Preface (part 3)

Lakes.—The largest lake in the province is Indawgyi in the Myitkyina district. It has an area of nearly 100 sq. m. and is surrounded on three sides by ranges of hills, but is open to the north where it has an outlet in the Indaw river. In the highlands of the Shan hills there are the Inle lakes near Yawnghwe, and in the Katha district also there is another Indaw which covers some 60 sq. m. Other lakes are the Paunglin lake in Minbu district, the Inma lake in Prome, the Tu and Duya in Henzada, the Shahkègyi and the Inyègyi in Bassein, the sacred lake at Ye in Tenasserim, and the Nagamauk, Panzemyaung and Walonbyan in Arakan. The Meiktila lake covers an area of some 5 sq. m., but it is to some extent at least an artificial reservoir. In the heart of the delta numerous large lakes or marshes abounding in fish are formed by the overflow of the Irrawaddy river during the rainy season, but these either assume very diminutive proportions or disappear altogether in the dry season.

Climate.—The climate of the delta is cooler and more temperate than in Upper Burma, and this is shown in the fairer complexion and stouter physique of the people of the lower province as compared with the inhabitants of the drier and hotter upper districts as far as Bhamo, where there is a great infusion of other types of the Tibeto-Burman family. North of the apex of the delta and the boundary between the deltaic and inland tracts, the rainfall gradually lessens as far as Minbu, where what was formerly called the rainless zone commences and extends as far as Katha. The rainfall in the coast districts varies from about 200 in. in the Arakan and Tenasserim divisions to an average of 90 in Rangoon and the adjoining portion of the Irrawaddy delta. In the extreme north of Upper Burma the rainfall is rather less than in the country adjoining Rangoon, and in the dry zone the annual average falls as low as 20 and 30 in.

The temperature varies almost as much as the rainfall. It is highest in the central zone, the mean of the maximum readings in such districts as Magwe, Myingyan, Kyauksè, Mandalay and Shwebo in the month of May being close on 100° F., while in the littoral and sub-montane districts it is nearly ten degrees less. The mean of the minimum readings in December in the central zone districts is a few degrees under 60° F. and in the littoral districts a few degrees over that figure. In the hilly district of Mogôk (Ruby Mines) the December mean minimum is 36.8° and the mean maximum 79°. The climate of the Chin and Kachin hills and also of the Shan States is temperate. In the shade and off the ground the thermometer rarely rises above 80° F. or falls below 25° F. In the hot season and in the sun as much as 150° F. is registered, and on the grass in the cold weather ten degrees of frost are not uncommon. Snow is seldom seen either in the Chin or Shan hills, but there are snow-clad ranges in the extreme north of the Kachin country. In the narrow valleys of the Shan hills, and especially in the Salween valley, the shade maximum reaches 100° F. regularly for several weeks in April. The rainfall in the hills varies very considerably, but seems to range from about 60 in. in the broader valleys to about 300 in. on the higher forest-clad ranges.

Geology.—Geologically, British Burma consists of two divisions, an eastern and a western. The dividing line runs from the mouth of the Sittang river along the railway to Mandalay, and thence continues northward, with the same general direction but curving slightly towards the east. West of this line the rocks are chiefly Tertiary and Quaternary; east of it they are mostly Palaeozoic or gneissic. In the western mountain ranges the beds are thrown into a series of folds which form a gentle curve running from south to north with its convexity facing westward. There is an axial zone of Cretaceous and Lower Eocene, and this is flanked on each side by the Upper Eocene and the Miocene, while the valley of the Irrawaddy is occupied chiefly by the Pliocene. Along the southern part of the Arakan coast the sea spreads over the western Miocene zone. The Cretaceous beds have not yet been separated from the overlying Eocene, and the identification of the system rests on the discovery of a single Cenomanian ammonite. The Eocene beds are marine and contain nummulites. The Miocene beds are also marine and are characterized by an abundant molluscan fauna. The Pliocene, on the other hand, is of freshwater origin, and contains silicified wood and numerous remains of Mammalia. Flint chips, which appear to have been fashioned by hand, are said to have been found in the Miocene beds, but to prove the existence of man at so early a period would require stronger evidence than has yet been brought forward.

The older rocks of eastern Burma are very imperfectly known. Gneiss and granite occur; Ordovician fossils have been found in the Upper Shan States, and Carboniferous fossils in Tenasserim and near Moulmein. Volcanic rocks are not common in any part of Burma, but about 50 m. north-north-east of Yenangyaung the extinct volcano of Popa rises to a height of 3000 ft. above the surrounding Pliocene plain. Intrusions of a serpentine-like rock break through the Miocene strata north of Bhamo, and similar intrusions occur in the western ranges. Whether the mud "volcanoes" of the Irrawaddy valley have any connexion with volcanic activity may be doubted. The petroleum of Burma occurs in the Miocene beds, one of the best-known fields being that of Yenangyaung. Coal is found in the Tertiary deposits in the valley of the Irrawaddy and in Tenasserim. Tin is abundant in Tenasserim, and lead and silver have been worked extensively in the Shan States. The famous ruby mines of Upper Burma are in metamorphic rock, while the jadeite of the Bhamo neighbourhood is associated with the Tertiary intrusions of serpentine-like rock already noticed.

Population.—The total population of Burma in 1901 was 10,490,624 as against 7,722,053 in 1891; but a considerable portion of this large increase was due to the inclusion of the Shan States and the Chin hills in the census area. Even in Burma proper, however, there was an increase during the decade of 1,530,822, or 19.8%. The density of population per square mile is 44 as compared with 167 for the whole of India and 552 for the Bengal Delta. England and Wales have a population more than twelve times as dense as that of Burma, so there is still room for expansion. The chief races of Burma are Burmese (6,508,682), Arakanese (405,143), Karens (717,859), Shans (787,087), Chins (179,292), Kachins (64,405) and Talaings (321,898); but these totals do not include the Shan States and Chin hills. The Burmese in person have the Mongoloid characteristics common to the Indo-Chinese races, the Tibetans and tribes of the Eastern Himalaya. They may be generally described as of a stout, active, well-proportioned form; of a brown but never of an intensely dark complexion, with black, coarse, lank and abundant hair, and a little more beard than is possessed by the Siamese. Owing to their gay and lively disposition the Burmese have been called "the Irish of the East," and like the Irish they are somewhat inclined to laziness. Since the advent of the British power, the immigration of Hindus with a lower standard of comfort and of Chinamen with a keener business instinct has threatened the economic independence of the Burmese in their own country. As compared with the Hindu, the Burmese wear silk instead of cotton, and eat rice instead of the cheaper grains; they are of an altogether freer and less servile, but also of a less practical character. The Burmese women have a keener business instinct than the men, and serve in some degree to redress the balance. The Burmese children are adored by their parents, and are said to be the happiest and merriest children in the world.

Language and Literature.—The Burmese are supposed by modern philologists to have come, as joint members of a vast Indo-Chinese immigration swarm, from western China to the head waters of the Irrawaddy and then separated, some to people Tibet and Assam, the others to press southwards into the plains of Burma. The indigenous tongues of Burma are divided into the following groups:—

A. Indo-Chinese family

(1) Tibet-Burman sub-family

(a) The Burmese group.
(b) The Kachin group.
(c) The Kuki-Chin group.

(2) Siamese-Chinese sub-family

(d) The Tai group.
(e) The Karen group.

(3) Môn-Annam sub-family

(f) The Upper Middle Mekong
or Wa Palaung group.
(g) The North Cambodian group.

B. Malay family

(h) The Selung language.

Burmese, which was spoken by 7,006,495 people in the province in 1901, is a monosyllabic language, with, according to some authorities, three different tones; so that any given syllable may have three entirely different meanings only distinguishable by the intonation when spoken, or by accents or diacritical marks when written. There are, however, very many weighty authorities who deny the existence of tones in the language. The Burmese alphabet is borrowed from the Aryan Sanskrit through the Pāli of Upper India. The language is written from left to right in what appears to be an unbroken line. Thus Burma possesses two kinds of literature, Pāli and Burmese. The Pāli is by far the more ancient, including as it does the Buddhist scriptures that originally found their way to Burma from Ceylon and southern India. The Burmese literature is for the most part metrical, and consists of religious romances, chronological histories and songs. The Maha Yazawin or "Royal Chronicle," forms the great historical work of Burma. This is an authorized history, in which everything unflattering to the Burmese monarchs was rigidly suppressed. After the Second Burmese War no record was ever made in the Yazawin that Pegu had been torn away from Burma by the British. The folk songs are the truest and most interesting national literature. The Burmese are fond of stage-plays in which great licence of language is permitted, and great liberty to "gag" is left to the wit or intelligence of the actors.

Government.—The province as a division of the Indian empire is administered by a lieutenant-governor, first appointed 1st May 1897, with a legislative council of nine members, five of whom are officials. There are, besides, a chief secretary, revenue secretary, secretary and two under-secretaries, a public works department secretary with two assistants. The revenue administration of the province is superintended by a financial commissioner, assisted by two secretaries, and a director of land records and agriculture, with a land records departmental staff. There is a chief court for the province with a chief justice and three justices, established in May 1900. Other purely judicial officers are the judicial commissioner for Upper Burma, and the civil judges of Mandalay and Moulmein. There are four commissioners of revenue and circuit, and nineteen deputy commissioners in Lower Burma, and four commissioners and seventeen deputy commissioners in Upper Burma. There are two superintendents of the Shan States, one for the northern and one for the southern Shan States, and an assistant superintendent in the latter; a superintendent of the Arakan hill tracts and of the Chin hills, and a Chinese political adviser taken from the Chinese consular service. The police are under the control of an inspector-general, with deputy inspector-general for civil and military police, and for supply and clothing. The education department is under a director of public instruction, and there are three circles—eastern, western and Upper Burma, each under an inspector of schools.

The Burma forests are divided into three circles each under a conservator, with twenty-one deputy conservators. There are also a deputy postmaster-general, chief superintendent and four superintendents of telegraphs, a chief collector of customs, three collectors and four port officers, and an inspector-general of jails. At the principal towns benches of honorary magistrates, exercising powers of various degrees, have been constituted. There are forty-one municipal towns, fourteen of which are in Upper Burma. The commissioners of division are ex officio sessions judges in their several divisions, and also have civil powers, and powers as revenue officers. They are responsible to the lieutenant-governor, each in his own division, for the working of every department of the public service, except the military department, and the branches of the administration directly under the control of the supreme government. The deputy commissioners perform the functions of district magistrates, district judges, collectors and registrars, besides the miscellaneous duties which fall to the principal district officer as representative of government. Subordinate to the deputy commissioners are assistant commissioners, extra-assistant commissioners and myoôks, who are invested with various magisterial, civil and revenue powers, and hold charge of the townships, as the units of regular civil and revenue jurisdiction are called, and the sub-divisions of districts, into which most of these townships are grouped. Among the salaried staff of officials, the townships officers are the ultimate representatives of government who come into most direct contact with the people. Finally, there are the village headmen, assisted in Upper Burma by elders, variously designated according to old custom. Similarly in the towns, there are headmen of wards and elders of blocks. In Upper Burma these headmen have always been revenue collectors. The system under which in towns headmen of wards and elders of blocks are appointed is of comparatively recent origin, and is modelled on the village system.

The Shan States were declared to be a part of British India by notification in 1886. The Shan States Act of 1888 vests the civil, criminal and revenue administration in the chief of the state, subject to the restrictions specified in the sanad or patent granted to him. The law to be administered in each state is the customary law of the state, so far as it is in accordance with the justice, equity and good conscience, and not opposed to the spirit of the law in the rest of British India. The superintendents exercise general control over the administration of criminal justice, and have power to call for cases, and to exercise wide revisionary powers. Criminal jurisdiction in cases in which either the complainant or the defendant is a European, or American, or a government servant, or a British subject not a native of a Shan State, is withdrawn from the chiefs and vested in the superintendents and assistant superintendents. Neither the superintendents nor the assistant superintendents have power to try civil suits, whether the parties are Shans or not. In the Myelat division of the southern Shan States, however, the criminal law is practically the same as the in force in Upper Burma, and the ngwegunhmus, or petty chiefs, have been appointed magistrates of the second class. The chiefs of the Shan States are of three classes:—(1) sawbwas; (2) myosas; (3) ngwegunhmus. The last are found only in the Myelat, or border country between the southern Shan States and Burma. There are fifteen sawbwas, sixteen myosas and thirteen ngwegunhmus in the Shan States proper. Two sawbwas are under the supervision of the commissioner of the Mandalay division, and two under the commissioner of the Sagaing division. The states vary enormously in size, from the 12,000 sq. m. of the Trans-Salween State of Kêng Tung, to the 3.95 sq. m. of Nam Hkôm in the Myelat. The latter contained only 41 houses with 210 inhabitants in 1897 and has since been merged in the adjoining state. There are five states, all sawbwaships, under the supervision of the superintendent of the northern Shan States, besides an indeterminate number of Wa States and communities of other races beyond the Salween river. The superintendent of the southern Shan States supervises thirty-nine, of which ten are sawbwaships. The headquarters of the northern Shan States are at Lashio, of the southern Shan States at Taung-gyi.

The states included in eastern and western Karen-ni are not part of British India, and are not subject to any of the laws in force in the Shan States, but they are under the supervision of the superintendent of the southern Shan States.

The northern portion of the Karen hills is at present dealt with on the principle of political as distinguished from administrative control. The tribes are not interfered with as long as they keep the peace. What is specifically known as the Kachin hills, the country taken under administration in the Bhamo and Myitkyina districts, is divided into forty tracts. Beyond these tracts there are many Kachins in Katha, Möng-Mit, and the northern Shan States, but though they are often the preponderating, they are not the exclusive population. The country within the forty tracts may be considered the Kachin hills proper, and it lies between 23° 30′ and 26° 30′ N. lat. and 96° and 98° E. long. Within this area the petty chiefs have appointment orders, the people are disarmed, and the rate of tribute per household is fixed in each case. Government is regulated by the Kachin hills regulation. Since 1894 the country has been practically undisturbed, and large numbers of Kachins are enlisted, and ready to enlist in the military police, and seem likely to form as good troops as the Gurkhas of Nepal.

The Chin hills were not declared an integral part of Burma until 1895, but they now form a scheduled district. The chiefs, however, are allowed to administer their own affairs, as far as may be, in accordance with their own customs, subject to the supervision of the superintendent of the Chin hills.

Religion.—Buddhists make up more than 88.6%; Mussulmans 3.28; spirit-worshippers 3.85; Hindus 2.76, and Christians 1.42 of the total population of the province. The large nominal proportion of Buddhists is deceptive. The Burmese are really as devoted to demonolatry as the hill-tribes who are labelled plain spirit-worshippers. The actual figures of the various religions, according to the census of 1901, are as follows:—

Buddhists

9,184,121

Spirit-worshippers

399,390

Hindus

285,484

Mussulmans

339,446

Christians

147,525

Sikhs

6,596

Jews

685

Parsees

245

Others

28

The chief religious principle of the Burmese is to acquire merit for their next incarnation by good works done in this life. The bestowal of alms, offerings of rice to priests, the founding of a monastery, erection of pagodas, with which the country is crowded, the building of a bridge or rest-house for the convenience of travellers are all works of religious merit, prompted, not by love of one's fellow-creatures, but simply and solely for one's own future advantage.

An analysis shows that not quite two in every thousand Burmese profess Christianity, and there are about the same number of Mahommedans among them. It is admitted by the missionaries themselves that Christianity has progressed very slowly among the Burmese in comparison with the rapid progress made amongst the Karens. It is amongst the Sgaw Karens that the greatest progress in Christianity has been made, and the number of spirit-worshippers among them is very much smaller. The number of Burmese Christians is considerably increased by the inclusion among them of the Christian descendants of the Portuguese settlers of Syriam deported to the old Burmese Tabayin, a village now included in the Ye-u subdivision of Shwebo. These Christians returned themselves as Burmese. The forms of Christianity which make most converts in Burma are the Baptist and Roman Catholic faiths. Of recent years many conversions to Christianity have been made by the American Baptist missionaries amongst the Lahu or Muhsö hill tribesmen.

Education.—Compared with other Indian provinces, and even with some of the countries of Europe, Burma takes a very high place in the returns of those able to both read and write. Taking the sexes apart, though women fall far behind men in the matter of education, still women are better educated in Burma than in the rest of India. The average number of each sex in Burma per thousand is:—literates, male 378; female, 45; illiterates, male, 622; female, 955. The number of literates per thousand in Bengal is:—male, 104; female, 5. The proportion was greatly reduced in the 1901 census by the inclusion of the Shan States and the Chin hills, which mostly consist of illiterates.

The fact that in Upper Burma the proportion of literates is nearly as high as, and the proportion of those under instruction even higher than, that of the corresponding classes in Lower Burma, is a clear proof that in primary education, at least, the credit for the superiority of the Burman over the native of India is due to indigenous schools. In almost every village in the province there is a monastery, where the most regular occupation of one or more of the resident pongyis, or Buddhist monks, is the instruction free of charge of the children of the village. The standard of instruction, however, is very low, consisting only of reading and writing, though this is gradually being improved in very many monasteries. The absence of all prejudice in favour of the seclusion of women also is one of the main reasons why in this province the proportion who can read and write is higher than in any other part of India, Cochin alone excepted. It was not till 1890 that the education department took action in Upper Burma. It was then ascertained that there were 684 public schools with 14,133 pupils, and 1664 private schools with 8685 pupils. It is worthy of remark that of these schools 29 were Mahommedan, and that there were 176 schools for girls in which upwards of 2000 pupils were taught. There are three circles—Eastern, Central and Upper Burma. For the special supervision and encouragement of indigenous primary education in monastic and in lay schools, each circle of inspection is divided into sub-circles corresponding with one or more of the civil districts, and each sub-circle is placed under a deputy-inspector or a sub-inspector of schools. There are nine standards of instruction, and the classes in schools correspond with these standards. In Upper Burma all educational grants are paid from imperial funds; there is no cess as in Lower Burma. Grants-in-aid are given according to results. There is only one college, at Rangoon, which is affiliated to the Calcutta University. There are missionary schools amongst the Chins, Kachins and Shans, and a school for the sons of Shan chiefs at Taung-gyi in the southern Shan States. A Patamabyan examination for marks in the Pāli language was first instituted in 1896 and is held annually.

Finance.—The gross revenue of Lower Burma from all sources in 1871-1872 was Rs.1,36,34,520, of which Rs.1,21,70,530 was from imperial taxation, Rs.3,73,200 from provincial services, and Rs.10,90,790 from local funds. The land revenue of the province was Rs.34,45,230. In Burma the cultivators themselves continue to hold the land from government, and the extent of their holdings averages about five acres. The land tax is supplemented by a poll tax on the male population from 18 to 60 years of age, with the exception of immigrants during the first five years of their residence, religious teachers, schoolmasters, government servants and those unable to obtain their own livelihood. In 1890-1891 the revenue of Lower Burma has risen to Rs.2,08,38,872 from imperial taxation, Rs.1,55,51,897 for provincial services, and Rs.12,14,596 from incorporated local funds. The expenditure on the administration of Lower Burma in 1870-1871 was Rs.49,70,020. In 1890-1891 it was Rs.1,58,48,041. In Upper Burma the chief source of revenue is the thathameda, a tithe or income tax which was instituted by King Mindon, and was adopted by the British very much as they found it. For the purpose of the assessment every district and town is classified according to its general wealth and prosperity. As a rule the basis of calculation was 100 rupees from every ten houses, with a 10% deduction for those exempted by custom. When the total amount payable by the village was thus determined, the village itself settled the amount to be paid by each individual householder. This was done by thamadis, assessors, usually appointed by the villagers themselves. Other important sources of revenue are the rents from state lands, forests, and miscellaneous items such as fishery, revenue and irrigation taxes. In 1886-1887, the year after the annexation, the amount collected in Upper Burma from all sources was twenty-two lakhs of rupees. In the following year it had risen to fifty lakhs. Much of Upper Burma, however, remained disturbed until 1890. The figures for 1890-1891, therefore, show the first really regular collection. The amount then collected was Rs.87,47,020.

The total revenue of Burma in the year ending March 31, 1900 was Rs.7,04,36,240 and in 1905, Rs.9,65,62,298. The total expenditure in the same years respectively was Rs.4,30,81,000 and Rs.5,66,60,047. The principal items of revenue in the budget are the land revenue, railways, customs, forests and excise.

Defence.—Burma is garrisoned by a division of the Indian army, consisting of two brigades, under a lieutenant-general. Of the native regiments seven battalions are Burma regiments specially raised for permanent service in Burma by transformation from military police. These regiments, consisting of Gurkhas, Sikhs and Pathans, are distributed throughout the Shan States and the northern part of Burma. In addition to these there are about 13,500 civil police and 15,000 military police. The military police are in reality a regular military force with only two European officers in command of each battalion; and they are recruited entirely from among the warlike races of northern India. A small battalion of Karens enlisted as sappers and miners proved a failure and had to be disbanded. Experiments have also been made with the Kachin hillmen and with the Shans; but the Burmese character is so averse to discipline and control in petty matters that it is impossible to get really suitable men to enlist even in the civil police. The volunteer forces consist of the Rangoon Port Defence Volunteers, comprising artillery, naval, and engineer corps, the Moulmein artillery, the Moulmein, Rangoon, Railway and Upper Burma rifles.

