which divides the two remaining tracts of the Irrawaddy basin. On the west, between the Pegu and the Arakan Yomas, stretches the Irrawaddy delta, a vast expanse of level plain 12,000 sq.m. in area falling in a gradual unbroken slope from its apex not far south of Prome down to the sea. This delta, which includes the districts of Bassein, Myaungmya, Thôngwa, Henzada, Hanthawaddy, Tharrawaddy, Pegu and Rangoon town, consists almost entirely of a rich alluvial deposit, and the whole area, which between Cape Negrais and Elephant Point is 137 m. wide, is fertile in the highest degree. To the east lies a tract of country which, though geographically a part of the Irrawaddy basin, is cut off from it by the Yomas, and forms a separate system draining into the Sittang river. The northern portion of this tract, which on the east touches the basin of the Salween river, is hilly; the remainder towards the confluence of the Salween, Gyaing and Attaran rivers consists of broad fertile plains. The whole is comprised in the districts of Toungoo and Thaton, part of the Karen-ni hills, with the Salween hill tract and the northern parts of Amherst, which form the northern portion of the Tenasserim administrative division. The third natural division of Burma is the old province of Tenasserim, which, constituted in 1826 with Moulmein as its capital, formed the nucleus from which the British supremacy throughout Burma has grown. It is a narrow strip of country lying between the Bay of Bengal and the high range of hills which form the eastern boundary of the province towards Siam. It comprises the districts of Mergui and Tavoy and a part of Amherst, and includes also the Mergui Archipelago. The surface of this part of the country is mountainous and much intersected with streams. Northward from this lies the major portion of the Southern Shan States and Karen-ni and a narrowing strip along the Salween of the Northern Shan States.
Mountains.—Burma proper is encircled on three sides by a wall of mountain ranges. The Arakan Yomas starting from Cape Negrais extend northwards more or less parallel with the coast till they join the Chin and Naga hills. They then form part of a system of ranges which curve north of the sources of the Chindwin river, and with the Kumon range and the hills of the Jade and Amber mines, make up a highland tract separated from the great Northern Shan plateau by the gorges of the Irrawaddy river. On the east the Kachin, Shan and Karen hills, extending from the valley of the Irrawaddy into China far beyond the Salween gorge, form a continuous barrier and boundary, and tail off into a narrow range which forms the eastern watershed of the Salween and separates Tenasserim from Siam. The highest peak of the Arakan Yomas, Liklang, rises nearly 10,000 ft. above the sea, and in the eastern Kachin hills, which run northwards from the state of Möng Mit to join the high range dividing the basins of the Irrawaddy and the Salween, are two peaks, Sabu and Worang, which rise to a height of 11,200 ft. above the sea. The Kumon range running down from the Hkamti country east of Assam to near Mogaung ends in a peak known as Shwedaunggyi, which reaches some 5750 ft. There are several peaks in the Ruby Mines district which rise beyond 7000 ft. and Loi Ling in the Northern Shan States reaches 9000 ft. Compared with these ranges the Pegu Yomas assume the proportions of mere hills. Popa, a detached peak in the Myingyan district, belongs to this system and rises to a height of nearly 5000 ft., but it is interesting mainly as an extinct volcano, a landmark and an object of superstitious folklore, throughout the whole of Central Burma. Mud volcanoes occur at Minbu, but they are not in any sense mountains, resembling rather the hot springs which are found in many parts of Burma. They are merely craters raised above the level of the surrounding country by the gradual accretion of the soft oily mud, which overflows at frequent intervals whenever a discharge of gas occurs. Spurs of the Chin hills run down the whole length of the Lower Chindwin district, almost to Sagaing, and one hill, Powindaung, is particularly noted on account of its innumerable cave temples, which are said to hold no fewer than 446,444 images of Buddha. Huge caves, of which the most noted are the Farm Caves, occur in the hills near Moulmein, and they too are full of relics of their ancient use as temples, though now they are chiefly visited in connexion with the bats, whose flight viewed from a distance, as they issue from the caves, resembles a cloud of smoke.
Rivers.—Of the rivers of Burma the Irrawaddy is the most important. It rises possibly beyond the confines of Burma in the unexplored regions, where India, Tibet and China meet, and seems to be formed by the junction of a number of considerable streams of no great length. Two rivers, the Mali and the N'mai, meeting about latitude 25° 45′ some 150 m. north of Bhamo, contribute chiefly to its volume, and during the dry weather it is navigable for steamers up to their confluence. Up to Bhamo, a distance of 900 m. from the sea, it is navigable throughout the year, and its chief tributary in Burma, the Chindwin, is also navigable for steamers for 300 m. from its junction with the Irrawaddy at Pakôkku. The Chindwin, called in its upper reaches the Tanai, rises in the hills south-west of Thama, and flows due north till it enters the south-east corner of the Hukawng valley, where it turns north-west and continues in that direction cutting the valley into two almost equal parts until it reaches its north-west range, when it turns almost due south and takes the name of the Chindwin. It is a swift clear river, fed in its upper reaches by numerous mountain streams. The Mogaung river, rising in the watershed which divides the Irrawaddy and the Chindwin drainages, flows south and south-east for 180 m. before it joins the Irrawaddy, and is navigable for steamers as far as Kamaing for about four months in the year. South of Thayetmyo, where arms of the Arakan Yomas approach the river and almost meet that spur of the Pegu Yomas which formed till 1886 the northern boundary of British Burma, the valley of the Irrawaddy opens out again, and at Yegin Mingyi near Myanaung the influence of the tide is first felt, and the delta may be said to begin. The so-called rivers of the delta, the Ngawun, Pyamalaw, Panmawaddy, Pyinzalu and Pantanaw, are simply the larger mouths of the Irrawaddy, and the whole country towards the sea is a close network of creeks where there are few or no roads and boats take the place of carts for every purpose. There is, however, one true river of some size, the Hlaing, which rises near Prome, flows southwards and meets the Pegu river and the Pazundaung creek near Rangoon, and thus forms the estuary which is known as the Rangoon river and constitutes the harbour of Rangoon. East of the Rangoon river and still within the deltaic area, though cut off from the main delta by the southern end of the Pegu Yomas, lies the mouth of the Sittang. This river, rising in the Sham-Karen hills, flows first due north and then southward through the Kyauksè, Yamèthin and Toungoo districts, its line being followed by the Mandalay-Rangoon railway as far south as Nyaunglèbin in the Pegu district. At Toungoo it is narrow, but below Shwegyin it widens, and at Sittang it is half a mile broad. It flows into the Gulf of Martaban, and near its mouth its course is constantly changing owing to erosion and corresponding accretions. The second river in the province in point of size is the Salween, a huge river, believed from the volume of its waters to rise in the Tibetan mountains to the north of Lhasa. It is in all probability actually longer than the Irrawaddy, but it is not to be compared to that river in importance. It is, in fact, walled in on either side, with banks varying in British territory from 3000 to 6000 ft. high and at present unnavigable owing to serious rapids in Lower Burma and at one or two places in the Shan States, but quite open to traffic for considerable reaches in its middle course. The Gyaing and the Attaran rivers meet the Salween at its mouth, and the three rivers form the harbour of Moulmein, the second seaport of Burma.