Minerals and Mining.—In its three chief mineral products, earth-oil, coal and gold, Burma offers a fair field for enterprise and nothing more. Without yielding fortunes for speculators, like South Africa or Australia, it returns a fair percentage upon genuine hard work. Coal is found in the Thayetmyo, Upper Chindwin and Shwebo districts, and in the Shan States; it also occurs in Mergui, but the deposits which have been so far discovered have been either of inferior quality or too far from their market to be worked to advantage. The tin mines in Lower Burma are worked by natives, but a company at one time worked mines in the Maliwun township of Mergui by European methods. The chief mines and minerals are in Upper Burma. The jade mines of Upper Burma are now practically the only source of supply of that mineral, which is in great demand over all China. The mines are situated beyond Kamaing, north of Mogaung in the Myitkyina district. The miners are all Kachins, and the right to collect the jade duty of 33⅓ is farmed out by government to a lessee, who has hitherto always been a Chinaman. The amount obtained has varied considerably. In 1887-1888 the rent was Rs.50,000. This dwindled to Rs.36,000 in 1892-1893, but the system was then adopted of letting for a term of three years and a higher rent was obtained. The value varies enormously according to colour, which should be a particular shade of dark green. Semi-transparency, brilliancy and hardness are, however, also essentials. The old river mines produced the best quality. The quarry mines on the top of the hill near Tawmaw produce enormous quantities, but the quality is not so good.

The most important ruby-bearing area is the Mogôk stone tract, in the hills about 60 m. east of the Irrawaddy and 90 m. north-north-west of Mandalay. The right to mine for rubies by European methods and to levy royalties from persons working by native methods was leased to the Burma Ruby Mines Company, Limited, in 1889, and the lease was renewed in 1896 for 14 years at a rent of Rs.3,15,000 a year plus a share of the profits. The rent was reduced permanently in 1898 to Rs.2,00,000 a year, but the share of the profits taken by government was increased from 20 to 30%. There are other ruby mines at Nanyaseik in the Myitkyina district and at Sagyin in the Mandalay district, where the mining is by native methods under licence-fees of Rs.5 and Rs.10 a month. They are, however, only moderately successful. Gold is found in most of the rivers in Upper Burma, but the gold-washing industry is for the most part spasmodic in the intervals of agriculture. There is a gold mine at Kyaukpazat in the Mawnaing circle of the Kathra district, where the quartz is crushed by machinery and treated by chemical processes. Work was begun in 1895, and the yield of gold in that year was 274 oz., which increased to 893 oz. in 1896-1897. This, however, proved to be merely a pocket, and the mine is now shut down. Dredging for gold, however, seems likely to prove very profitable and gold dust is found in practically every river in the hills.

The principal seats of the petroleum industry are Yenangyaung in the Magwe, and Yenangyat in the Pakôkku districts. The wells have been worked for a little over a century by the natives of the country. The Burma Oil Company since 1889 has worked by drilled wells on the American or cable system, and the amount produced is yearly becoming more and more important.

Amber is extracted by Kachins in the Hukawng valley beyond the administrative border, but the quality of the fossil resin is not very good. The amount exported varies considerably. Tourmaline or rubellite is found on the borders of the Ruby Mines district and in the Shan State of Möng Löng. Steatite is extracted from the Arakan hill quarries. Salt is manufactured at various places in Upper Burma, notably in the lower Chindwin, Sagaing, Shwebo, Myingyan and Yamethin districts, as well as at Mawhkio in the Shan State of Thibaw. Iron is found in many parts of the hills, and is worked by inhabitants of the country. A good deal is extracted and manufactured into native implements at Pang Lông in the Lēgya (Laihka) Shan State. Lead is extracted by a Chinese lessee from the mines at Bawzaing (Maw-sōn) in the Myelat, southern Shan States. The ore is rich in silver as well as in lead.

Agriculture.—The cultivation of the land is by far the most important industry in Burma. Only 9.4% of the people were classed as urban in the census of 1901, and a considerable proportion of this number were natives of India and not Burmese. Nearly two-thirds of the total population are directly or indirectly engaged in agriculture and kindred occupations. Throughout most of the villages in the rural tracts men, women and children all take part in the agricultural operations, although in riverine villages whole families often support themselves from the sale of petty commodities and eatables. The food of the people consists as a rule of boiled rice with salted fresh or dried fish, salt, sessamum-oil, chillies, onions, turmeric, boiled vegetables, and occasionally meat of some sort from elephant flesh down to smaller animals, fowls and almost everything except snakes, by way of condiment.

The staple crop of the province in both Upper and Lower Burma is rice. In Lower Burma it is overwhelmingly the largest crop; in Upper Burma it is grown wherever practicable. Throughout the whole of the moister parts of the province the agricultural season is the wet period of the south-west monsoon, lasting from the middle of May until November. In some parts of Lower Burma and in the dry districts of Upper Burma a hot season crop is also grown with the assistance of irrigation during the spring months. Oxen are used for ploughing the higher lands with light soil, and the heavier and stronger buffaloes for ploughing wet tracts and marshy lands. As rice has to be transplanted as well as sown and irrigated, it needs a considerable amount of labour expended on it; and the Burman has the reputation of being a somewhat indolent cultivator. The Karens and Shans who settle in the plains expend much more care in ploughing and weeding their crops. Other crops which are grown in the province, especially in Upper Burma, comprise maize, tilseed, sugar-cane, cotton, tobacco, wheat, millet, other food grains including pulse, condiments and spices, tea, barley, sago, linseed and other oil-seeds, various fibres, indigo and other dye crops, besides orchards and garden produce. At the time of the British annexation of Burma there were some old irrigation systems in the Kyauksè and Minbu districts, which had been allowed to fall into disrepair, and these have now been renewed and extended. In addition to this the Mandalay Canal, 40 m. in length, with fourteen distributaries was opened in 1902; the Shwebo canal, 27 m. long, was opened in 1906, and a beginning had been made of two branches 29 and 20 m. in length, and of the Môn canal, begun in 1904, 53 m. in length. In all upwards of 300,000 acres are subject to irrigation under these schemes. On the whole the people of Burma are prosperous and contented. Taxes and land revenue are light; markets for the disposal of produce are constant and prices good; while fresh land is still available in most districts. Compared with the congested districts in the other provinces of India, with the exception of Assam, the lot of the Burman is decidedly enviable.

Forests.—-The forests of Burma are the finest in British India and one of the chief assets of the wealth of the country; it is from Burma that the world draws its main supply of teak for shipbuilding, and indeed it was the demand for teak that largely led to the annexation of Burma. At the close of the First Burmese War in 1826 Tenasserim was annexed because it was supposed to contain large supplies of this valuable timber; and it was trouble with a British forest company that directly led to the Third Burmese War of 1885. Since the introduction of iron ships teak has supplanted oak, because it contains an essential oil which preserves iron and steel, instead of corroding them like the tannic acid contained in oak. The forests of Burma, therefore, are now strictly preserved by the government, and there is a regular forest department for the conservation and cutting of timber, the planting of young trees for future generations, the prevention of forest fires, and for generally supervising their treatment by the natives. In the reserves the trees of commercial value can only be cut under a licence returning a revenue to the state, while unreserved trees can be cut by the natives for home consumption. There are naturally very many trees in these forests besides the teak. In Lower Burma alone the enumeration of the trees made by Sulpiz Kurz in his Forest Flora of British Burma (1877) includes some 1500 species, and the unknown species of Upper Burma and the Shan States would probably increase this total very considerably. In addition to teak, which provides the bulk of the revenue, the most valuable woods are sha or cutch, india rubber, pyingado, or ironwood for railway sleepers, and padauk. Outside these reserves enormous tracts of forest and jungle still remain for clearance and cultivation, reservation being mostly confined to forest land unsuitable for crops. In 1870-1871 the state reserved forests covered only 133 sq.m., in all the Rangoon division. The total receipts from the forests then amounted to Rs.7,72,400. In 1889-1890 the total area of reserved forests in Lower Burma was 5574 sq.m., and the gross revenue was Rs.31,34,720, and the expenditure was Rs.13,31,930. The work of the forest department did not begin in Upper Burma till 1891. At the end of 1892 the reserved forests in Upper Burma amounted to 1059 sq.m. On 30th June 1896 the reserved area amounted to 5438 sq.m. At the close of 1899 the area of the reserved forests in the whole province amounted to 15,669 sq.m., and in 1903-1904 to 20,038 sq.m. with a revenue of Rs.85,19,404 and expenditure amounting to Rs.35,00,311. In 1905-1906 there were 20,545 sq.m. of reserved forest, and it is probable that when the work of reservation is complete there will be 25,000 sq.m. of preserves or 12% of the total area.

Fisheries.—Fisheries and fish-curing exist both along the sea-coast of Burma and in inland tracts, and afforded employment to 126,651 persons in 1907. The chief seat of the industry is in the Thongwa and Bassein districts, where the income from the leased fisheries on individual streams sometimes amounts to between £6000 and £7000 a year. Net fisheries, worked by licence-holders in the principal rivers and along the sea-shore, are not nearly so profitable as the closed fisheries—called In—which are from time to time sold by auction for fixed periods of years. Salted fish forms, along with boiled rice, one of the chief articles of food among the Burmese; and as the price of salted fish is gradually rising along with the prosperity and purchasing power of the population, this industry is on a very sound basis. There are in addition some pearling grounds in the Mergui Archipelago, which have a very recent history; they were practically unknown before 1890; in the early 'nineties they were worked by Australian adventurers, most of whom have since departed; and now they are leased in blocks to a syndicate of Chinamen, who grant sub-leases to individual adventurers at the rate of £25 a pump for the pearling year. The chief harvest is of mother of pearl, which suffices to pay the working expenses; and there is over and above the chance of finding a pearl of price. Some pearls worth £1000 and upwards have recently been discovered.

Manufactures and Art.—The staple industry of Burma is agriculture, but many cultivators are also artisans in the by-season. In addition to rice-growing and the felling and extraction of timber, and the fisheries, the chief occupations are rice-husking, silk-weaving and dyeing. The introduction of cheap cottons and silk fabrics has dealt a blow to hand-weaving, while aniline dyes are driving out the native vegetable product; but both industries still linger in the rural tracts. The best silk-weavers are to be found at Amarapura. There large numbers of people follow this occupation as their sole means of livelihood, whereas silk and cotton weaving throughout the province generally is carried on by girls and women while unoccupied by other domestic duties. The Burmese are fond of bright colours, and pink and yellow harmonize well with their dark olive complexion, but even here the influence of western civilization is being felt, and in the towns the tendency now is towards maroon, brown, olive and dark green for the women's skirts. The total number of persons engaged in the production of textile fabrics in Burma according to the census of 1901 was 419,007. The chief dye-product of Burma is cutch, a brown dye obtained from the wood of the sha tree. Cutch-boiling forms the chief means of livelihood of a large number of the poorer classes in the Prome and Thayetmyo districts of Lower Burma, and a subsidiary means of subsistence elsewhere. Cheroot making and smoking is universal among both sexes. The chief arts of Burma are wood-carving and silver work. The floral wood-carving is remarkable for its freedom and spontaneity. The carving is done in teak wood when it is meant for fixtures, but teak has a coarse grain, and otherwise yamane clogwood, said to be a species of gmelina, is preferred. The tools employed are chisel, gouge and mallet. The design is traced on the wood with charcoal, gouged out in the rough, and finished with sharp fine tools, using the mallet for every stroke. The great bulk of the silver work is in the form of bowls of different sizes, in shape something like the lower half of a barrel, only more convex, of betel boxes, cups and small boxes for lime. Both in the wood-carving and silver work the Burmese character displays itself, giving boldness, breadth and freedom of design, but a general want of careful finish. Unfortunately the national art is losing its distinctive type through contact with western civilization.

Commerce.—The chief articles of export from Burma are rice and timber. In 1805 the quantity of rice exported in the foreign and coastal trade amounted to 1,419,173 tons valued at Rs.9,77,66,132, and in 1905 the figures were 2,187,764 tons, value Rs.15,67,28,288. England takes by far the greatest share of Burma's rice, though large quantities are also consumed in Germany, while France, Italy, Belgium and Holland also consume a considerable amount. The regular course of trade is apt to be deflected by famines in India or Japan. In 1900 over one million tons of rice were shipped to India during the famine there. The rice-mills, almost all situated at the various seaports, secure the harvest from the cultivator through middlemen. The value of teak exported in 1895 was Rs.1,34,64,303, and in 1905, Rs.1,31,03,401. Subordinate products for exports include cutch dye, caoutchouc or india-rubber, cotton, petroleum and jade. By far the largest of the imports are cotton, silk and woollen piece-goods, while subordinate imports include hardware, gunny bags, sugar, tobacco and liquors.

The following table shows the progressive value of the trade of Burma since 1871-1872:—

Year.

Imports.

Exports.

Total.

Rs.

Rs.

Rs.

1871-1872

3,15,79,860

3,78,02,170

6,93,82,030

1881-1882

6,38,49,840

8,05,71,410

14,44,21,250

1801-1892

10,50,06,247

12,67,21,878

23,17,28,125

1901-1902

12,78,46,636

18,74,47,200

31,52,93,836

1904-1905

17,06,20,796

23,94,69,114

41,00,89,910

Internal Communications.—In 1871-1872 there were 814 m. of road in Lower Burma, but the chief means of internal communication was by water. Steamers plied on the Irrawaddy as far as Thayetmyo. The vessels of the Irrawaddy Flotilla Company now ply to Bassein and to all points on the Irrawaddy as far north as Bhamo, and in the dry weather to Myitkyina, and also on the Chindwin as far north as Kindat, and to Homalin during the rains. The Arakan Flotilla Company has also helped to open up the Arakan division. The length of roads has not greatly increased in Lower Burma, but there has been a great deal of road construction in Upper Burma. At the end of the year 1904-1905 there were in the whole province 7486 m. of road, 1516 m. of which were metalled and 3170 unmetalled, with 2799 m. of other tracks. But the chief advance in communications has been in railway construction. The first railway from Rangoon to Prome, 161 m., was opened in 1877, and that from Rangoon to Toungoo, 166 m., was opened in 1884. Since the annexation of Upper Burma this has been extended to Mandalay, and the Mu Valley railway has been constructed from Sagaing to Myitkyina, a distance of 752 m. from Rangoon. The Mandalay-Lashio railway has been completed, and trains run from Mandalay to Lashio, a distance of 178 m. The Sagaing-Mônywa-Alôn branch and the Meiktila-Myingyan branch were opened to traffic during 1900. In 1902 a railway from Henzada to Bassein was formed and a connecting link with the Prome line from Henzada to Letpadan was opened in 1903. Railways were also constructed from Pegu to Martaban, 121 m. in length, and from Henzada to Kyang-in, 66 m. in length; and construction was contemplated of a railway from Thazi towards Taung-gyi, the headquarters of the southern Shan States. The total length of lines open in 1904-1905 was 1340 m., but railway communication in Burma is still very incomplete. Five of the eight commissionerships and Lashio, the capital of the northern Shan States, have communication with each other by railway, but Taung-gyi and the southern Shan States can still only be reached by a hill-road through difficult country for cart traffic, and the headquarters of three commissionerships, Moulmein, Akyab and Minbu, have no railway communication with Rangoon. Arakan is in the worst position of all, for it is connected with Burma by neither railway nor river, nor even by a metalled road, and the only way to reach Akyab from Rangoon is once a week by sea.

Law.—The British government has administered the law in Burma on principles identical with those which have been adopted elsewhere in the British dominions in India. That portion of the law which is usually described as Anglo-Indian law (see Indian Law) is generally applicable to Burma, though there are certain districts inhabited by tribes in a backward state of civilization which are excepted from its operation. Acts of the British parliament relating to India generally would be applicable to Burma, whether passed before or after its annexation, these acts being considered applicable to all the dominions of the crown in India. As regards the acts of the governor-general in council passed for India generally—they, too, were from the first applicable to Lower Burma; and they have all been declared applicable to Upper Burma also by the Burma Laws Act of 1898. That portion of the English law which has been introduced into India without legislation, and all the rules of law resting upon the authority of the courts, are made applicable to Burma by the same act. But consistently with the practice which has always prevailed in India, there is a large field of law in Burma which the British government has not attempted to disturb. It is expressly directed by the act of 1898 above referred to, that in regard to succession, inheritance, marriage, caste or any religious usage or institution, the law to be administered in Burma is (a) the Buddhist law in cases where the parties are Buddhists, (b) the Mahommedan law in cases where the parties are Mahommedans, (c) the Hindu law in cases where the parties are Hindus, except so far as the same may have been modified by the legislature. The reservation thus made in favour of the native laws is precisely analogous to the similar reservation made in India (see Indian Law, where the Hindu law and the Mahommedan Law are described). The Buddhist law is contained in certain sacred books called Dhammathats. The laws themselves are derived from one of the collections which Hindus attribute to Manu, but in some respects they now widely differ from the ancient Hindu law so far as it is known to us. There is no certainty as to the date or method of their introduction. The whole of the law administered now in Burma rests ultimately upon statutory authority; and all the Indian acts relating to Burma, whether of the governor-general or the lieutenant-governor of Burma in council, will be found in the Burma Code (Calcutta, 1899), and in the supplements to that volume which are published from time to time at Rangoon. There is no complete translation of the Dhammathats, but a good many of them have been translated. An account of these translations will be found in The Principles of Buddhist Law by Chan Toon (Rangoon, 1894), which is the first attempt to present those principles in something approaching to a systematic form.

History.—It is probable that Burma is the Chryse Regio of Ptolemy, a name parallel in meaning to Sonaparanta, the classic Pāli title assigned to the country round the capital in Burmese documents. The royal history traces the lineage of the kings to the ancient Buddhist monarchs of India. This no doubt is fabulous, but it is hard to say how early communication with Gangetic India began. From the 11th to the 13th century the old Burman empire was at the height of its power, and to this period belong the splendid remains of architecture at Pagan. The city and the dynasty were destroyed by a Chinese (or rather Mongol) invasion (1284 A.D.) in the reign of Kublai Khan. After that the empire fell to a low ebb, and Central Burma was often subject to Shan dynasties. In the early part of the 16th century the Burmese princes of Toungoo, in the north-east of Pegu, began to rise to power, and established a dynasty which at one time held possession of Pegu, Ava and Arakan. They made their capital at Pegu, and to this dynasty belong the gorgeous descriptions of some of the travellers of the 16th century. Their wars exhausted the country, and before the end of the century it was in the greatest decay. A new dynasty arose in Ava, which subdued Pegu, and maintained their supremacy throughout the 17th and during the first forty years of the 18th century. The Peguans or Talaings then revolted, and having taken the capital Ava, and made the king prisoner, reduced the whole country to submission. Alompra, left by the conqueror in charge of the village of Môtshobo, planned the deliverance of his country. He attacked the Peguans at first with small detachments; but when his forces increased, he suddenly advanced, and took possession of the capital in the autumn of 1753.

In 1754 the Peguans sent an armament of war-boats against Ava, but they were totally defeated by Alompra; while in the districts of Prome, Donubyu, &c., the Burmans revolted, and expelled all the Pegu garrisons in their towns. In 1754 Prome was besieged by the king of Pegu, who was again defeated by Alompra, and the war was transferred from the upper provinces to the mouths of the navigable rivers, and the numerous creeks and canals which intersect the lower country. In 1755 the yuva raja, the king of Pegu's brother, was equally unsuccessful, after which the Peguans were driven from Bassein and the adjacent country, and were forced to withdraw to the fortress of Syriam, distant 12 m. from Rangoon. Here they enjoyed a brief repose, Alompra being called away to quell an insurrection of his own subjects, and to repel an invasion of the Siamese; but returning victorious, he laid siege to the fortress of Syriam and took it by surprise. In these wars the French sided with the Peguans, the English with the Burmans. Dupleix, the governor of Pondicherry, had sent two ships to the aid of the former; but the master of the first was decoyed up the river by Alompra, where he was massacred along with his whole crew. The other escaped to Pondicherry. Alompra was now master of all the navigable rivers; and the Peguans, shut out from foreign aid, were finally subdued. In 1757 the conqueror laid siege to the city of Pegu, which capitulated, on condition that their own king should govern the country, but that he should do homage for his kingdom, and should also surrender his daughter to the victorious monarch. Alompra never contemplated the fulfilment of the condition; and having obtained possession of the town, abandoned it to the fury of his soldiers. In the following year the Peguans vainly endeavoured to throw off the yoke. Alompra afterwards reduced the town and district of Tavoy, and finally undertook the conquest of the Siamese. His army advanced to Mergui and Tenasserim, both of which towns were taken; and he was besieging the capital of Siam when he was taken ill. He immediately ordered his army to retreat, in hopes of reaching his capital alive; but he expired on the way, in 1760, in the fiftieth year of his age, after he had reigned eight years. In the previous year he had massacred the English of the establishment of Negrais, whom he suspected of assisting the Peguans. He was succeeded by his eldest son Noungdaugyi, whose reign was disturbed by the rebellion of his brother Sin-byu-shin, and afterwards by one of his father's generals. He died in little more than three years, leaving one son in his infancy; and on his decease the throne was seized by his brother Sin-byu-shin. The new king was intent, like his predecessors, on the conquest of the adjacent states, and accordingly made war in 1765 on the Manipur kingdom, and also on the Siamese, with partial success. In the following year he defeated the Siamese, and, after a long blockade, obtained possession of their capital. But while the Burmans were extending their conquests in this quarter, they were invaded by a Chinese army of 50,000 men from the province of Yunnan. This army was hemmed in by the skill of the Burmans; and, being reduced by the want of provisions, it was afterwards attacked and totally destroyed, with the exception of 2500 men, who were sent in fetters to work in the Burmese capital at their several trades. In the meantime the Siamese revolted, and while the Burman army was marching against them, the Peguan soldiers who had been incorporated in it rose against their companions, and commencing an indiscriminate massacre, pursued the Burman army to the gates of Rangoon, which they besieged, but were unable to capture. In 1774 Sin-byu-shin was engaged in reducing the marauding tribes. He took the district and fort of Martaban from the revolted Peguans; and in the following year he sailed down the Irrawaddy with an army of 50,000 men, and, arriving at Rangoon, put to death the aged monarch of Pegu, along with many of his nobles, who had shared with him in the offence of rebellion. He died in 1776, after a reign of twelve years, during which he had extended the Burmese dominions on every side. He was succeeded by his son, a youth of eighteen, called Singumin (Chenguza of Symes), who proved himself a bloodthirsty despot, and was put to death by his uncle, Bodawpaya or Mentaragyi, in 1781, who ascended the vacant throne. In 1783 the new king effected the conquest of Arakan. In the same year he removed his residence from Ava, which, with brief interruptions, had been the capital for four centuries, to the new city of Amarapura, "the City of the Immortals."

The Siamese who had revolted in 1771 were never afterwards subdued by the Burmans; but the latter retained their dominion over the sea-coast as far as Mergui. In the year 1785 they attacked the island of Junkseylon with a fleet of boats and an army, but were ultimately driven back with loss; and a second attempt by the Burman monarch, who in 1786 invaded Siam with an army of 30,000 men, was attended with no better success. In 1793 peace was concluded between these two powers, the Siamese yielding to the Burmans the entire possession of the coast of Tenasserim on the Indian Ocean, and the two important seaports of Mergui and Tavoy.

In 1795 the Burmese were involved in a dispute with the British in India, in consequence of their troops, to the amount of 5000 men, entering the district of Chittagong in pursuit of three robbers who had fled from justice across the frontier. Explanations being made and terms of accommodation offered by General Erskine, the commanding officer, the Burmese commander retired from the British territories, when the fugitives were restored, and all differences for the time amicably arranged.

But it was evident that the gradual extension of the British and Burmese territories would in time bring the two powers into close contact along a more extended line of frontier, and in all probability lead to a war between them. It happened, accordingly, that the Burmese, carrying their arms into Assam and Manipur, penetrated to the British border near Sylhet, on the north-east frontier of Bengal, beyond which were the possessions of the chiefs of Cachar, under the protection of the British government. The Burmese leaders, arrested in their career of conquest, were impatient to measure their strength with their new neighbours. It appears from the evidence of Europeans who resided in Ava, that they were entirely unacquainted with the discipline and resources of the Europeans. They imagined that, like other nations, they would fall before their superior tactics and valour; and their cupidity was inflamed by the prospect of marching to Calcutta and plundering the country. At length their chiefs ventured on the open violation of the British territories. They attacked a party of sepoys within the frontier, and seized and carried off British subjects, while at all points their troops, moving in large bodies, assumed the most menacing positions. In the south encroachments were made upon the British frontier of Chittagong. The island of Shahpura, at the mouth of the Naaf river, had been occupied by a small guard of British troops. These were attacked on the 23rd of September 1823 by the Burmese, and driven from their post with the loss of several lives; and to the repeated demands of the British for redress no answer was returned. Other outrages ensued; and at length, on March 5th, 1824, war was declared by the British government. The military operations, which will be found described under Burmese Wars, ended in the treaty of Yandaboo on the 24th of February 1826, which conceded the British terms and enabled their army to be withdrawn.

For some years the relations of peace continued undisturbed. Probably the feeling of amity on the part of the Burmese government was not very strong; but so long as the prince by whom the treaty was concluded continued in power, no attempt was made to depart from its main stipulations. That monarch, Ba-ggi-daw, however, was obliged in 1837 to yield the throne to a usurper who appeared in the person of his brother, Tharrawaddi (Tharawadi). The latter, at an early period, manifested not only that hatred of British connexion which was almost universal at the Burmese court, but also the extremest contempt. For several years it had become apparent that the period was approaching when war between the British and the Burmese governments would again become inevitable. The British resident, Major Burney, who had been appointed in 1830, finding his presence at Ava agreeable neither to the king nor to himself, removed in 1837 to Rangoon, and shortly afterwards retired from the country. Ultimately it became necessary to forego even the pretence of maintaining relations of friendship, and the British functionary at that time, Captain Macleod, was withdrawn in 1840 altogether from a country where his continuance would have been but a mockery. The state of sullen dislike which followed was after a while succeeded by more active evidences of hostility. Acts of violence were committed on British ships and British seamen. Remonstrance was consequently made by the British government, and its envoys were supported by a small naval force. The officers on whom devolved the duty of representing the wrongs of their fellow-countrymen and demanding redress, proceeded to Rangoon, the governor of which place had been a chief actor in the outrages complained of; but so far were they from meeting with any signs of regret, that they were treated with indignity and contempt, and compelled to retire without accomplishing anything beyond blockading the ports. A series of negotiations followed; nothing was demanded of the Burmese beyond a very moderate compensation for the injuries inflicted on the masters of two British vessels, an apology for the insults offered by the governor of Rangoon to the representatives of the British government, and the re-establishment of at least the appearance of friendly relations by the reception of a British agent by the Burmese government. But the obduracy of King Pagan, who had succeeded his father in 1846, led to the refusal alike of atonement for past wrongs, of any expression of regret for the display of gratuitous insolence, and of any indication of a desire to maintain friendship for the future. Another Burmese war was the result, the first shot being fired in January 1852. As in the former, though success was varying, the British finally triumphed, and the chief towns in the lower part of the Burmese kingdom fell to them in succession. The city of Pegu, the capital of that portion which, after having been captured, had again passed into the hands of the enemy, was recaptured and retained, and the whole province of Pegu was, by proclamation of the governor-general, Lord Dalhousie, declared to be annexed to the British dominions on the 20th of December 1852. No treaty was obtained or insisted upon,—the British government being content with the tacit acquiescence of the king of Burma without such documents; but its resolution was declared, that any active demonstration of hostility by him would be followed by retribution.

About the same time a revolution broke out which resulted in King Pagan's dethronement. His tyrannical and barbarous conduct had made him obnoxious at home as well as abroad, and indeed many of his actions recall the worst passages of the history of the later Roman emperors. The Mindôn prince, who had become apprehensive for his own safety, made him prisoner in February 1853, and was himself crowned king of Burma towards the end of the year. The new monarch, known as King Mindôn, showed himself sufficiently arrogant in his dealings with the European powers, but was wise enough to keep free from any approach towards hostility. The loss of Pegu was long a matter of bitter regret, and he absolutely refused to acknowledge it by a formal treaty. In the beginning of 1855 he sent a mission of compliment to Lord Dalhousie, the governor-general; and in the summer of the same year Major (afterwards Sir Arthur) Phayre, de facto governor of the new province of Pegu, was appointed envoy to the Burmese court. He was accompanied by Captain (afterwards Sir Henry) Yule as secretary, and Mr Oldham as geologist, and his mission added largely to our knowledge of the state of the country; but in its main object of obtaining a treaty it was unsuccessful. It was not till 1862 that the king at length yielded, and his relations with Britain were placed on a definite diplomatic basis.

In that year the province of British Burma, the present Lower Burma, was formed, with Sir Arthur Phayre as chief commissioner. In 1867 a treaty was concluded at Mandalay providing for the free intercourse of trade and the establishment of regular diplomatic relations. King Mindôn died in 1878, and was succeeded by his son King Thibaw. Early in 1879 he excited much horror by executing a number of the members of the Burmese royal family, and relations became much strained. The British resident was withdrawn in October 1879. The government of the country rapidly became bad. Control over many of the outlying districts was lost, and the elements of disorder on the British frontier were a standing menace to the peace of the country. The Burmese court, in contravention of the express terms of the treaty of 1869, created monopolies to the detriment of the trade of both England and Burma; and while the Indian government was unrepresented at Mandalay, representatives of Italy and France were welcomed, and two separate embassies were sent to Europe for the purpose of contracting new and, if possible, close alliances with sundry European powers. Matters were brought to a crisis towards the close of 1885, when the Burmese government imposed a fine of £230,000 on the Bombay-Burma Trading Corporation, and refused to comply with a suggestion of the Indian government that the cause of complaint should be investigated by an impartial arbitrator. An ultimatum was therefore despatched on the 22nd of October 1885. On the 9th of November a reply was received in Rangoon amounting to an unconditional refusal. The king on the 7th of November issued a proclamation calling upon his subjects to drive the British into the sea. On the 14th of November 1885 the British field force crossed the frontier, and advanced to Mandalay without incurring any serious resistance (see Burmese Wars). It reached Ava on the 26th of November, and an envoy from the king signified his submission. On the 28th of November the British occupied Mandalay, and next day King Thibaw was sent down the river to Rangoon, whence he was afterwards transferred to Ratnagiri on the Bombay coast. Upper Burma was formally annexed on the 1st of January 1886, and the work of restoring the country to order and introducing settled government commenced. This was a more serious task than the overthrow of the Burmese government, and occupied four years. This was in part due to the character of the country, which was characterized as one vast military obstacle, and in part to the disorganization which had been steadily growing during the six years of King Thibaw's reign. By the close of 1889 all the larger bands of marauders were broken up, and since 1890 the country has enjoyed greater freedom from violent crime than the province formerly known as British Burma. By the Upper Burma Village Regulations and the Lower Burma Village Act, the villagers themselves were made responsible for maintaining order in every village, and the system has worked with the greatest success. During the decade 1891-1901 the population increased by 19.8% and cultivation by 53%. With good harvests and good markets the standard of living in Burma has much improved. Large areas of cultivable waste have been brought under cultivation, and the general result has been a contented people. The boundary with Siam was demarcated in 1893, and that with China was completed in 1900.

Authorities.—Official: Col. Horace Spearman, British Burma Gazetteer (2 vols., Rangoon, 1879); Sir J. George Scott, Upper Burma Gazetteer (5 vols., Rangoon, 1900-1901). Non-official: Right Rev. Bishop Bigandet, Life or Legend of Gautama (3rd ed., London, 1881); G.W. Bird, Wanderings in Burma (London, 1897); E.D. Cuming, In the Shadow of the Pagoda (London, 1893), With the Jungle Folk (Condon, 1897); Max and Bertha Ferrars, Burma (London, 1900); H. Fielding, The Soul of a People (Buddhism in Burma) (London, 1898), Thibaw's Queen (London, 1899), A People at School (1906); Capt. C.J. Forbes, F.S., Burma (London, 1878), Comparative Grammar of the Languages of Farther India (London, 1881), Legendary History of Burma and Arakan (Rangoon, 1882); J. Gordon, Burma and its Inhabitants (London, 1876); Mrs E. Hart, Picturesque Burma (London, 1897); Gen. R. Macmahon, Far Cathay and Farther India (London, 1892); Rev. F. Mason, D.D., Burma (Rangoon, 1860); E.H. Parker, Burma (Rangoon, 1892); Sir Arthur Phayre, History of Burma (London, 1883); G.C. Rigby, History of the Operations in Northern Arakan and the Yawdwin Chin Hills (Rangoon, 1897), Sir J. George Scott, Burma, As it is, As it was, and As it will be (London, 1886); Shway Yoe, The Burman, His Life and Notions (2nd ed., London, 1896); D.M. Smeaton, The Karens of Burma (London, 1887); Sir Henry Yule, A Mission to Ava (London, 1858); J. Nisbet, Burma under British Rule and Before (London, 1901); V.D. Scott O'Connor, The Silken East (London, 1904); Talbot Kelly, Burma (London, 1905); an exhaustive account of the administration is contained in Dr Alleyne Ireland's The Province of Burma, Report prepared on behalf of the university of Chicago (Boston, U.S.A., 2 vols., 1907).

(J. G. Sc.)

See also, for geology, W. Theobald, "On the Geology of Pegu," Mem. Geol. Surv. India, vol. x. pt. ii. (1874); F. Noetling, "The Development and Subdivision of the Tertiary System in Burma," Rec. Geol. Sun. India, vol. xxviii. (1895), pp. 59-86, pl. ii.; F. Noetling, "The Occurrence of Petroleum in Burma, and its Technical Exploitation," Mem. Geol. Surv. India, vol. xxvii. pt. ii. (1898).

BURMANN, PIETER (1668-1741), Dutch classical scholar, known as "the Elder," to distinguish him from his nephew, was born at Utrecht. At the age of thirteen he entered the university where he studied under Graevius and Gronovius. He devoted himself particularly to the study of the classical languages, and became unusually proficient in Latin composition. As he was intended for the legal profession, he spent some years in attendance on the law classes. For about a year he studied at Leiden, paying special attention to philosophy and Greek. On his return to Utrecht he took the degree of doctor of laws (March 1688), and after travelling through Switzerland and part of Germany, settled down to the practice of law, without, however, abandoning his classical studies. In December 1691 he was appointed receiver of the tithes which were originally paid to the bishop of Utrecht, and five years later was nominated to the professorship of eloquence and history. To this chair was soon added that of Greek and politics. In 1714 he paid a short visit to Paris and ransacked the libraries. In the following year he was appointed successor to the celebrated Perizonius, who had held the chair of history, Greek language and eloquence at Leiden. He was subsequently appointed professor of history for the United Provinces and chief librarian. His numerous editorial and critical works spread his fame as a scholar throughout Europe, and engaged him in many of the stormy disputes which were then so common among men of letters. Burmann was rather a compiler than a critic; his commentaries show immense learning and accuracy, but are wanting in taste and judgment. He died on the 31st of March 1741.

Burmann edited the following classical authors:—Phaedrus (1698); Horace (1699); Valerius Flaccus (1702); Petronius Arbiter (1709); Velleius Paterculus (1719); Quintilian (1720); Justin (1722); Ovid (1727); Poetae Latini minores (1731); Suetonius (1736); Lucan (1740). He also published an edition of Buchanan's works, continued Graevius's great work, Thesaurus Antiquitatum et Historiarum Italiae, and wrote a treatise De Vectigalibus populi Romani (1694) and a short manual of Roman antiquities, Antiquitatum Romanarum Brevis Descriptio (1711). His Sylloge epistolarum a viris illustribus scriptarum (1725) is of importance for the history of learned men. The list of his works occupies five pages in Saxe's Onomasticon. His poems and orations were published after his death. There is an account of his life in the Gentleman's Magazine for April (1742) by Dr Samuel Johnson.

BURMANN, PIETER (1714-1778), called by himself "the Younger" (Secundus), Dutch philologist, nephew of the above, was born at Amsterdam on the 13th of October 1714. He was brought up by his uncle in Leiden, and afterwards studied law and philology under C.A. Duker and Arnold von Drakenborch at Utrecht. In 1735 he was appointed professor of eloquence and history at Franeker, with which the chair of poetry was combined in 1741. In the following year he left Franeker for Amsterdam to become professor of history and philology at the Athenaeum. He was subsequently professor of poetry (1744), general librarian (1752), and inspector of the gymnasium (1753). In 1777 he retired, and died on the 24th of June 1778 at Sandhorst, near Amsterdam. He resembled his more famous uncle in the manner and direction of his studies, and in his violent disposition, which involved him in quarrels with contemporaries, notably Saxe and Klotz. He was a man of extensive learning, and had a great talent for Latin poetry. His most valuable works are: Anthologia Veterum Latinorum Epigrammatum et Poematum (1759-1773); Aristophanis Comoediae Novem (1760); Rhetorica ad Herennium (1761). He completed the editions of Virgil (1746) and Claudian (1760), which had been left unfinished by his uncle, and commenced an edition of Propertius, one of his best works, which was only half printed at the time of his death. It was completed by L. van Santen and published in 1780.

BURMESE WARS. Three wars were fought between Burma and the British during the 19th century (see Burma: History), which resulted in the gradual extinction of Burmese independence.

First Burmese War, 1823-26.—On the 23rd of September 1823 an armed party of Burmese attacked a British guard on Shapura, an island close to the Chittagong side, killing and wounding six of the guard. Two Burmese armies, one from Manipur and another from Assam, also entered Cachar, which was under British protection, in January 1824. War with Burma was formally declared on the 5th of March 1824. On the 17th of May a Burmese force invaded Chittagong and drove a mixed sepoy and police detachment from its position at Ramu, but did not follow up its success. The British rulers in India, however, had resolved to carry the war into the enemy's country; an armament, under Commodore Charles Grant and Sir Archibald Campbell, entered the Rangoon river, and anchored off the town on the 10th of May 1824. After a feeble resistance the place, then little more than a large stockaded village, was surrendered, and the troops were landed. The place was entirely deserted by its inhabitants, the provisions were carried off or destroyed, and the invading force took possession of a complete solitude. On the 28th of May Sir A. Campbell ordered an attack on some of the nearest posts, which were all carried after a steadily weakening defence. Another attack was made on the 10th of June on the stockades at the village of Kemmendine. Some of these were battered by artillery from the war vessels in the river, and the shot and shells had such effect on the Burmese that they evacuated them, after a very unequal resistance. It soon, however, became apparent that the expedition had been undertaken with very imperfect knowledge of the country, and without adequate provision. The devastation of the country, which was part of the defensive system of the Burmese, was carried out with unrelenting rigour, and the invaders were soon reduced to great difficulties. The health of the men declined, and their ranks were fearfully thinned. The monarch of Ava sent large reinforcements to his dispirited and beaten army; and early in June an attack was commenced on the British line, but proved unsuccessful. On the 8th the British assaulted. The enemy were beaten at all points; and their strongest stockaded works, battered to pieces by a powerful artillery, were in general abandoned. With the exception of an attack by the prince of Tharrawaddy in the end of August, the enemy allowed the British to remain unmolested during the months of July and August. This interval was employed by Sir A. Campbell in subduing the Burmese provinces of Tavoy and Mergui, and the whole coast of Tenasserim. This was an important conquest, as the country was salubrious and afforded convalescent stations to the sick, who were now so numerous in the British army that there were scarcely 3000 soldiers fit for duty. An expedition was about this time sent against the old Portuguese fort and factory of Syriam, at the mouth of the Pegu river, which was taken; and in October the province of Martaban was reduced under the authority of the British.

The rainy season terminated about the end of October; and the court of Ava, alarmed by the discomfiture of its armies, recalled the veteran legions which were employed in Arakan, under their renowned leader Maha Bandula. Bandula hastened by forced marches to the defence of his country; and by the end of November an army of 60,000 men had surrounded the British position at Rangoon and Kemmendine, for the defence of which Sir Archibald Campbell had only 5000 efficient troops. The enemy in great force made repeated attacks on Kemmendine without success, and on the 7th of December Bandula was defeated in a counter attack made by Sir A. Campbell. The fugitives retired to a strong position on the river, which they again entrenched; and here they were attacked by the British on the 15th, and driven in complete confusion from the field.

Sir Archibald Campbell now resolved to advance on Prome, about 100 m. higher up the Irrawaddy river. He moved with his force on the 13th of February 1825 in two divisions, one proceeding by land, and the other, under General Willoughby Cotton, destined for the reduction of Danubyu, being embarked on the flotilla. Taking the command of the land force, he continued his advance till the 11th of March, when intelligence reached him of the failure of the attack upon Danubyu. He instantly commenced a retrograde march; on the 27th he effected a junction with General Cotton's force, and on the 2nd of April entered the entrenchments at Danubyu without resistance, Bandula having been killed by the explosion of a bomb. The English general entered Prome on the 25th, and remained there during the rainy season. On the 17th of September an armistice was concluded for one month. In the course of the summer General Joseph Morrison had conquered the province of Arakan; in the north the Burmese were expelled from Assam; and the British had made some progress in Cachar, though their advance was finally impeded by the thick forests and jungle.

The armistice having expired on the 3rd of November, the army of Ava, amounting to 60,000 men, advanced in three divisions against the British position at Prome, which was defended by 3000 Europeans and 2000 native troops. But the British still triumphed, and after several actions, in which the Burmese were the assailants and were partially successful, Sir A. Campbell, on the 1st of December, attacked the different divisions of their army, and successively drove them from all their positions, and dispersed them in every direction. The Burmese retired on Malun, along the course of the Irrawaddy, where they occupied, with 10,000 or 12,000 men, a series of strongly fortified heights and a formidable stockade. On the 26th they sent a flag of truce to the British camp; and negotiations having commenced, peace was proposed to them on the following conditions:—(1) The cession of Arakan, together with the provinces of Mergui, Tavoy and Ye; (2) the renunciation by the Burmese sovereign of all claims upon Assam and the contiguous petty states; (3) the Company to be paid a crore of rupees as an indemnification for the expenses of the war; (4) residents from each court to be allowed, with an escort of fifty men; while it was also stipulated that British ships should no longer be obliged to unship their rudders and land their guns as formerly in the Burmese ports. This treaty was agreed to and signed, but the ratification of the king was still wanting; and it was soon apparent that the Burmese had no intention to sign it, but were preparing to renew the contest. On the 19th of January, accordingly, Sir A. Campbell attacked and carried the enemy's position at Malun. Another offer of peace was here made by the Burmese, but it was found to be insincere; and the fugitive army made at the ancient city of Pagan a final stand in defence of the capital. They were attacked and overthrown on the 9th of February 1826; and the invading force being now within four days' march of Ava, Dr Price, an American missionary, who with other Europeans had been thrown into prison when the war commenced, was sent to the British camp with the treaty (known as the treaty of Yandaboo) ratified, the prisoners of war released, and an instalment of 25 lakhs of rupees. The war was thus brought to a successful termination, and the British army evacuated the country.

Second Burmese War, 1852.—On the 15th of March 1852 Lord Dalhousie sent an ultimatum to King Pagan, announcing that hostile operations would be commenced if all his demands were not agreed to by the ist of April. Meanwhile a force consisting of 8100 troops had been despatched to Rangoon under the command of General H.T. Godwin, C.B., while Commodore Lambert commanded the naval contingent. No reply being given to this letter, the first blow of the Second Burmese War was struck by the British on the 5th of April 1852, when Martaban was taken. Rangoon town was occupied on the 12th, and the Shwe Dagôn pagoda on the 14th, after heavy fighting, when the Burmese army retired northwards. Bassein was seized on the 19th of May, and Pegu was taken on the 3rd of June, after some sharp fighting round the Shwe-maw-daw pagoda. During the rainy season the approval of the East India Company's court of directors and of the British government was obtained to the annexation of the lower portion of the Irrawaddy Valley, including Prome. Lord Dalhousie visited Rangoon in July and August, and discussed the whole situation with the civil, military and naval authorities. In consequence General Godwin occupied Prome on the 9th of October after but slight resistance. Early in December Lord Dalhousie informed King Pagan that the province of Pegu would henceforth form part of the British dominions, and that if his troops resisted the measure his whole kingdom would be destroyed. The proclamation of annexation was issued on the 20th of January 1853, and thus the Second Burmese War was brought to an end without any treaty being signed.

Third Burmese War, 1885-86.—The imposition of an impossible fine on the Bombay-Burma Trading Company, coupled with the threat of confiscation of all their rights and property in case of non-payment, led to the British ultimatum of the 22nd of October 1885; and by the 9th of November a practical refusal of the terms having been received at Rangoon, the occupation of Mandalay and the dethronement of King Thibaw were determined upon. At this time, beyond the fact that the country was one of dense jungle, and therefore most unfavourable for military operations, little was known of the interior of Upper Burma; but British steamers had for years been running on the great river highway of the Irrawaddy, from Rangoon to Mandalay, and it was obvious that the quickest and most satisfactory method of carrying out the British campaign was an advance by water direct on the capital. Fortunately a large number of light-draught river steamers and barges (or "flats"), belonging to the Irrawaddy Flotilla Company, were available at Rangoon, and the local knowledge of the company's officers of the difficult river navigation was at the disposal of the government. Major-General, afterwards Sir, H.N.D. Prendergast, V.C., K.C.B., R.E., was placed in command of the expedition. As was only to be expected in an enterprise of this description, the navy as well as the army was called in requisition; and as usual the services rendered by the seamen and guns were most important. The total effective of the force was 9034 fighting men, 2810 native followers and 67 guns, and for river service, 24 machine guns. The river fleet which conveyed the troops and stores was composed of a total of no less than 55 steamers, barges, launches, &c.

Thayetmyo was the British post on the river nearest to the frontier, and here, by 14th November, five days after Thibaw's answer had been received, practically the whole expedition was assembled. On the same day General Prendergast received instructions to commence operations. The Burmese king and his country were taken completely by surprise by the unexampled rapidity of the advance. There had been no time for them to collect and organize the stubborn resistance of which the river and its defences were capable. They had not even been able to block the river by sinking steamers, &c., across it, for, on the very day of the receipt of orders to advance, the armed steamers, the "Irrawaddy" and "Kathleen," engaged the nearest Burmese batteries, and brought out from under their guns the king's steamer and some barges which were lying in readiness for this very purpose. On the 16th the batteries themselves on both banks were taken by a land attack, the enemy being evidently unprepared and making no resistance. On the 17th of November, however, at Minhla, on the right bank of the river, the Burmans in considerable force held successively a barricade, a pagoda and the redoubt of Minhla. The attack was pressed home by a brigade of native infantry on shore, covered by a bombardment from the river, and the enemy were defeated with a loss of 170 killed and 276 prisoners, besides many more drowned in the attempt to escape by the river. The advance was continued next day and the following days, the naval brigade and heavy artillery leading and silencing in succession the enemy's river defences at Nyaungu, Pakôkku and Myingyan. On the 26th of November, when the flotilla was approaching the ancient capital of Ava, envoys from King Thibaw met General Prendergast with offers of surrender; and on the 27th, when the ships were lying off that city and ready to commence hostilities, the order of the king to his troops to lay down their arms was received. There were three strong forts here, full at that moment with thousands of armed Burmans, and though a large number of these filed past and laid down their arms by the king's command, still many more were allowed to disperse with their weapons; and these, in the time that followed, broke up into dacoit or guerrilla bands, which became the scourge of the country and prolonged the war for years. Meanwhile, however, the surrender of the king of Burma was complete; and on the 28th of November, in less than a fortnight from the declaration of war, Mandalay had fallen, and the king himself was a prisoner, while every strong fort and town on the river, and all the king's ordnance (1861 pieces), and thousands of rifles, muskets and arms had been taken. Much valuable and curious "loot" and property was found in the palace and city of Mandalay, which, when sold, realized about 9 lakhs of rupees (£60,000).

From Mandalay, General Prendergast seized Bhamo on the 28th of December. This was a very important move, as it forestalled the Chinese, who were preparing to claim the place. But unfortunately, although the king was dethroned and deported, and the capital and the whole of the river in the hands of the British, the bands of armed soldiery, unaccustomed to conditions other than those of anarchy, rapine and murder, took advantage of the impenetrable cover of their jungles to continue a desultory armed resistance. Reinforcements had to be poured into the country, and it was in this phase of the campaign, lasting several years, that the most difficult and most arduous work fell to the lot of the troops. It was in this jungle warfare that the losses from battle, sickness and privation steadily mounted up; and the troops, both British and native, proved once again their fortitude and courage.

Various expeditions followed one another in rapid succession, penetrating to the remotest corners of the land, and bringing peace and protection to the inhabitants, who, it must be mentioned, suffered at least as much from the dacoits as did the troops. The final, and now completely successful, pacification of the country, under the direction of Sir Frederick (afterwards Earl) Roberts, was only brought about by an extensive system of small protective posts scattered all over the country, and small lightly equipped columns moving out to disperse the enemy whenever a gathering came to a head, or a pretended prince or king appeared.

No account of the Third Burmese War would be complete without a reference to the first, and perhaps for this reason most notable, land advance into the enemy's country. This was carried out in November 1885 from Toungoo, the British frontier post in the east of the country, by a small column of all arms under Colonel W.P. Dicken, 3rd Madras Light Infantry, the first objective being Ningyan. The operations were completely successful, in spite of a good deal of scattered resistance, and the force afterwards moved forward to Yamethin and Hlaingdet. As inland operations developed, the want of mounted troops was badly felt, and several regiments of cavalry were brought over from India, while mounted infantry was raised locally. It was found that without these most useful arms it was generally impossible to follow up and punish the active enemy.

BURN, RICHARD (1700-1785), English legal writer, was born at Winton, Westmorland, in 1709. Educated at Queen's College, Oxford, he entered the Church, and in 1736 became vicar of Orton in Westmorland. He was a justice of the peace for the counties of Westmorland and Cumberland, and devoted himself to the study of law. He was appointed chancellor of the diocese of Carlisle in 1765, an office which he held till his death at Orton on the 12th of November 1785. Burn's Justice of the Peace and Parish Officer, first published in 1755, was for many years the standard authority on the law relating to justices of the peace. It has passed through innumerable editions. His Ecclesiastical Law (1760), a work of much research, was the foundation upon which were built many modern commentaries on ecclesiastical law. The best edition is that by R. Phillimore (4 vols., 1842). Burn also wrote Digest of the Militia Laws (1760), and A New Law Dictionary (2 vols., 1792).

BURNABY, FREDERICK GUSTAVUS (1842-1885), English traveller and soldier, was born on the 3rd of March 1842, at Bedford, the son of a clergyman. Educated at Harrow and in Germany, he entered the Royal Horse Guards in 1859. Finding no chance for active service, his spirit of adventure sought outlets in balloon-ascents and in travels through Spain and Russia. In the summer of 1874 he accompanied the Carlist forces as correspondent of The Times, but before the end of the war he was transferred to Africa to report on Gordon's expedition to the Sudan. This took Burnaby as far as Khartum. Returning to England in March 1875, he matured his plans for a journey on horseback to Khiva through Russian Asia, which had just been closed to travellers. His accomplishment of this task, in the winter of 1875-1876, described in his book A Ride to Khiva, brought him immediate fame. His next leave of absence was spent in another adventurous journey on horseback, through Asia Minor, from Scutari to Erzerum, with the object of observing the Russian frontier, an account of which he afterwards published. In the Russo-Turkish War of 1877, Burnaby (who soon afterwards became lieut.-colonel) acted as travelling agent to the Stafford House (Red Cross) Committee, but had to return to England before the campaign was over. At this point began his active interest in politics, and in 1880 he unsuccessfully contested a seat at Birmingham in the Tory-Democrat interest. In 1882 he crossed the Channel in a balloon. Having been disappointed in his hope of seeing active service in the Egyptian campaign of 1882, he participated in the Suakin campaign of 1884 without official leave, and was wounded at El Teb when acting as an intelligence officer under General Valentine Baker. This did not deter him from a similar course when a fresh expedition started up the Nile. He was given a post by Lord Wolseley, and met his death in the hand-to-hand fighting of the battle of Abu Klea (17th January 1885).

BURNAND, SIR FRANCIS COWLEY (1836- ), English humorist, was born in London on the 29th of November 1836. His father was a London stockbroker, of French-Swiss origin; his mother Emma Cowley, a direct descendant of Hannah Cowley (1743-1809), the English poet and dramatist. He was educated at Eton and Cambridge, and originally studied first for the Anglican, then for the Roman Catholic Church; but eventually took to the law and was called to the bar. From his earliest days, however, the stage had attracted him—he founded the Amateur Dramatic Club at Cambridge,—and finally he abandoned the church and the law, first for the stage and subsequently for dramatic authorship. His first great dramatic success was made with the burlesque Black-Eyed Susan, and he wrote a large number of other burlesques, comedies and farces. One of his early burlesques came under the favourable notice of Mark Lemon, then editor of Punch, and Burnand, who was already writing for the comic paper Fun, became in 1862 a regular contributor to Punch. In 1880 he was appointed editor of Punch, and only retired from that position in 1906. In 1902 he was knighted. His literary reputation as a humorist depends, apart from his long association with Punch, on his well-known book Happy Thoughts, originally published in Punch in 1863-1864 and frequently reprinted.

See Recollections and Reminiscences, by Sir F.C. Burnand (London, 1904).

BURNE-JONES, SIR EDWARD BURNE, Bart. (1833-1898), English painter and designer, was born on the 28th of August 1833 at Birmingham. His father was a Welsh descent, and the idealism of his nature and art has been attributed to this Celtic strain. An only son, he was educated at King Edward's school, Birmingham, and destined for the Church. He retained through life an interest in classical studies, but it was the mythology of the classics which fascinated him. He went into residence as a scholar at Exeter College, Oxford, in January 1853. On the same day William Morris entered the same college, having also the intention of taking orders. The two were thrown together, and grew close friends. Their similar tastes and enthusiasms were mutually stimulated. Burne-Jones resumed his early love of drawing and designing. With Morris he read Modern Painters and the Morte d'Arthur. He studied the Italian pictures in the University galleries, and Dürer's engravings; but his keenest enthusiasm was kindled by the sight of two works by a living man, Rossetti. One of these was a woodcut in Allingham's poems, "The Maids of Elfinmere"; the other was the water-colour "Dante drawing an Angel," then belonging to Mr Coombe, of the Clarendon Press, and now in the University collection. Having found his true vocation, Burne-Jones, like his friend Morris, determined to relinquish his thoughts of the Church and to become an artist. Rossetti, although not yet seen by him, was his chosen master; and early in 1856 he had the happiness, in London, of meeting him. At Easter he left college without taking a degree. This was his own decision, not due (as often stated) to Rossetti's persuasion; but on settling in London, where Morris soon joined him at 17 Red Lion Square, he began to work under Rossetti's friendly instruction and encouraging guidance.

As Burne-Jones once said, he "found himself at five-and-twenty what he ought to have been at fifteen." He had had no regular training as a draughtsman, and lacked the confidence of science. But his extraordinary faculty of invention as a designer was already ripening; his mind, rich in knowledge of classical story and medieval romance, teemed with pictorial subjects; and he set himself to complete his equipment by resolute labour, witnessed by innumerable drawings. The works of this first period are all more or less tinged by the influence of Rossetti; but they are already differentiated from the elder master's style by their more facile though less intensely felt elaboration of imaginative detail. Many are pen-and-ink drawings on vellum, exquisitely finished, of which the "Waxen Image" is one of the earliest and best examples; it is dated 1856. Although subject, medium and manner derive from Rossetti's inspiration, it is not the hand of a pupil merely, but of a potential master. This was recognized by Rossetti himself, who before long avowed that he had nothing more to teach him. Burne-Jones's first sketch in oils dates from this same year, 1856; and during 1857 he made for Bradfield College the first of what was to be an immense series of cartoons for stained glass. In 1858 he decorated a cabinet with the "Prioress's Tale" from Chaucer, his first direct illustration of the work of a poet whom he especially loved and who inspired him with endless subjects. Thus early, therefore, we see the artist busy in all the various fields in which he was to labour.

In the autumn of 1857 Burne-Jones joined in Rossetti's ill-fated scheme to decorate theh walls of the Oxford Union. None of the painters had mastered the technique of fresco, and their pictures had begun to peel from the walls before they were completed. In 1859 Burne-Jones made his first journey to Italy. He saw Florence, Pisa, Siena, Venice and other places, and appears to have found the gentle and romantic Sienese more attractive than any other school. Rossetti's influence still persisted; and its impress is visible, more strongly perhaps than ever before, in the two water-colours "Sidonia von Bork" and "Clara von Bork," painted in 1860. These little masterpieces have a directness of execution rare with the artist. In powerful characterization, combined with a decorative motive, they rival Rossetti at his best. In June of this year Burne-Jones was married to Miss Georgiana Macdonald, two of whose sisters were the wives of Sir E. Poynter and Mr J.L. Kipling, and they settled in Bloomsbury. Five years later he moved to Kensington Square, and shortly afterwards to the Grange, Fulham, an old house with a garden, where he resided till his death. In 1862 the artist and his wife accompanied Ruskin to Italy, visiting Milan and Venice.

In 1864 he was elected an associate of the Society of Painters in Water-Colours, and exhibited, among other works, "The Merciful Knight," the first picture which fully revealed his ripened personality as an artist. The next six years saw a series of fine water-colours at the same gallery; but in 1870, owing to a misunderstanding, Burne-Jones resigned his membership of the society. He was re-elected in 1886. During the next seven years, 1870-1877, only two works of the painter's were exhibited. These were two water-colours, shown at the Dudley Gallery in 1873, one of them being the beautiful "Love among the Ruins," destroyed twenty years later by a cleaner who supposed it to be an oil painting, but afterwards reproduced in oils by the painter. This silent period was, however, one of unremitting production. Hitherto Burne-Jones had worked almost entirely in water-colours. He now began a number of large pictures in oils, working at them in turn, and having always several on hand. The "Briar Rose" series, "Laus Veneris," the "Golden Stairs," the "Pygmalion" series, and "The Mirror of Venus" are among the works planned and completed, or carried far towards completion, during these years. At last, in May 1877, the day of recognition came, with the opening of the first exhibition of the Grosvenor Gallery, when the "Days of Creation," the "Beguiling of Merlin," and the "Mirror of Venus" were all shown. Burne-Jones followed up the signal success of these pictures with "Laus Veneris," the "Chant d'Amour," "Pan and Psyche," and other works, exhibited in 1878. Most of these pictures are painted in gay and brilliant colours. A change is noticeable next year, 1879, in the "Annunciation" and in the four pictures called "Pygmalion and the Image"; the former of these, one of the simplest and most perfect of the artist's works, is subdued and sober; in the latter a scheme of soft and delicate tints was attempted, not with entire success. A similar temperance of colours marks the "Golden Stairs," first exhibited in 1880. In 1884, following the almost sombre "Wheel of Fortune" of the preceding year, appeared "King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid," in which Burne-Jones once more indulged his love of gorgeous colour, refined by the period of self-restraint. This masterpiece is now in the National collection. He next turned to two important sets of pictures, "The Briar Rose" and "The Story of Perseus," though these were not completed for some years to come. In 1886, having been elected A.R.A. the previous year, he exhibited (for the only time) at the Royal Academy "The Depths of the Sea," a mermaid carrying down with her a youth whom she has unconsciously drowned in the impetuosity of her love. This picture adds to the habitual haunting charm a tragic irony of conception and a felicity of execution which give it a place apart among Burne-Jones's works. He resigned his Associateship in 1893. One of the "Perseus" series was exhibited in 1887, two more in 1888, with "The Brazen Tower," inspired by the same legend. In 1890 the four pictures of "The Briar Rose" were exhibited by themselves, and won the widest admiration. The huge tempera picture, "The Star of Bethlehem," painted for the corporation of Birmingham, was exhibited in 1891. A long illness for some time checked the painter's activity, which, when resumed, was much occupied with decorative schemes. An exhibition of his work was held at the New Gallery in the winter of 1892-1893. To this period belong several of his comparatively few portraits. In 1894 Burne-Jones was made a baronet. Ill-health again interrupted the progress of his works, chief among which was the vast "Arthur in Avalon." In 1898 he had an attack of influenza, and had apparently recovered, when he was again taken suddenly ill, and died on the 17th of June. In the following winter a second exhibition of his works was held at the New Gallery, and an exhibition of his drawings (including some of the charmingly humorous sketches made for children) at the Burlington Fine Arts Club.

His son and successor in the baronetcy, Sir Philip Burne-Jones (b. 1861), also became well known as an artist. The only daughter, Margaret, married Mr J.W. Mackail.

Burne-Jones's influence has been exercised far less in painting than in the wide field of decorative design. Here it has been enormous. His first designs for stained glass, 1857-1861, were made for Messrs Powell, but after 1861 he worked exclusively for Morris & Co. Windows executed from his cartoons are to be found all over England; others exist in churches abroad. For the American Church in Rome he designed a number of mosaics. Reliefs in metal, tiles, gesso-work, decorations for pianos and organs, and cartoons for tapestry represent his manifold activity. In all works, however, which were only designed and not carried out by him, a decided loss of delicacy is to be noted. The colouring of the tapestries (of which the "Adoration of the Magi" at Exeter College is the best-known) is more brilliant than successful. The range and fertility of Burne-Jones as a decorative inventor can be perhaps most conveniently studied in the sketch-book, 1885-1895, which he bequeathed to the British Museum. The artist's influence on book-illustration must also be recorded. In early years he made a few drawings on wood for Dalziel's Bible and for Good Words; but his later work for the Kelmscott Press, founded by Morris in 1891, is that by which he is best remembered. Besides several illustrations to other Kelmscott books, he made eighty-seven designs for the Chaucer of 1897.

Burne-Jones's aim in art is best given in some of his own words, written to a friend: "I mean by a picture a beautiful, romantic dream of something that never was, never will be—in a light better than any light that ever shone—in a land no one can define or remember, only desire—and the forms divinely beautiful—and then I wake up, with the waking of Brynhild." No artist was ever more true to his aim. Ideals resolutely pursued are apt to provoke the resentment of the world, and Burne-Jones encountered, endured and conquered an extraordinary amount of, angry criticism. In so far as this was directed against the lack of realism in his pictures, it was beside the point. The earth, the sky, the rocks, the trees, the men and women of Burne-Jones are not those of this world; but they are themselves a world, consistent with itself, and having therefore its own reality. Charged with the beauty and with the strangeness of dreams, it has nothing of a dream's incoherence. Yet it is a dreamer always whose nature penetrates these works, a nature out of sympathy with struggle and strenuous action. Burne-Jones's men and women are dreamers too. It was this which, more than anything else, estranged him from the age into which he was born. But he had an inbred "revolt from fact" which would have estranged him from the actualities of any age. That criticism seems to be more justified which has found in him a lack of such victorious energy and mastery over his materials as would have enabled him to carry out his conceptions in their original intensity. Representing the same kind of tendency as distinguished his French contemporary, Puvis de Chavannes, he was far less in the main current of art, and his position suffers accordingly. Often compared with Botticelli, he had nothing of the fire and vehemence of the Florentine. Yet, if aloof from strenuous action, Burne-Jones was singularly strenuous in production. His industry was inexhaustible, and needed to be, if it was to keep pace with the constant pressure of his ideas. Invention, a very rare excellence, was his pre-eminent gift. Whatever faults his paintings may have, they have always the fundamental virtue of design; they are always pictures. His fame might rest on his purely decorative work. But his designs were informed with a mind of romantic temper, apt in the discovery of beautiful subjects, and impassioned with a delight in pure and variegated colour. These splendid gifts were directed in a critical and fortunate moment by the genius of Rossetti. Hence a career which shows little waste or misdirection of power, and, granted the aim proposed, a rare level of real success.

Authorities.—In 1904 was published Memorials of Edward Burne-Jones, by his widow, two volumes of extreme interest and charm. The Work of Burne-Jones, a collection of ninety-one photogravures, appeared in 1900.

See also Catalogue to Burlington Club Exhibition of Drawings by Burne-Jones, with Introduction by Cosmo Monkhouse (1899); Sir E. Burne-Jones: a Record and a Review, by Malcolm Belt (1898); Sir E. Burne-Jones, his Life and Work, by Julia Cartwright (Mrs Ady) (1894); The Life of William Morris, by J.W. Mackail (1899).

(L. B.)

BURNELL, ARTHUR COKE (1840-1882), English Sanskrit scholar, was born at St Briavels, Gloucestershire, in 1840. His father was an official of the East India Company, and in 1860 he himself went out to Madras as a member of the Indian civil service. Here he utilized every available opportunity to acquire or copy Sanskrit manuscripts. In 1870 he presented his collection of 350 MSS. to the India library. In 1874 he published a Handbook of South Indian Palaeography, characterized by Max Müller as "indispensable to every student of Indian literature," and in 1880 issued for the Madras government his greatest work, the Classified Index to the Sanskrit MSS. in the Palace at Tanjore. He was also the author of a large number of translations from, and commentaries on, various other Sanskrit manuscripts, being particularly successful in grouping and elucidating the essential principles of Hindu law. In addition to his exhaustive acquaintance with Sanskrit, and the southern India vernaculars, he had some knowledge of Tibetan, Arabic, Kawi, Javanese and Coptic. Burnell originated with Sir Henry Yule the well-known dictionary of Anglo-Indian words and phrases, Hobson-Jobson. His constitution, never strong, broke down prematurely through the combined influence of overwork and the Madras climate, and he died at West Stratton, Hampshire, on the 12th of October 1882. A further collection of Sanskrit manuscripts was purchased from his heirs by the India library after his death.

BURNELL, ROBERT (d. 1292), English bishop and chancellor, was born at Acton Burnell in Shropshire, and began his public life probably as a clerk in the royal chancery. He was soon in the service of Edward, the eldest son of King Henry III., and was constantly in attendance on the prince, whose complete confidence he appears to have enjoyed. Having received some ecclesiastical preferments, he acted as one of the regents of the kingdom from the death of Henry III. in November 1272 until August 1274, when the new king, Edward I., returned from Palestine and made him his chancellor. In 1275 Burnell was elected bishop of Bath and Wells, and three years later Edward repeated the attempt which he had made in 1270 to secure the archbishopric of Canterbury for his favourite. The bishop's second failure to obtain this dignity was due, doubtless, to his irregular and unclerical manner of life, a fact which also accounts, in part at least, for the hostility which existed between his victorious rival, Archbishop Peckham, and himself. As the chief adviser of Edward I. during the earlier part of his reign, and moreover as a trained and able lawyer, the bishop took a prominent part in the legislative acts of the "English Justinian," whose activity in this direction coincides practically with Burnell's tenure of the office of chancellor. The bishop also influenced the king's policy with regard to France, Scotland and Wales; was frequently employed on business of the highest moment; and was the royal mouthpiece on several important occasions. In 1283 a council, or, as it is sometimes called, a parliament, met in his house at Acton Burnell, and he was responsible for the settlement of the court of chancery in London. In spite of his numerous engagements, Burnell found time to aggrandize his bishopric, to provide liberally for his nephews and other kinsmen, and to pursue his cherished but futile aim of founding a great family. Licentious and avaricious, he amassed great wealth; and when he died on the 25th of October 1292 he left numerous estates in Shropshire, Worcestershire, Somerset, Kent, Surrey and elsewhere. He was, however, genial and kind-hearted, a great lawyer and a faithful minister.

See R.W. Eyton, Antiquities of Shropshire (London, 1854-1860); and E. Foss, The Judges of England, vol. iii. (London, 1848-1864).

BURNES, SIR ALEXANDER (1805-1841), British traveller and explorer, was born at Montrose, Scotland, in 1805. While serving in India, in the army of the East India Company, which he had joined in his seventeenth year, he made himself acquainted with Hindustani and Persian, and thus obtained an appointment as interpreter at Surat in 1822. Transferred to Cutch in 1826 as assistant to the political agent, he turned his attention more particularly to the history and geography of north-western India and the adjacent countries, at that time very imperfectly known. His proposal in 1829 to undertake a journey of exploration through the valley of the Indus was not carried out owing to political apprehensions; but in 1831 he was sent to Lahore with a present of horses from King William IV. to Maharaja Ranjit Singh and took advantage of the opportunity for extensive investigations. In the following years his travels were extended through Afghanistan across the Hindu Kush to Bokhara and Persia. The narrative which he published on his visit to England in 1834 added immensely to contemporary knowledge of the countries traversed, and was one of the most popular books of the time. The first edition brought the author the sum of £800, and his services were recognized not only by the Royal Geographical Society of London, but also by that of Paris. Soon after his return to India in 1835 he was appointed to the court of Sind to secure a treaty for the navigation of the Indus; and in 1836 he undertook a political mission to Dost Mahommed at Kabul. He advised Lord Auckland to support Dost Mahommed on the throne of Kabul, but the viceroy preferred to follow the opinion of Sir William Macnaghten and reinstated Shah Shuja, thus leading up to the disasters of the first Afghan War. On the restoration of Shah Shuja in 1839, he became regular political agent at Kabul, and remained there till his assassination in 1841 (on the 2nd of November), during the heat of an insurrection. The calmness with which he continued at his post, long after the imminence of his danger was apparent, gives an heroic colouring to the close of an honourable and devoted life. It came to light in 1861 that some of Burnes' despatches from Kabul in 1839 had been altered, so as to convey opinions opposite to his, but Lord Palmerston refused after such a lapse of time to grant the inquiry demanded in the House of Commons. A narrative of his later labours was published in 1842 under the title of Cabool.

See Sir J.W. Kaye, Lives of Indian Officers (1889).

BURNET, GILBERT (1643-1715), English bishop and historian, was born in Edinburgh on the 18th of September 1643, of an ancient and distinguished Scottish house. He was the youngest son of Robert Burnet (1592-1661), who at the Restoration became a lord of session with the title of Lord Crimond. Robert Burnet had refused to sign the Scottish Covenant, although the document was drawn up by his brother-in-law, Archibald Johnstone, Lord Warristoun. He therefore found it necessary to retire from his profession, and twice went into exile. He disapproved of the rising of the Scots, but was none the less a severe critic of the government of Charles I. and of the action of the Scottish bishops. This moderate attitude he impressed on his son Gilbert, whose early education he directed. The boy entered Marischal College at the age of nine, and five years later graduated M.A. He then spent a year in the study of feudal and civil law before he resolved to devote himself to theology. He became a probationer for the Scottish ministry in 1661 just before episcopal government was re-established in Scotland. His decision to accept episcopal orders led to difficulties with his family, especially with his mother, who held rigid Presbyterian views. From this time dates his friendship with Robert Leighton (1611-1684), who greatly influenced his religious opinions. Leighton had, during a stay in the Spanish Netherlands, assimilated something of the ascetic and pietistic spirit of Jansenism, and was devoted to the interests of peace in the church. Burnet wisely refused to accept a benefice in the disturbed state of church affairs, but he wrote an audacious letter to Archbishop Sharp asking him to take measures to restore peace. Sharp sent for Burnet, and dismissed his advice without apparent resentment. He had already made valuable acquaintances in Edinburgh, and he now visited London, Oxford and Cambridge, and, after a short visit to Edinburgh in 1663, when he sought to secure a reprieve for his uncle Warristoun, he proceeded to travel in France and Holland. At Cambridge he was strongly influenced by the philosophical views of Ralph Cudworth and Henry More, who proposed an unusual degree of toleration within the boundaries of the church and the limitations imposed by its liturgy and episcopal government; and his intercourse in Holland with foreign divines of different Protestant sects further encouraged his tendency to latitudinarianism.

When he returned to England in 1664 he established intimate relations with Sir Robert Moray and with John Maitland, earl and afterwards first duke of Lauderdale, both of whom at that time advocated a tolerant policy towards the Scottish covenanters. Burnet became a member of the Royal Society, of which Moray was the first president. On his father's death he had been offered a living by a relative, Sir Alexander Burnet, and in 1663 the living of Saltoun, East Lothian, had been kept open for him by one of his father's friends. He was not formally inducted at Saltoun until June 1665, although he had served there since October 1664. For the next five years he devoted himself to his parish, where he won the respect of all parties. In 1666 he alienated the Scottish bishops by a bold memorial (printed in vol. ii. of the Miscellanies of the Scottish Historical Society), in which he pointed out that they were departing from the custom of the primitive church by their excessive pretensions, and yet his attitude was far too moderate to please the Presbyterians. In 1669 he resigned his parish to become professor of divinity in the university of Glasgow, and in the same year he published an exposition of his ecclesiastical views in his Modest and Free Conference between a Conformist and a Nonconformist (by "a lover of peace"). He was Leighton's right hand in the efforts at a compromise between the episcopal and the presbyterian principle. Meanwhile he had begun to differ from Lauderdale, whose policy after the failure of the scheme of "Accommodation" moved in the direction of absolutism and repression, and during Lauderdale's visit to Scotland in 1672 the divergence rapidly developed into opposition. He warily refused the offer of a Scottish bishopric, and published in 1673 his four "conferences," entitled Vindication of the Authority, Constitution and Laws of the Church and State of Scotland, in which he insisted on the duty of passive obedience. It was partly through the influence of Anne (d. 1716), duchess of Hamilton in her own right, that he had been appointed at Glasgow, and he made common cause with the Hamiltons against Lauderdale. The duchess had made over to him the papers of her father and uncle, from which he compiled the Memoirs of the Lives and Actions of James and William, dukes of Hamilton and Castleherald. In which an Account is given of the Rise and Progress of the Civil Wars of Scotland ... together with many letters ... written by King Charles I. (London, 1677; Univ. Press, Oxford, 1852), a book which was published as the second volume of a History of the Church of Scotland, Spottiswoode's History forming the first. This work established his reputation as an historian. Meanwhile he had clandestinely married in 1671 a cousin of Lauderdale, Lady Margaret Kennedy, daughter of John Kennedy, 6th earl of Cassilis, a lady who had already taken an active part in affairs in Scotland, and was eighteen years older than Burnet. The marriage was kept secret for three years, and Burnet renounced all claim to his wife's fortune.

Lauderdale's ascendancy in Scotland and the failure of the attempts at compromise in Scottish church affairs eventually led Burnet to settle in England. He was favourably received by Charles II. in 1673, when he went up to London to arrange for the publication of the Hamilton Memoirs, and he was treated with confidence by the duke of York. On his return to Scotland Lauderdale refused to receive him, and denounced him to Charles II. as one of the chief centres of Scottish discontent. Burnet found it wiser to retire to England on the plea of fulfilling his duties as royal chaplain. Once in London he resigned his professorship (September 1674) at Glasgow; but, although James remained his friend, Charles struck him off the roll of court chaplains in 1674, and it was in opposition to court influence that he was made chaplain to the Rolls Chapel by the master, Sir Harbottle Grimston, and appointed lecturer at St Clement's. He was summoned in April 1675 before a committee of the House of Commons to give evidence against Lauderdale, and disclosed, without reluctance according to his enemies, confidences which had passed between him and the minister. He himself confesses in his autobiography that "it was a great error in me to appear in this matter," and his conduct cost him the patronage of the duke of York. In ecclesiastical matters he threw in his lot with Thomas Tillotson and John Tenison, and at the time of the Revolution had written some eighteen polemics against encroachments of the Roman Catholic Church. At the suggestion of Sir William Jones, the attorney-general, he began his History of the Reformation in England, based on original documents. In the necessary research he received some pecuniary help from Robert Boyle, but he was hindered in the preparation of the first part (1679) through being refused access to the Cotton library, possibly by the influence of Lauderdale. For this volume he received the thanks of parliament, and the second and third volumes appeared in 1681 and 1715. In this work he undertook to refute the statements of Nicholas Sanders, whose De Origine et progressu schismatis Anglicani libri tres (Cologne, 1585) was still, in the French translation of Maucroix, the commonly accepted account of the English reformation. Burnet's contradictions of Sanders must not, however, be accepted without independent investigation. At the time of the Popish Plot in 1678 he displayed some moderation, refusing to believe the charges made against the duke of York, though he chose this time to publish some anti-Roman pamphlets. He tried, at some risk to himself, to save the life of one of the victims, William Staly, and visited William Howard, Viscount Stafford, in the Tower. To the Exclusion Bill he opposed a suggestion of compromise, and it is said that Charles offered him the bishopric of Chichester, "if he would come entirely into his interests." Burnet's reconciliation with the court was short-lived. In January 1680 he addressed to the king a long letter on the subject of his sins; he was known to have received the dangerous confidence of Wilmot, earl of Rochester, in his last illness; and he was even suspected, unjustly, in 1683, of having composed the paper drawn up on the eve of death by William Russell, Lord Russell, whom he attended to the scaffold. On the 5th of November 1684 he preached, at the express wish of his patron Grimston, and against his own desire, the usual anti-Catholic sermon. He was consequently deprived of his appointments by order of the court, and on the accession of James II. retired to Paris. He had already begun the writing of his memoirs, which were to develop into the History of His Own Time.

Burnet now travelled in Italy, Germany and Switzerland, finally settling in Holland at the Hague, where he won from the princess of Orange a confidence which proved enduring. He rendered a signal service to William by inducing the princess to offer to leave the whole political power in her husband's hands in the event of their succession to the English crown. A prosecution against him for high treason was now set on foot both in England and in Scotland, and he took the precaution of naturalizing himself as a Dutch subject. Lady Margaret Burnet was dying when he left England, and n Holland he married a Dutch heiress of Scottish descent, Mary Scott. He returned to England with William and Mary, and drew up the English text of their declaration. His earlier views on the doctrine of non-resistance had been sensibly modified by what he saw in France after the revocation of the edict of Nantes and by the course of affairs at home, and in 1688 he published an Inquiry into the Measures of Submission to the Supreme Authority in defence of the revolution. He was consecrated to the see of Salisbury on the 31st of March 1689 by a commission of bishops to whom Archbishop Sancroft had delegated his authority, declining personally to perform the office. In his pastoral letter to his clergy urging them to take the oath of allegiance, Burnet grounded the claim of William and Mary on the right of conquest, a view which gave such offence that the pamphlet was burnt by the common hangman three years later. As bishop he proved an excellent administrator, and gave the closest attention to his pastoral duties. He discouraged plurality of livings, and consequent non-residence, established a school of divinity as Salisbury, and spent much time himself in preparing candidates for confirmation, and in the examination of those who wished to enter the priesthood. Four discourses delivered to the clergy of his diocese were printed in 1694. During Queen Mary's lifetime ecclesiastical patronage passed through her hands, but after her death William III. appointed an ecclesiastical commission on which Burnet was a prominent member, for the disposal of vacant benefices. In 1696 and 1697 he presented memorials to the king suggesting that the first-fruits and tenths raised by the clergy should be devoted to the augmentation of the poorer livings, and though his suggestions were not immediately accepted, they were carried into effect under Queen Anne by the provision known as Queen Anne's Bounty. His second wife died of smallpox in 1698, and in 1700 Burnet married again, his third wife being Elizabeth (1661-1709), widow of Robert Berkeley and daughter of Sir Richard Blake, a rich and charitable woman, known by her Method of Devotion, posthumously published in 1710. In 1699 he was appointed tutor to the royal duke of Gloucester, son of the Princess Anne, an appointment which he accepted somewhat against his will. His influence at court had declined after the death of Queen Mary; William resented his often officious advice, placed little confidence in his discretion, and soon after his accession is even said to have described him as ein rechter Tartuffe. Burnet made a weighty speech against the bill (1702-1703) directed against the practice of occasional conformity, and was a consistent exponent of Broad Church principles. He devoted five years' labour to his Exposition of the Thirty-nine Articles (1699; ed. J.R. Page, 1837), which was severely criticized by the High Church clergy. But his hopes for a comprehensive scheme which might include nonconformists in the English Church were necessarily destroyed on the accession of Queen Anne. He died on the 17th of March 1715, and was buried in the parish of St James's, Clerkenwell.

Burnet directed in his will that his most important work, the History of His Own Time, should appear six years after his death. It was published (2 vols., 1724-1734) by his sons, Gilbert and Thomas, and then not without omissions. It was attacked in 1724 by John Cockburn in A Specimen of some free and impartial Remarks. Burnet's book naturally aroused much opposition, and there were persistent rumours that the MS. had been unduly tampered with. He has been freely charged with gross misrepresentation, an accusation to which he laid himself open, for instance, in the account of the birth of James, the Old Pretender. His later intimacy with the Marlboroughs made him very lenient where the duke was concerned. The greatest value of his work naturally lies in his account of transactions of which he had personal knowledge, notably in his relation of the church history of Scotland, of the Popish Plot, of the proceedings at the Hague previous to the expedition of William and Mary, and of the personal relations between the joint sovereigns.

Of his children by his second wife, William (d. 1729) became a colonial governor in America; Gilbert (d. 1726) became prebendary of Salisbury in 1715, and chaplain to George I. in 1718; and Sir Thomas (1694-1753), his literary executor and biographer, became in 1741 judge in the court of common pleas.

Bibliography.—The chief authorities for Bishop Burnet's life are the autobiography "Rough Draft of my own Life" (ed. H.C. Foxcroft, Oxford, 1902, in the Supplement to Burnet's History), the Life by Sir Thomas Burnet in the History of His Own Time (Oxford, 1823, vol. vi.), and the History itself. A rather severe but detailed and useful criticism is given in L. v. Ranke's History of England (Eng. ed., Oxford, 1875), vol. vi. pp. 45-101. Burnet's letters to his friend, George Savile, marquess of Halifax, were published by the Royal Historical Society (Camden Miscellany, vol. xi.). The History of His Own Time (2 vols. fol., 1724-1734) ran through many editions before it was reprinted at the Clarendon Press (6 vols., 1823, and supplementary volume, 1833) with the suppressed passages of the first volume and notes by the earls of Dartmouth and Hardwicke, with the remarks of Swift. This edition, under the direction of M.J. Routh, was enlarged in a second Oxford edition of 1833. A new edition, based on this, but making use of the Bodleian MS., which differs very considerably from the printed version, was edited by Osmund Airy (Oxford, 1897, &c.). In 1902 (Clarendon Press, Oxford) Miss H.C. Foxcroft edited A Supplement to Burnet's History of His Own Time, to which is prefixed an account of the relation between the different versions of the History—the Bodleian MS., the fragmentary Harleian MS. in the British Museum and Sir Thomas Burnet's edition; the book contains the remaining fragments of Burnet's original memoirs, his autobiography, his letters to Admiral Herbert and his private meditations. The chief differences between Burnet's original draft as represented by the Bodleian MS. and the printed history consist in a more lenient view generally of individuals, a modification of the censure levelled at the Anglican clergy, changes obviously dictated by a general variation in his point of view, and a more cautious account of personal matters such as his early relations with Lauderdale. He also cut out much minor detail, and information relating to himself and to members of his family. His History of the Reformation of the Church of England was edited (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 7 vols., 1865) by N. Pocock.

Besides the works mentioned above may be noticed: Some Passages of the Life and Death of John, Earl of Rochester (Lond., 1680; facsimile reprint, with introduction by Lord Ronald Gower, 1875); The Life and Death of Sir Matthew Hale, Kt., sometime Lord Chief-Justice of his Majesties Court of Kings Bench (Lond., 1682), which is included in C. Wordsworth's Ecclesiastical Biography (vol. vi., 1818); The History of the Rights of Princes in disposing of Ecclesiastical Benefices and Church Lands (Lond., 1682, 8vo); The Life of William Bedell, D.D., Bishop of Kilmore in Ireland (1685), containing the correspondence between Bedell and James Waddesdon of the Holy Inquisition on the subject of the Roman obedience; Reflections on Mr Varillas's "History of the Revolutions that have happened in Europe in matters of Religion," and more particularly on his Ninth Book, that relates to England (Amst., 1686), appended to the account of his travels entitled Some Letters, which was originally published at Rotterdam (1686); A Discourse of the Pastoral Care (1692, 14th ed., 1821); An Essay on the Memory of the late Queen (1695); A Collection of various Tracts and Discourses written in the Years 1677 to 1704 (3 vols., 1704); and A Collection of Speeches, Prefaces, Letters, with a Description of Geneva and Holland (1713). Of his shorter religious and polemical works a catalogue is given in vol. vi. of the Clarendon Press edition of his History, and in Lowndes's Bibliographer's Manual. The following translations deserve to be mentioned:—Utopia, written in Latin by Sir Thomas More, Chancellor of England: translated into English (1685); A Relation of the Death of the Primitive Persecutors, written originally in Latin, by L.C.F. Lactantius: Englished by Gilbert Burnet, D.D., to which he hath made a large preface concerning Persecution (Amst., 1687).

See also A Life of Gilbert Burnet, Bishop of Salisbury (1907), by T.E.S. Clarke and H.C. Foxcroft, with an introduction by C.H. Firth, which contains a chronological list of Burnet's published works. Of Burnet's personal character there are well-known descriptions in chapter vii. of Macaulay's History of England, and in W.E.H. Lecky's History of England in the Eighteenth Century, vol. i. pp. 80 seq.

BURNET, THOMAS (1635-1715), English divine, was born at Croft in Yorkshire about the year 1635. He was educated at Northallerton, and at Clare Hall, Cambridge. In 1657 he was made fellow of Christ's, and in 1667 senior proctor of the university. By the interest of James, duke of Ormonde, he was chosen master of the Charterhouse in 1685, and took the degree of D.D. As master he made a noble stand against the illegal attempts to admit Andrew Popham as a pensioner of the house, strenuously opposing an order of the 26th of December 1686, addressed by James II. to the governors dispensing with the statutes for the occasion.

Burnet published his famous Telluris Theoria Sacra, or Sacred Theory of the Earth, at London in 1681. This work, containing a fanciful theory of the earth's structure, attracted much attention, and he was afterwards encouraged to issue an English translation, which was printed in folio, 1684-1689. Addison commended the author in a Latin ode, but his theory was attacked by John Keill, William Whiston and Erasmus Warren, to all of whom he returned answers. His reputation obtained for him an introduction at court by Archbishop Tillotson, whom he succeeded as clerk of the closet to King William. But he suddenly marred his prospects by the publication, in 1692, of a work entitled Archaeologiae Philosophicae: sive Doctrina antiqua de Rerum Originibus, in which he treated the Mosaic account of the fall of man as an allegory. This excited a great clamour against him; and the king was obliged to remove him from his office at court. Of this book an English translation was published in 1729. Burnet published several other minor works before his death, which took place at the Charterhouse on the 27th September 1715. Two posthumous works appeared several years after his death—De Fide et Officiis Christianorum (1723), and De Statu Mortuorum et Resurgentium Tractatus (1723); in which he maintained the doctrine of a middle state, the millennium, and the limited duration of future punishment. A Life of Dr Burnet, by Heathcote, appeared in 1759.

"Which," says Samuel Johnson, "the critick ought to read for its elegance, the philosopher for its arguments, and the saint for its piety" (Lives of English Poets, vol. i. p. 303).

Burnet held that at the deluge the earth was crushed like an egg, the internal waters rushing out, and the fragments of shell becoming the mountains.

BURNET, known botanically as Poterium, a member of the rose family. The plants are perennial herbs with pinnate leaves and small flowers arranged in dense long-stalked heads. Great burnet (Poterium officinale) is found in damp meadows; salad burnet (P. Sanguisorba) is a smaller plant with much smaller flower-heads growing in dry pastures.

BURNETT, FRANCES ELIZA HODGSON (1849- ), Anglo-American novelist, whose maiden name was Hodgson, was born in Manchester, England, on the 24th of November 1849; she went to America with her parents, who settled in Knoxville, Tennessee, in 1865. Miss Hodgson soon began to write stories for magazines. In 1873 she married Dr L.M. Burnett of Washington, whom she afterwards (1898) divorced. Her reputation as a novelist was made by her remarkable tale of Lancashire life, That Lass o' Lowrie's (1877), and a number of other volumes followed, of which the best were Through one Administration (1883) and A Lady of Quality (1896). In 1886 she attained a new popularity by her charming story of Little Lord Fauntleroy, and this led to other stories of child-life. Little Lord Fauntleroy was dramatized (see Copyright for the legal questions involved) and had a great success on the stage; and other dramas by her were also produced. In 1900 she married a second time, her husband being Mr Stephen Townesend, a surgeon, who (as Will Dennis) had taken to the stage and had collaborated with her in some of her plays.

BURNEY, CHARLES (1726-1814), English musical historian, was born at Shrewsbury on the 12th of April 1726. He received his earlier education at the free school of that city, and was afterwards sent to the public school at Chester. His first music master was Edmund Baker, organist of Chester cathedral, and a pupil of Dr John Blow. Returning to Shrewsbury when about fifteen years old, he continued his musical studies for three years under his half-brother, James Burney, organist of St Mary's church, and was then sent to London as a pupil of the celebrated Dr Arne, with whom he remained three years. Burney wrote some music for Thomson's Alfred, which was produced at Drury Lane theatre on the 30th of March 1745. In 1749 he was appointed organist of St Dionis-Backchurch, Fenchurch Street, with a salary of £30 a year; and he was also engaged to take the harpsichord in the "New Concerts" then recently established at the King's Arms, Cornhill. In that year he married Miss Esther Sleepe, who died in 1761; in 1769 he married Mrs Stephen Allen of Lynn. Being threatened with a pulmonary affection he went in 1751 to Lynn in Norfolk, where he was elected organist, with an annual salary of £100, and there he resided for the next nine years. During that time he began to entertain the idea of writing a general history of music. His Ode for St Cecilia's Day was performed at Ranelagh Gardens in 1759; and in 1760 he returned to London in good health and with a young family; the eldest child, a girl of eight years of age, surprised the public by her attainments as a harpsichord player. The concertos for the harpsichord which Burney published soon after his return to London were regarded with much admiration. In 1766 he produced, at Drury Lane, a free English version and adaptation of J.J. Rousseau's operetta Le Devin du village, under the title of The Cunning Man. The university of Oxford conferred upon him, on the 23rd of June 1769, the degrees of Bachelor and Doctor of Music, on which occasion he presided at the performance of his exercise for these degrees. This consisted of an anthem, with an overture, solos, recitatives and choruses, accompanied by instruments, besides a vocal anthem in eight parts, which was not performed. In 1769 he published An Essay towards a History of Comets.

Amidst his various professional avocations, Burney never lost sight of his favorite object—his History of Music—and therefore resolved to travel abroad for the purpose of collecting materials that could not be found in Great Britain. Accordingly, he left London in June 1770, furnished with numerous letters of introduction, and proceeded to Paris, and thence to Geneva, Turin, Milan, Padua, Venice, Bologna, Florence, Rome and Naples. The results of his observations he published in The Present State of Music in France and Italy (1771). Dr Johnson thought so well of this work that, alluding to his own Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, he said, "I had that clever dog Burney's Musical Tour in my eye." In July 1772 Burney again visited the continent, to collect further materials, and, after his return to London, published his tour under the title of The Present State of Music in Germany, the Netherlands and United Provinces (1773). In 1773 he was chosen a fellow of the Royal Society. In 1776 appeared the first volume (in 4to) of his long-projected History of Music. In 1782 Burney published his second volume; and in 1789 the third and fourth. Though severely criticized by Forkel in Germany and by the Spanish ex-Jesuit, Requeno, who, in his Italian work Saggi sul Ristabilimento dell' Arte Armonica de' Greci e Romani Cantori (Parma, 1798), attacks Burney's account of the ancient Greek music, and calls him lo scompigliato Burney, the History of Music was generally recognized as possessing great merit. The least satisfactory volume is the fourth, the treatment of Handel and Bach being quite inadequate. Burney's first tour was translated into German by Ebeling, and printed at Hamburg in 1772; and his second tour, translated into German by Bode, was published at Hamburg in 1773. A Dutch translation of his second tour, with notes by J.W. Lustig, organist at Groningen, was published there in 1786. The Dissertation on the Music of the Ancients, in the first volume of Burney's History, was translated into German by J.J. Eschenburg, and printed at Leipzig, 1781. Burney derived much aid from the first two volumes of Padre Martini's very learned Storia della Musica (Bologna, 1757-1770). One cannot but admire his persevering industry, and his sacrifices of time, money and personal comfort, in collecting and preparing materials for his History, and few will be disposed to condemn severely errors and oversights in a work of such extent and difficulty.

In 1774 he had written A Plan for a Music School. In 1779 he wrote for the Royal Society an account of the infant Crotch, whose remarkable musical talent excited so much attention at that time. In 1784 he published, with an Italian title-page, the music annually performed in the pope's chapel at Rome during Passion Week. In 1785 he published, for the benefit of the Musical Fund, an account of the first commemoration of Handel in Westminster Abbey in the preceding year, with an excellent life of Handel. In 1796 he published Memoirs and Letters of Metastasio. Towards the close of his life Burney was paid £1000 for contributing to Rees's Cyclopaedia all the musical articles not belonging to the department of natural philosophy and mathematics. In 1783, through the treasury influence of his friend Edmund Burke, he was appointed organist to the chapel of Chelsea Hospital, and he moved his residence from St Martin's Street, Leicester Square, to live in the hospital for the remainder of his life. He was made a member of the Institute of France, and nominated a correspondent in the class of the fine arts, in the year 1810. From 1806 until his death he enjoyed a pension of £300 granted by Fox. He died at Chelsea College on the 12th of April 1814, and was interred in the burying-ground of the college. A tablet was erected to his memory in Westminster Abbey.

Burney's portrait was painted by Reynolds, and his bust was cut by Nollekens in 1805. He had a wide circle of acquaintance among the distinguished artists and literary men of his day. At one time he thought of writing a life of his friend Dr Samuel Johnson, but he retired before the crowd of biographers who rushed into that field. His character in private as well as in public life appears to have been very amiable and exemplary. Dr Burney's eldest son, James, was a distinguished officer in the royal navy, who died a rear-admiral in 1821; his second son was the Rev. Charles Burney, D.D. (1757-1817), a well-known classical scholar, whose splendid collection of rare books, and MSS. was ultimately bought by the nation for the British Museum; and his second daughter was Frances (Madame D'Arblay, q.v.).

The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay contain many minute and interesting particulars of her father's public and private life, and of his friends and contemporaries. A life of Burney by Madame D'Arblay appeared in 1832.

Besides the operatic music above mentioned, Burney's known compositions consist of:—(1) Six Sonatas for the harpsichord; (2) Two Sonatas for the harp or piano, with accompaniments for violin and violoncello; (3) Sonatas for two violins and a bass: two sets; (4) Six Lessons for the harpsichord; (5) Six Duets for two German flutes; (6) Three Concertos for the harpsichord; (7) Six concert pieces with an introduction and fugue for the organ; (8) Six Concertos for the violin, &c., in eight parts; (9) Two Sonatas for pianoforte, violin and violoncello; (10) A Cantata, &c.; (11) Anthems, &c.; (12) XII. Canzonetti a due voci in Canone, poesia dell' Abate Metastasio.

BURNHAM BEECHES, a wooded tract of 375 acres in Buckinghamshire, England, acquired in 1879 by the Corporation of the city of London, and preserved for public use. This tract, the remnant of an ancient forest, the more beautiful because of the undulating character of the land, lies west of the road between Slough and Beaconsfield, and 2 m. north of Burnham Beeches station on the Great Western railway. The poet Thomas Gray, who stayed frequently at Stoke Poges in the vicinity, is enthusiastic concerning the beauty of the Beeches ina letter to Horace Walpole in 1737. Near the township of Burnham are slight Early English remains of an abbey founded in 1265. Burnham is an urban district with a population (1901) of 3245.

BURNHAM-ON-CROUCH, an urban district in the southeastern parliamentary division of Essex, England, 43 m. E. by N. from London on a branch of the Great Eastern railway. Pop. (1901) 2919. The church of St Mary is principally late Perpendicular, a good example; it has Decorated portions and a Norman font. There are extensive oyster beds in the Crouch estuary. Burnham lies 6 m. from the North Sea; below it the Crouch is joined on the south side by the Roch, which branches into numerous creeks, and, together with the main estuary, forms Foulness, Wallasea, Potton and other low, flat islands, embanked and protected from incursions of the sea. Burnham is in some repute as a watering-place, and is a favourite yachting station. There is considerable trade in corn and coal, and boat-building is carried on.

BURNING TO DEATH. As a legal punishment for various crimes burning alive was formerly very wide-spread. It was common among the Romans, being given in the XII. Tables as the special penalty for arson. Under the Gothic codes adulterers were so punished, and throughout the middle ages it was the civil penalty for certain heinous crimes, e.g. poisoning, heresy, witchcraft, arson, bestiality and sodomy, and so continued in some cases, nominally at least, till the beginning of the 19th century. In England, under the common law, women condemned for high treason or petty treason (murder of husband, murder of master or mistress, certain offences against the coin, &c.) were burned, this being considered more "decent" than hanging and exposure on a gibbet. In practice the convict was strangled before being burnt. The last woman burnt in England suffered in 1789, the punishment being abolished in 1790.

Burning was not included among the penalties for heresy under the Roman imperial codes; but the burning of heretics by orthodox mobs had long been sanctioned by custom before the edicts of the emperor Frederick II. (1222, 1223) made it the civil-law punishment for heresy. His example was followed in France by Louis IX. in the Establishments of 1270. In England, where the civil law was never recognized, the common law took no cognizance of ecclesiastical offences, and the church courts had no power to condemn to death. There were, indeed, in the 12th and 13th centuries isolated instances of the burning of heretics. William of Newburgh describes the burning of certain foreign sectaries in 1169, and early in the 13th century a deacon was burnt by order of the council of Oxford (Foxe ii. 374; cf. Bracton, de Corona, ii. 300), but by what legal sanction is not obvious. The right of the crown to issue writs de haeretico comburendo, claimed for it by later jurists, was based on that issued by Henry IV. in 1400 for the burning of William Sawtre; but Sir James Stephen (Hist. Crim. Law) points out that this was issued "with the assent of the lords temporal," which seems to prove that the crown had no right under the common law to issue such writs. The burning of heretics was actually made legal in England by the statute de haeretico comburendo (1400), passed ten days after the issue of the above writ. This was repealed in 1533, but the Six Articles Act of 1539 revived burning as a penalty for denying transubstantiation. Under Queen Mary the acts of Henry IV. and Henry V. were revived; they were finally abolished in 1558 on the accession of Elizabeth. Edward VI., Elizabeth and James I., however, burned heretics (illegally as it would appear) under their supposed right of issuing writs for this purpose. The last heretics burnt in England were two Arians, Bartholomew Legate at Smithfield, and Edward Wightman at Lichfield, both in 1610. As for witches, countless numbers were burned in most European countries, though not in England, where they were hanged. In Scotland in Charles II.'s day the law still was that witches were to be "worried at the stake and then burnt"; and a witch was burnt at Dornoch so late as 1708.

BURNLEY, a market town and municipal, county and parliamentary borough of Lancashire, England, at the junction of the rivers Brun and Calder, 213 m. N.N.W. of London and 29 m. N. of Manchester, on the Lancashire & Yorkshire railway and the Leeds & Liverpool Canal. Pop. (1891) 87,016; (1901) 97,043. The church of St Peter dates from the 14th century, but is largely modernized; among a series of memorials of the Towneley family is one to Charles Towneley (d. 1805), who collected the series of antique marbles, terra-cottas, bronzes, coins and gems which are named after him and preserved in the British Museum. In 1902 Towneley Hall and Park were acquired by the corporation, the mansion being adapted to use as a museum and art gallery, and in 1903 a summer exhibition was held here. There are a large number of modern churches and chapels, a handsome town-hall, market hall, museum and art gallery, school of science, municipal technical school, various benevolent institutions, and pleasant public parks and recreation grounds. The principal industries are cotton-weaving, worsted-making, iron-founding, coal-mining, quarrying, brick-burning and the making of sanitary wares. It has been suggested that Burnley may coincide with Brunanburh, the battlefield on which the Saxons conquered the Dano-Celtic force in 937. During the cotton famine consequent upon the American war of 1861-65 it suffered severely, and the operatives were employed on relief works embracing an extensive system of improvements. The parliamentary borough (1867), which returns one member, falls within the Clitheroe division of the county. The county borough was created in 1888. The town was incorporated in 1861. The corporation consists of a mayor, 12 aldermen and 36 councillors. By act of parliament in 1890 Burnley was created a suffragan bishopric of the diocese of Manchester. Area of the municipal borough, 4005 acres.

BURNOUF, EUGÈNE (1801-1852), French orientalist, was born in Paris on the 8th of April 1801. His father, Prof. Jean Louis Burnouf (1775-1844), was a classical scholar of high reputation, and the author, among other works, of an excellent translation of Tacitus (6 vols., 1827-1833). Eugene Burnouf published in 1826 an Essai sur le Pâli ..., written in collaboration with Christian Lassen; and in the following year Observations grammaticales sur quelques passages de l'essai sur le Pâli. The next great work he undertook was the deciphering of the Zend manuscripts brought to France by Anquetil du Perron. By his labours a knowledge of the Zend language was first brought into the scientific world of Europe. He caused the Vendidad Sade, part of one of the books bearing the name of Zoroaster, to be lithographed with the utmost care from the Zend MS. in the Bibliothèque Nationale, and published it in folio parts, 1829-1843. From 1833 to 1835 he published his Commentaire sur le Yaçna, l'un des livres liturgiques des Parses; he also published the Sanskrit text and French translation of the Bhâgavata Purâna ou histoire poétique de Krichna in three folio volumes (1840-1847). His last works were Introduction à l'histoire du Bouddhisme indien (1844), and a translation of Le lotus de la bonne loi (1852). Burnouf died on the 28th of May 1852. He had been for twenty years a member of the Académie des Inscriptions and professor of Sanskrit in the Collège de France.

See a notice of Burnouf's works by Barthélemy Saint-Hilaire, prefixed to the second edition (1876) of the Introd. à l'histoire du Bouddhisme indien; also Naudet, "Notice historique sur M.M. Burnouf, père et fils," in Mem. de l'Acad. des Inscriptions, xx. A list of his valuable contributions to the Journal asiatique, and of his MS. writings, is given in the appendix to the Choix de lettres d'Eugène Burnouf (1891).

BURNOUS (from the Arab. burnus), a long cloak of coarse woollen stuff with a hood, usually white in colour, worn by the Arabs and Berbers throughout North Africa.

BURNS, SIR GEORGE, Bart. (1795-1890), English shipowner, was born in Glasgow on the 10th of December 1795, the son of the Rev. John Burns. In partnership with a brother, James, he began as a Glasgow general merchant about 1818, and in 1824 in conjunction with a Liverpool partner, Hugh Matthie, started a line of small sailing ships which ran between Glasgow and Liverpool. As business increased the vessels were also sailed to Belfast, and steamers afterwards replaced the sailing ships. In 1830 a partnership was entered into with the McIvers of Liverpool, in which George Burns devoted himself specially to the management of the ships. In 1838 with Samuel Cunard, Robert Napier and other capitalists, the partners (McIver and Burns) started the "Cunard" Atlantic line of steamships. They secured the British government's contract for the carrying of the mails to North America. The sailings were begun with four steamers of about 1000 tons each, which made the passage in 15 days at some 8½ knots per hour. George Burns retired from the Glasgow management of the line in 1860. He was made a baronet in 1889, but died on the 2nd of June 1890 at Castle Wemyss, where he had spent the latter years of his life.

John Burns (1829-1901), his eldest son, who succeeded him in the baronetcy, and became head of the Cunard Company, was created a peer, under the title of Baron Inverclyde, in 1897; he was the first to suggest to the government the use of merchant vessels for war purposes. George Arbuthnot Burns (1861-1905) succeeded his father in the peerage, as 2nd baron Inverclyde, and became chairman of the Cunard Company in 1902. He conducted the negotiations which resulted in the refusal of the Cunard Company to enter the shipping combination, the International Mercantile Marine Company, formed by Messrs J.P. Morgan & Co., and took a leading part in the application of turbine engines to ocean liners.

BURNS, JOHN (1858- ), English politician, was born at Vauxhall, London, in October 1858, the second son of Alexander Burns, an engineer, of Ayrshire extraction. He attended a national school in Battersea until he was ten years old, when he was sent to work in Price's candle factory. He worked for a short time as a page-boy, then in some engine works, and at fourteen was apprenticed for seven years to a Millbank engineer. He continued his education at the night-schools, and read extensively, especially the works of Robert Owen, J.S. Mill, Paine and Cobbett. He ascribed his conversion to the principles of socialism to his sense of the insufficiency of the arguments advanced against it by J.S. Mill, but he had learnt socialistic doctrine from a French fellow-workman, Victor Delahaye, who had witnessed the Commune. After working at his trade in various parts of England, and on board ship, he went for a year to the West African coast at the mouth of the Niger as a foreman engineer. His earnings from this undertaking were expended on a six months' tour in France, Germany and Austria for the study of political and economic conditions. He had early begun the practice of outdoor speaking, and his exceptional physical strength and strong voice were invaluable qualifications for a popular agitator. In 1878 he was arrested and locked up for the night for addressing an open-air demonstration on Clapham Common. Two years later he married Charlotte Gale, the daughter of a Battersea shipwright. He was again arrested in 1886 for his share in the West End riots when the windows of the Carlton and other London clubs were broken, but cleared himself at the Old Bailey of the charge of inciting the mob to violence. In November of the next year, however, he was again arrested for resisting the police in their attempt to break up the meeting in Trafalgar Square, and was condemned to six weeks' imprisonment. A speech delivered by him at the Industrial Remuneration Conference of 1884 had attracted considerable attention, and in that year he became a member of the Social Democratic Federation, which put him forward unsuccessfully in the next year as parliamentary candidate for West Nottingham. His connexion with the Social Democratic Federation was short-lived; but he was an active member of the executive of the Amalgamated Engineers' trade union, and was connected with the trades union congresses until 1895, when, through his influence, a resolution excluding all except wage labourers was passed. He was still working at his trade in Hoe's printing machine works when he became a Progressive member of the first London County Council, being supported by an allowance of £2 a week subscribed by his constituents, the Battersea working men. He introduced in 1892 a motion that all contracts for the County Council should be paid at trade union rates and carried out under trade union conditions, and devoted his efforts in general to a war against monopolies, except those of the state or the municipality. In the same year (1889) in which he became a member of the County Council, he acted with Mr Ben Tillett as the chief leader and organizer of the London dock strike. He entered the House of Commons as member for Battersea in 1892, and was re-elected in 1895, 1900 and 1906. In parliament he became well known as an independent Radical, and he was included in the Liberal cabinet by Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman in December 1905 as president of the Local Government Board. During the next two years, though much out of favour with his former socialist allies, he earned golden opinions for his administrative policy, and for his refusal to adopt the visionary proposals put forward by the more extreme members of the Labour party for dealing with the "unemployed" question; and in 1908 he retained his office in Mr Asquith's cabinet.

BURNS, ROBERT (1759-1796), Scottish poet, was born on the 25th of January 1759 in a cottage about 2 m. from Ayr. He was the eldest son of a small farmer, William Burness, of Kincardineshire stock, who wrought hard, practised integrity, wished to bring up his children in the fear of God, but had to fight all his days against the winds and tides of adversity. "The poet," said Thomas Carlyle, "was fortunate in his father—a man of thoughtful intense character, as the best of our peasants are, valuing knowledge, possessing some and open-minded for more, of keen insight and devout heart, friendly and fearless: a fully unfolded man seldom found in any rank in society, and worth descending far in society to seek. ... Had he been ever so little richer, the whole might have issued otherwise. But poverty sunk the whole family even below the reach of our cheap school system, and Burns remained a hard-worked plough-boy."

Through a series of migrations from one unfortunate farm to another; from Alloway (where he was taught to read) to Mt. Oliphant, and then (1777) to Lochlea in Tarbolton (where he learnt the rudiments of geometry), the poet remained in the same condition of straitened circumstances. At the age of thirteen he thrashed the corn with his own hands, at fifteen he was the principal labourer. The family kept no servant, and for several years butchers' meat was a thing unknown in the house. "This kind of life," he writes, "the cheerless gloom of a hermit and the unceasing toil of a galley-slave, brought me to my sixteenth year." His naturally robust frame was overtasked, and his nervous constitution received a fatal strain. His shoulders were bowed, he became liable to headaches, palpitations and fits of depressing melancholy. From these hard tasks and his fiery temperament, craving in vain for sympathy in a frigid air, grew the strong temptations on which Burns was largely wrecked,—the thirst for stimulants and the revolt against restraint which soon made headway and passed all bars. In the earlier portions of his career a buoyant humour bore him up; and amid thick-coming shapes of ill he bated no jot of heart or hope. He was cheered by vague stirrings of ambition, which he pathetically compares to the "blind groping of Homer's Cyclops round the walls of his cave." Sent to school at Kirkoswald, he became, for his scant leisure, a great reader—eating at meal-times with a spoon in one hand and a book in the other,—and carrying a few small volumes in his pocket to study in spare moments in the fields. "The collection of songs" he tells us, "was my vade mecum. I pored over them driving my cart or walking to labour, song by song, verse by verse, carefully noting the true, tender, sublime or fustian." He lingered over the ballads in his cold room by night; by day, whilst whistling at the plough, he invented new forms and was inspired by fresh ideas, "gathering round him the memories and the traditions of his country till they became a mantle and a crown." It was among the furrows of his father's fields that he was inspired with the perpetually quoted wish—

"That I for poor auld Scotland's sake

Some useful plan or book could make,

Or sing a sang at least."

An equally striking illustration of the same feeling is to be found in his summer Sunday's ramble to the Leglen wood,—the fabled haunt of Wallace,—which the poet confesses to have visited "with as much devout enthusiasm as ever pilgrim did the shrine of Loretto." In another reference to the same period he refers to the intense susceptibility to the homeliest aspects of Nature which throughout characterized his genius. "Scarcely any object gave me more—I do not know if I should call it pleasure—but something which exalts and enraptures me—than to walk in the sheltered side of a wood or high plantation in a cloudy winter day and hear the stormy wind howling among the trees and raving over the plain. I listened to the birds, and frequently turned out of my path lest I should disturb their little songs or frighten them to another station." Auroral visions were gilding his horizon as he walked in glory, if not in joy, "behind his plough upon the mountain sides."; but the swarm of his many-coloured fancies was again made grey by the atra cura of unsuccessful toils.

Burns had written his first verses of note, "Behind yon hills where Stinchar (afterwards Lugar) flows," when in 1781 he went to Irvine to learn the trade of a flax-dresser. "It was," he says, "an unlucky affair. As we were giving a welcome carousal to the New Year, the shop took fire and burned to ashes; and I was left, like a true poet, without a sixpence." His own heart, too, had unfortunately taken fire. He was poring over mathematics till, in his own phraseology,—still affected in its prose by the classical pedantries caught from Pope by Ramsay,—"the sun entered Virgo, when a charming fillette, who lived next door, overset my trigonometry, and set me off at a tangent from the scene of my studies." We need not detail the story, nor the incessant repetitions of it, which marked and sometimes marred his career. The poet was jilted, went through the usual despairs, and resorted to the not unusual sources of consolation. He had found that he was "no enemy to social life," and his mates had discovered that he was the best of boon companions in the lyric feasts, where his eloquence shed a lustre over wild ways of life, and where he was beginning to be distinguished as a champion of the New Lights and a satirist of the Calvinism whose waters he found like those of Marah.

In Robert's 25th year his father died, full of sorrows and apprehensions for the gifted son who wrote for his tomb in Alloway kirkyard, the fine epitaph ending with the characteristic line—

"For even his failings leaned to virtue's side."

For some time longer the poet, with his brother Gilbert, lingered at Lochlea, reading agricultural books, miscalculating crops, attending markets, and in a mood of reformation resolving, "in spite of the world, the flesh and the devil, to be a wise man." Affairs, however, went no better with the family; and in 1784 they migrated to Mossgiel, where he lived and wrought, during four years, for a return scarce equal to the wage of the commonest labourer in our day. Meanwhile he had become intimate with his future wife, Jean Armour; but the father, a master mason, discountenanced the match, and the girl being disposed to "sigh as a lover," as a daughter to obey, Burns, in 1786, gave up his suit, resolved to seek refuge in exile, and having accepted a situation as book-keeper to a slave estate in Jamaica, had taken his passage in a ship for the West Indies. His old associations seemed to be breaking up, men and fortune scowled, and "hungry ruin had him in the wind," when he wrote the lines ending—

"Adieu, my native banks of Ayr,"

and addressed to the most famous of the loves, in which he was as prolific as Catullus or Tibullus, the proposal—

"Will ye go to the Indies, my Mary."

He was withheld from his project and, happily or unhappily, the current of his life was turned by the success of his first volume, which was published at Kilmarnock in June 1786. It contained some of his most justly celebrated poems, the results of his scanty leisure at Lochlea and Mossgiel; among others "The Twa Dogs,"—a graphic idealization of Aesop,—"The Author's Prayer," the "Address to the Deil," "The Vision" and "The Dream," "Halloween," "The Cottar's Saturday Night," the lines "To a Mouse" and "To a Daisy," "Scotch Drink," "Man was made to Mourn," the "Epistle to Davie," and some of his most popular songs. This epitome of a genius so marvellous and so varied took his audience by storm. "The country murmured of him from sea to sea." "With his poems," says Robert Heron, "old and young, grave and gay, learned and ignorant, were alike transported. I was at that time resident in Galloway, and I can well remember how even plough-boys and maid-servants would have gladly bestowed the wages they earned the most hardly, and which they wanted to purchase necessary clothing, if they might but procure the works of Burns." This first edition only brought the author £20 direct return, but it introduced him to the literati of Edinburgh, whither he was invited, and where he was welcomed, feasted, admired and patronized. He appeared as a portent among the scholars of the northern capital and its university, and manifested, according to Mr Lockhart, "in the whole strain of his bearing, his belief that in the society of the most eminent men of his nation he was where he was entitled to be, hardly deigning to flatter them by exhibiting a symptom of being flattered."

Sir Walter Scott bears a similar testimony to the dignified simplicity and almost exaggerated independence of the poet, during this annus mirabilis of his success. "As for Burns, Virgilium vidi tantum, I was a lad of fifteen when he came to Edinburgh, but had sense enough to be interested in his poetry, and would have given the world to know him. I saw him one day with several gentlemen of literary reputation, among whom I remember the celebrated Dugald Stewart. Of course we youngsters sat silent, looked, and listened.... I remember ... his shedding tears over a print representing a soldier lying dead in the snow, his dog sitting in misery on one side, on the other his widow with a child in her arms. His person was robust, his manners rustic, not clownish. ... His countenance was more massive than it looks in any of the portraits. There was a strong expression of shrewdness in his lineaments; the eye alone indicated the poetic character and temperament. It was large and of a dark cast, and literally glowed when he spoke with feeling or interest. I never saw such another eye in a human head. His conversation expressed perfect self-confidence, without the least intrusive forwardness. I thought his acquaintance with English poetry was rather limited; and having twenty times the abilities of Allan Ramsay and of Fergusson he talked of them with too much humility as his models. He was much caressed in Edinburgh, but the efforts made for his relief were extremely trifling." Laudatur et alget. Burns went from those meetings, where he had been posing professors (no hard task), and turning the heads of duchesses, to share a bed in the garret of a writer's apprentice,—they paid together 3s. a week for the room. It was in the house of Mr Carfrae, Baxter's Close, Lawnmarket, "first scale stair on the left hand in going down, first door in the stair." During Burns's life it was reserved for William Pitt to recognize his place as a great poet; the more cautious critics of the North were satisfied to endorse him as a rustic prodigy, and brought upon themselves a share of his satire. Some of the friendships contracted during this period—as for Lord Glencairn and Mrs Dunlop—are among the most pleasing and permanent in literature; for genuine kindness was never wasted on one who, whatever his faults, has never been accused of ingratitude. But in the bard's city life there was an unnatural element. He stooped to beg for neither smiles nor favour, but the gnarled country oak is cut up into cabinets in artificial prose and verse. In the letters to Mr Graham, the prologue to Mr Wood, and the epistles to Clarinda, he is dancing minuets with hob-nailed shoes. When, in 1787, the second edition of the Poems came out, the proceeds of their sale realized for the author £400. On the strength of this sum he gave himself two long rambles, full of poetic material—one through the border towns into England as far as Newcastle, returning by Dumfries to Mauchline, and another a grand tour through the East Highlands, as far as Inverness, returning by Edinburgh, and so home to Ayrshire.

In 1788 Burns took a new farm at Ellisland on the Nith, settled there, married, lost his little money, and wrote, among other pieces, "Auld Lang Syne" and "Tam o' Shanter." In 1789 he obtained, through the good office of Mr Graham of Fintry, an appointment as excise-officer of the district, worth £50 per annum. In 1791 he removed to a similar post at Dumfries worth £70. In the course of the following year he was asked to contribute to George Thomson's Select Collection of Original Scottish Airs with Symphonies and Accompaniments for the Pianoforte and Violin: the poetry by Robert Burns. To this work he contributed about one hundred songs, the best of which are now ringing in the ear of every Scotsman from New Zealand to San Francisco. For these, original and adapted, he received a shawl for his wife, a picture by David Allan representing the "Cottar's Saturday Night," and £5! The poet wrote an indignant letter and never afterwards composed for money. Unfortunately the "Rock of Independence" to which he had proudly retired was but a castle of air, over which the meteors of French political enthusiasm cast a lurid gleam. In the last years of his life, exiled from polite society on account of his revolutionary opinions, he became sourer in temper and plunged more deeply into the dissipations of the lower ranks, among whom he found his only companionship and sole, though shallow, sympathy.

Burns began to feel himself prematurely old. Walking with a friend who proposed to him to join a county ball, he shook his head, saying "that's all over now," and adding a verse of Lady Grizel Baillie's ballad—

"O were we young as we ance hae been,

We sud hae been galloping down on yon green,

And linking it ower the lily-white lea,

But were na my heart light I wad dee."

His hand shook; his pulse and appetite failed; his spirits sunk into a uniform gloom. In April 1796 he wrote—"I fear it will be some time before I tune my lyre again. By Babel's streams I have sat and wept. I have only known existence by the pressure of sickness and counted time by the repercussions of pain. I close my eyes in misery and open them without hope. I look on the vernal day and say with poor Fergusson—

"Say wherefore has an all-indulgent heaven

Life to the comfortless and wretched given."

On the 4th of July he was seen to be dying. On the 12th he wrote to his cousin for the loan of £10 to save him from passing his last days in jail. On the 21st he was no more. On the 25th, when his last son came into the world, he was buried with local honours, the volunteers of the company to which he belonged firing three volleys over his grave.

It has been said that "Lowland Scotland as a distinct nationality came in with two warriors and went out with two bards. It came in with William Wallace and Robert Bruce and went out with Robert Burns and Walter Scott. The first two made the history, the last two told the story and sung the song." But what in the minstrel's lay was mainly a requiem was in the people's poet also a prophecy. The position of Burns in the progress of British literature may be shortly defined; he was a link between two eras, like Chaucer, the last of the old and the first of the new—the inheritor of the traditions and the music of the past, in some respects the herald of the future.

The volumes of our lyrist owe part of their popularity to the fact of their being an epitome of melodies, moods and memories that had belonged for centuries to the national life, the best inspirations of which have passed into them. But in gathering from his ancestors Burns has exalted their work by asserting a new dignity for their simplest themes. He is the heir of Barbour, distilling the spirit of the old poet's epic into a battle chant, and of Dunbar, reproducing the various humours of a half-sceptical, half-religious philosophy of life. He is the pupil of Ramsay, but he leaves his master, to make a social protest and to lead a literary revolt. The Gentle Shepherd, still largely a court pastoral, in which "a man's a man" if born a gentleman, may be contrasted with "The Jolly Beggars"—the one is like a minuet of the ladies of Versailles on the sward of the Swiss village near the Trianon, the other like the march of the maenads with Theroigne de Mericourt. Ramsay adds to the rough tunes and words of the ballads the refinement of the wits who in the "Easy" and "Johnstone" clubs talked over their cups of Prior and Pope, Addison and Gay. Burns inspires them with a fervour that thrills the most wooden of his race. We may clench the contrast by a representative example. This is from Ramsay's version of perhaps the best-known of Scottish songs,—

"Methinks around us on each bough

A thousand Cupids play;

Whilst through the groves I walk with you,

Each object makes me gay.

Since your return—the sun and moon

With brighter beams do shine,

Streams murmur soft notes while they run

As they did lang syne."

Compare the verses in Burns—

"We twa hae run about the braes

And pu'd the gowans fine;

But we've wandered mony a weary foot

Sin auld lang syne.

We twa hae paidl'd in the burn,

Frae morning sun till dine:

But seas between us braid hae roar'd

Sin auld lang syne."

Burns as a poet of the inanimate world doubtless derived hints from Thomson of The Seasons, but in his power of tuning its manifestation to the moods of the mind he is more properly ranked as a forerunner of Wordsworth. He never follows the fashions of his century, except in his failures—in his efforts at set panegyric or fine letter-writing. His highest work knows nothing of "Damon" or "Musidora." He leaves the atmosphere of drawing-rooms for the ingle or the ale-house or the mountain breeze.

The affectations of his style are insignificant and rare. His prevailing characteristic is an absolute sincerity. A love for the lower forms of social life was his besetting sin; Nature was his healing power. Burns compares himself to an Aeolian harp, strung to every wind of heaven. His genius flows over all living and lifeless things with a sympathy that finds nothing mean or insignificant. An uprooted daisy becomes in his pages an enduring emblem of the fate of artless maid and simple bard. He disturbs a mouse's nest and finds in the "tim'rous beastie" a fellow-mortal doomed like himself to "thole the winter's sleety dribble," and draws his oft-repeated moral. He walks abroad and, in a verse that glints with the light of its own rising sun before the fierce sarcasm of "The Holy Fair," describes the melodies of a "simmer Sunday morn." He loiters by Afton Water and "murmurs by the running brook a music sweeter than its own." He stands by a roofless tower, where "the howlet mourns in her dewy bower," and "sets the wild echoes flying," and adds to a perfect picture of the scene his famous vision of "Libertie." In a single stanza he concentrates the sentiment of many Night Thoughts—

"The pale moon is setting beyond the white wave,

And Time is setting wi' me, O."

For other examples of the same graphic power we may refer to the course of his stream—

"Whiles ow'r a linn the burnie plays

As through the glen it wimpled," &c.,

or to "The Birks of Aberfeldy" or the "spate" in the dialogue of "The Brigs of Ayr." The poet is as much at home in the presence of this flood as by his "trottin' burn's meander." Familiar with all the seasons he represents the phases of a northern winter with a frequency characteristic of his clime and of his fortunes; her tempests became anthems in his verse, and the sounding woods "raise his thoughts to Him that walketh on the wings of the wind"; full of pity for the shelterless poor, the "ourie cattle," the "silly sheep," and the "helpless birds," he yet reflects that the bitter blast is not "so unkind as man's ingratitude." This constant tendency to ascend above the fair or wild features of outward things, or to penetrate beneath them, to make them symbols, to endow them with a voice to speak for humanity, distinguishes Burns as a descriptive poet from the rest of his countrymen. As a painter he is rivalled by Dunbar and James I., more rarely by Thomson and Ramsay. The "lilt" of Tannahill's finest verse is even more charming. But these writers rest in their art; their main care is for their own genius. The same is true in a minor degree of some of his great English successors. Keats has a palette of richer colours, but he seldom condescends to "human nature's daily food." Shelley floats in a thin air to stars and mountain tops, and vanishes from our gaze like his skylark. Byron, in the midst of his revolutionary fervour, never forgets that he himself belongs to the "caste of Vere de Vere." Wordsworth's placid affection and magnanimity stretch beyond mankind, and, as in "Hart-leap-well" and the "Cuckoo," extend to bird and beast; he moralizes grandly on the vicissitudes of common life, but he does not enter into, because by right of superior virtue he places himself above them. "From the Lyrical Ballads," it has been said, "it does not appear that men eat or drink, marry or are given in marriage." We revere the monitor who, consciously good and great, gives us the dry light of truth, but we love the bard, nostrae deliciae, who is all fire—fire from heaven and Ayrshire earth mingling in the outburst of passion and of power, which is his poetry and the inheritance of his race. He had certainly neither culture nor philosophy enough to have written the "Ode on the Recollections of Childhood," but to appreciate that ode requires an education. The sympathies of Burns, as broad as Wordsworth's, are more intense; in turning his pages we feel ourselves more decidedly in the presence of one who joys with those who rejoice and mourns with those who mourn. He is never shallow, ever plain, and the expression of his feeling is so terse that it is always memorable. Of the people he speaks more directly for the people than any of our more considerable poets. Chaucer has a perfect hold of the homeliest phases of life, but he wants the lyric element, and the charm of his language has largely faded from untutored ears. Shakespeare, indeed, has at once a loftier vision and a wider grasp; for he sings of "Thebes and Pelops line," of Agincourt and Philippi, as of Falstaff, and Snug the joiner, and the "meanest flower that blows." But not even Shakespeare has put more thought into poetry which the most prosaic must appreciate than Burns has done. The latter moves in a narrower sphere and wants the strictly dramatic faculty, but its place is partly supplied by the vividness of his narrative. His realization of incident and character is manifested in the sketches in which the manners and prevailing fancies of his countrymen are immortalized in connexion with local scenery. Among those almost every variety of disposition finds its favourite. The quiet households of the kingdom have received a sort of apotheosis in the "Cottar's Saturday Night." It has been objected that the subject does not afford scope for the more daring forms of the author's genius; but had he written no other poem, this heartful rendering of a good week's close in a God-fearing home, sincerely devout, and yet relieved from all suspicion of sermonizing by its humorous touches, would have secured a permanent place in literature. It transcends Thomson and Beattie at their best, and will smell sweet like the actions of the just for generations to come.

Lovers of rustic festivity may hold that the poet's greatest performance is his narrative of "Halloween," which for easy vigour, fulness of rollicking life, blended truth and fancy, is unsurpassed in its kind. Campbell, Wilson, Hazlitt, Montgomery, Burns himself, and the majority of his critics, have recorded their preference for "Tam o' Shanter," where the weird superstitious element that has played so great a part in the imaginative work of this part of our island is brought more prominently forward. Few passages of description are finer than that of the roaring Doon and Alloway Kirk glimmering through the groaning trees; but the unique excellence of the piece consists in its variety, and a perfectly original combination of the terrible and the ludicrous. Like Goethe's Walpurgis Nacht, brought into closer contact with real life, it stretches from the drunken humours of Christopher Sly to a world of fantasies almost as brilliant as those of the Midsummer Night's Dream, half solemnized by the severer atmosphere of a sterner clime. The contrast between the lines "Kings may be blest," &c., and those which follow, beginning "But pleasures are like poppies spread," is typical of the perpetual antithesis of the author's thought and life, in which, at the back of every revelry, he sees the shadow of a warning hand, and reads on the wall the writing, Omnia mutantur. With equal or greater confidence other judges have pronounced Burns's masterpiece to be "The Jolly Beggars." Certainly no other single production so illustrates his power of exalting what is insignificant, glorifying what is mean, and elevating the lowest details by the force of his genius. "The form of the piece," says Carlyle, "is a mere cantata, the theme the half-drunken snatches of a joyous band of vagabonds, while the grey leaves are floating on the gusts of the wind in the autumn of the year. But the whole is compacted, refined and poured forth in one flood of liquid harmony. It is light, airy and soft of movement, yet sharp and precise in its details; every face is a portrait, and the whole a group in clear photography. The blanket of the night is drawn aside; in full ruddy gleaming light these rough tatterdemalions are seen at their boisterous revel wringing from Fate another hour of wassail and good cheer." Over the whole is flung a half-humorous, half-savage satire—aimed, like a two-edged sword, at the laws and the law-breakers, in the acme of which the graceless crew are raised above the level of ordinary gipsies, footpads and rogues, and are made to sit "on the hills like gods together, careless of mankind," and to launch their Titan thunders of rebellion against the world.

"A fig for those by law protected;

Liberty's a glorious feast;

Courts for cowards were erected,

Churches built to please the priest."

A similar mixture of drollery and defiance appears in the justly celebrated "Address to the Deil," which, mainly whimsical, is relieved by touches oan in the conception of such a being straying in lonely places and loitering among trees, or in the familiarity with which the poet lectures so awful a personage,"—we may add, than in the inimitable outbreak at the close—

"O would you tak a thought an' men'."

Carlyle, in reference to this passage, cannot resist the suggestion of a parallel from Sterne. "He is the father of curses and lies, said Dr Slop, and is cursed and damned already. I am sorry for it, quoth my Uncle Toby."

Burns fared ill at the hands of those who were not sorry for it, and who repeated with glib complacency every terrible belief of the system in which they had been trained. The most scathing of his Satires, under which head fall many of his minor and frequent passages in his major pieces, are directed against the false pride of birth, and what he conceived to be the false pretences of religion. The apologue of "Death and Dr Hornbook," "The Ordination," the song "No churchman am I for to rail and to write," the "Address to the Unco Guid," "Holy Willie," and above all "The Holy Fair," with its savage caricature of an ignorant ranter of the time called Moodie, and others of like stamp, not unnaturally provoked offence. As regards the poet's attitude towards some phases of Calvinism prevalent during his life, it has to be remarked that from the days of Dunbar there has been a degree of antagonism between Scottish verse and the more rigid forms of Scottish theology.

It must be admitted that in protesting against hypocrisy he has occasionally been led beyond the limits prescribed by good taste. He is at times abusive of those who differ from him. This, with other offences against decorum, which here and there disfigure his pages, can only be condoned by an appeal to the general tone of his writing, which is reverential. Burns had a firm faith in a Supreme Being, not as a vague mysterious Power; but as the Arbiter of human life. Amid the vicissitudes of his career he responds to the cottar's summons, "Let us worship God."

"An atheist's laugh's a poor exchange

For Deity offended"

is the moral of all his verse, which treats seriously of religious matters. His prayers in rhyme give him a high place among secular Psalmists.

Like Chaucer, Burns was a great moralist, though a rough one. In the moments of his most intense revolt against conventional prejudice and sanctimonious affectation, he is faithful to the great laws which underlie change, loyal in his veneration for the cardinal virtues—Truth, Justice and Charity,—and consistent in the warnings, to which his experience gives an unhappy force, against transgressions of Temperance. In the "Epistle to a Young Friend," the shrewdest advice is blended with exhortations appealing to the highest motive, that which transcends the calculation of consequences, and bids us walk in the straight path from the feeling of personal honour, and "for the glorious privilege of being independent." Burns, like Dante, "loved well because he hated, hated wickedness that hinders loving," and this feeling, as in the lines—"Dweller in yon dungeon dark," sometimes breaks bounds; but his calmer moods are better represented by the well-known passages in the "Epistle to Davie," in which he preaches acquiescence in our lot, and a cheerful acceptance of our duties in the sphere where we are placed. This philosophie douce, never better sung by Horace, is the prevailing refrain of our author's Songs. On these there are few words to add to the acclaim of a century. They have passed into the air we breathe; they are so real that they seem things rather than words, or, nearer still, living beings. They have taken all hearts, because they are the breath of his own; not polished cadences, but utterances as direct as laughter or tears. Since Sappho loved and sang, there has been no such national lyrist as Burns. Fine ballads, mostly anonymous, existed in Scotland previous to his time; and shortly before a few authors had produced a few songs equal to some of his best. Such are Alexander Ross's "Wooed and Married," Lowe's "Mary's Dream," "Auld Robin Gray," "The Land o' the Leal" and the two versions of "The Flowers o' the Forest." From these and many of the older pieces in Ramsay's collection, Burns admits to have derived copious suggestions and impulses. He fed on the past literature of his country as Chaucer on the old fields of English thought, and—

"Still the elements o' sang,

In formless jumble, right and wrang,

Went floating in his brain."

But he gave more than he received; he brought forth an hundredfold; he summed up the stray material of the past, and added so much of his own that one of the most conspicuous features of his lyrical genius is its variety in new paths. Between the first of war songs, composed in a storm on a moor, and the pathos of "Mary in Heaven," he has made every chord in our northern life to vibrate. The distance from "Duncan Gray" to "Auld Lang Syne" is nearly as great as that from Falstaff to Ariel. There is the vehemence of battle, the wail of woe, the march of veterans "red-wat-shod," the smiles of meeting, the tears of parting friends, the gurgle of brown burns, the roar of the wind through pines, the rustle of barley rigs, the thunder on the hill—all Scotland is in his verse. Let who will make her laws, Burns has made the songs, which her emigrants recall "by the long wash of Australasian seas," in which maidens are wooed, by which mothers lull their infants, which return "through open casements unto dying ears"—they are the links, the watchwords, the masonic symbols of the Scots race.

(J. N.)

The greater part of Burns's verse was posthumously published, and, as he himself took no care to collect the scattered pieces of occasional verse, different editors have from time to time printed, as his, verses that must be regarded as spurious. Poems chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, by Robert Burns (Kilmarnock, 1786), was followed by an enlarged edition printed in Edinburgh in the next year. Other editions of this book were printed—in London (1787), an enlarged edition at Edinburgh (2 vols., 1793) and a reprint of this in 1794. Of a 1790 edition mentioned by Robert Chambers no traces can be found. Poems by Burns appeared originally in The Caledonian Mercury, The Edinburgh Evening Courant, The Edinburgh Herald, The Edinburgh Advertiser; the London papers, Stuart's Star and Evening Advertiser (subsequently known as The Morning Star), The Morning Chronicle; and in the Edinburgh Magazine and The Scots Magazine. Many poems, most of which had first appeared elsewhere, were printed in a series of penny chap-books, Poetry Original and Select (Brash and Reid, Glasgow), and some appeared separately as broadsides. A series of tracts issued by Stewart and Meikle (Glasgow, 1796-1799) includes some Burns's numbers, The Jolly Beggars, Holy Willie's Prayer and other poems making their first appearance in this way. The seven numbers of this publication were reissued in January 1800 as The Poetical Miscellany. This was followed by Thomas Stewart's Poems ascribed to Robert Burns (Glasgow, 1801). Burns's songs appeared chiefly in James Johnson's Scots Musical Museum (6 vols., 1787-1803), which he appears after the first volume to have virtually edited, though the two last volumes were published only after his death; and in George Thomson's Select Collection of Original Scottish Airs (6 vols., 1793-1841). Only five of the songs done for Thomson appeared during the poet's lifetime, and Thomson's text cannot be regarded with confidence. The Hastie MSS. in the British Museum (Addit. MS. 22,307) include 162 songs, many of them in Burns's handwriting; and the Dalhousie MS., at Brechin Castle, contains Burns's correspondence with Thomson. For a full account of the songs see James C. Dick, The Songs of Robert Burns now first printed with the Melodies for which they were written (2 vols., 1903).

The items in Mr W. Craibe Angus's Printed Works of Robert Burns (1899) number nine hundred and thirty. Only the more important collected editions can be here noticed. Dr Currie was the anonymous editor of the Works of Robert Burns; with an Account of his Life, and a Criticism on his Writings ... (Liverpool, 1800). This was undertaken for the benefit of Burns's family at the desire of his friends, Alexander Cunningham and John Syme. A second and amended edition appeared in 1801, and was followed by others, but Currie's text is neither accurate nor complete. Additional matter appeared in Reliques of Robert Burns ... by R.H. Cromek (London, 1808). In The Works of Robert Burns, With his Life by Allan Cunningham (8 vols., London, 1834) there are many additions and much biographical material. The Works of Robert Burns, edited by James Hogg and William Motherwell (5 vols., 1834-1836, Glasgow and Edinburgh), contains a life of the poet by Hogg, and some useful notes by Motherwell attempting to trace the sources of Burns's songs. The Correspondence between Burns and Clarinda was edited by W.C. McLehose (Edinburgh, 1843). An improved text of the poems was provided in the second "Aldine Edition" of the Poetical Works (3 vols., 1839), for which Sir H. Nicolas, the editor, made use of many original MSS. In the Life and Works of Robert Burns, edited by Robert Chambers (Edinburgh, 4 vols., 1851-1852; library edition, 1856-1857; new edition, revised by William Wallace, 1896), the poet's works are given in chronological order, interwoven with letters and biography. The text was bowdlerized by Chambers, but the book contained much new and valuable information. Other well-known editions are those of George Gilfillan (2 vols., 1864); of Alexander Smith (Golden Treasury Series, London, 2 vols., 1865); of P. Hately Waddell (Glasgow, 1867); one published by Messrs Blackie & Son, with Dr Currie's memoir and an essay by Prof. Wilson (1843-1844); of W. Scott Douglas (the Kilmarnock edition, 1876, and the "library" edition, 1877-1879), and of Andrew Lang, assisted by W.A. Craigie (London, 1896). The complete correspondence between Burns and Mrs Dunlop was printed in 1898.

A critical edition of the Poetry of Robert Burns, which may be regarded as definitive, and is provided with full notes and variant readings, was prepared by W.E. Henley and T.F. Henderson (4 vols., Edinburgh, 1896-1897; reprinted, 1901), and is generally known as the "Centenary Burns." In vol. iii. the extent of Burns's indebtedness to Scottish folk-song and his methods of adaptation are minutely discussed; vol. iv. contains an essay on "Robert Burns. Life, Genius, Achievement," by W.E. Henley.

The chief original authority for Burns's life is his own letters. The principal "lives" are to be found in the editions just mentioned. His biography has also been written by J. Gibson Lockhart (Life of Burns, Edinburgh, 1828); for the "English Men of Letters" series in 1879 by Prof. J. Campbell Shairp; and by Sir Leslie Stephen in the Dictionary of National Biography (vol. viii., 1886). Among the more important essays on Burns are those by Thomas Carlyle (Edinburgh Review, December 1828); by John Nichol, the writer of the above article (W. Scott Douglas's edition of Burns); by R.L. Stevenson (Familiar Studies of Men and Books); by Auguste Angellier (Robert Burns. La vie et les œuvres, 2 vols., Paris, 1893); by Lord Rosebery (Robert Burns: Two Addresses in Edinburgh, 1896); by J. Logie Robertson (in In Scottish Fields, Edin., 1890, and Furth in Field, Edin., 1894); and T.F. Henderson (Robert Burns, 1904). There is a selected bibliography in chronological order in W.A. Craigie's Primer of Burns (1896).

BURNS AND SCALDS. A burn is the effect of dry heat applied to some part of the human body, a scald being the result of moist heat. Clinically there is no distinction between the two, and their classification and treatment are identical. In Dupuytren's classification, now most generally accepted, burns are divided into six classes according to the severest part of the lesion. Burns of the first degree are characterized by severe pain, redness of the skin, a certain amount of swelling that soon passes, and later exfoliation of the skin. Burns of the second degree show vesicles (small blisters) scattered over the inflamed area, and containing a clear, yellowish fluid. Beneath the vesicle the highly sensitive papillae of the skin are exposed. Burns of this degree leave no scar, but often produce a permanent discoloration. In burns of the third degree, there is a partial destruction of the true skin, leaving sloughs of a yellowish or black colour. The pain is at first intense, but passes off on about the second day to return again at the end of a week, when the sloughs separate, exposing the sensitive nerve filaments of the underlying skin. This results in a slightly depressed cicatrix, which happily, however, shows but slight tendency to contraction. Burns of the fourth degree, which follow the prolonged application of any form of intense heat, involve the total destruction of the true skin. The pain is much less severe than in the preceding class, since the nerve endings have been totally destroyed. The results, however, are far more serious, and the healing process takes place only very slowly on account of the destruction of the skin glands. As a result, deep puckered scars are formed, which show great tendency to contract, and where these are situated on face, neck or joints the resulting deformity and loss of function may be extremely serious. In burns of the fifth degree the underlying muscles are more or less destroyed, and in those of the sixth the bones are also charred. Examples of the last two classes are mainly provided by epileptics who fall into a fire during a fit.

The clinical history of a severe burn can be divided into three periods. The first period lasts from 36 to 48 hours, during which time the patient lies in a condition of profound shock, and consequently feels little or no pain. If death results from shock, coma first supervenes, which deepens steadily until the end comes. The second period begins when the effects of shock pass, and continues until the slough separates, this usually taking from seven to fourteen days. Considerable fever is present, and the tendency to every kind of complication is very great. Bronchitis, pneumonia, pleurisy, meningitis, intestinal catarrh, and even ulceration of the duodenum, have all been recorded. Hence both nursing and medical attendance must be very close during this time. It is probable that these complications are all the result of septic infection and absorption, and since the modern antiseptic treatment of burns they have become much less common. The third period is prolonged until recovery takes place. Death may result from septic absorption, or from the wound becoming infected with some organism, as tetanus, erysipelas, &c. The prognosis depends chiefly on the extent of skin involved, death almost invariably resulting when one-third of the total area of the body is affected, however superficially. Of secondary but still grave importance is the position of the burn, that over a serous cavity making the future more doubtful than one on a limb. Also it must be remembered that children very easily succumb to shock.

In treating a patient the condition of shock must be attended to first, since from it arises the primary danger. The sufferer must be wrapped immediately in hot blankets, and brandy given by the mouth or in an enema, while ether can be injected hypodermically. If the pulse is very bad a saline infusion must be administered. The clothes can then be removed and the burnt surfaces thoroughly cleansed with a very mild antiseptic, a weak solution of lysol acting very well. If there are blisters these must be opened and the contained effusion allowed to escape. Some surgeons leave them at this stage, but others prefer to remove the raised epithelium. When thoroughly cleansed, the wound is irrigated with sterilized saline solution and a dressing subsequently applied. For the more superficial lesions by far the best results are obtained from the application of gauze soaked in picric acid solution and lightly wrung out, being covered with a large antiseptic wool pad and kept in position by a bandage. Picric acid 1½ drams, absolute alcohol 3 oz., and distilled water 40 oz., make a good lotion. All being well, this need only be changed about twice a week. The various kinds of oil once so greatly advocated in treating burns are now largely abandoned since they have no antiseptic properties. The deeper burns can only be attended to by a surgeon, whose aim will be first to bring septic absorption to a minimum, and later to hasten the healing process. Skin grafting has great value after extensive burns, not because it hastens healing, which it probably does not do, but because it has a marked influence in lessening cicatricial contraction. When a limb is hopelessly charred, amputation is the only course.

BURNSIDE, AMBROSE EVERETT (1824-1881), American soldier, was born at Liberty, Indiana, on the 23rd of May 1824, of Scottish pedigree, his American ancestors settling first in South Carolina, and next in the north-west wilderness, where his parents lived in a rude log cabin. He was appointed to the United States military academy through casual favour, and graduated in 1847, when war with Mexico was nearly over. In 1853 he resigned his commission, and from 1853 to 1858 was engaged in the manufacture of firearms at Bristol, R.I. In 1856 he invented a breech-loading rifle. He was employed by the Illinois Central railroad until the Civil War broke out. Then he took command of a Rhode Island regiment of three months militia, on the summons of Governor Sprague, took part in the relief of the national capital, and commanded a brigade in the first battle of Bull Run. On the 6th of August 1861 he was commissioned brigadier-general of volunteers, and placed in charge of the expeditionary force which sailed in January 1862 under sealed orders for the North Carolina coast. The victories of Roanoke Island, Newbern and Fort Macon (February—April) were the chief incidents of a campaign which was favourably contrasted by the people with the work of the main army on the Atlantic coast. He was promoted major-general U.S.V. soon afterwards, and early in July, with his North Carolina troops (IX. army corps), he was transferred to the Virginian theatre of war. Part of his forces fought in the last battles of Pope's campaign in Virginia, and Burnside himself was engaged in the battles of South Mountain and Antietam. At the latter he was in command of McClellan's left wing, but the want of vigour in his attack was unfavourably criticized. His patriotic spirit, modesty and amiable manners, made him highly popular, and upon McClellan's final removal (Nov. 7) from the Army of the Potomac, President Lincoln chose him as successor. The choice was unfortunate. Much as he was liked, no one had ever looked upon him as the equal of McClellan, and it was only with the greatest reluctance that he himself accepted the responsibility, which he had on two previous occasions declined. He sustained a crushing defeat at the battle of Fredericksburg (13 Dec. 1862), and (Jan. 27) gave way to Gen. Hooker, after a tenure of less than three months. Transferred to Cincinnati in March 1863, he caused the arrest and court-martial of Clement L. Vallandigham, lately an opposition member of Congress, for an alleged disloyal speech, and later in the year his measures for the suppression of press criticism aroused much opposition; he helped to crush Morgan's Ohio raid in July; then, moving to relieve the loyalists in East Tennessee, in September entered Knoxville, to which the Confederate general James Longstreet unsuccessfully laid siege. In 1864 Burnside led his old IX. corps under Grant in the Wilderness and Petersburg campaigns. After bearing his part well in the many bloody battles of that time, he was overtaken once more by disaster. The failure of the "Burnside mine" at Petersburg brought about his resignation. A year later he left the service, and in 1866 he became governor of Rhode Island, serving for three terms (1866-1869). From 1875 till his death he was a Republican member of the United States Congress. He was present with the German headquarters at the siege of Paris in 1870-71. He died at Bristol, Rhode Island, on the 13th of September 1881.

See B.P. Poore, Life and Public Services of Ambrose E. Burnside (Providence, 1882); A. Woodbury, Major-General Burnside and the Ninth Army Corps (Providence, 1867).

BURNTISLAND, a royal, municipal and police burgh of Fife, Scotland, on the shore of the Firth of Forth, 5¾ m. S.W. of Kirkcaldy by the North British railway. Pop. (1891) 4993; (1901) 4846. It is protected from the north wind by the Binn (632 ft.), and in consequence of its excellent situation, its links and sandy beach, it enjoys considerable repute as a summer resort. The chief industries are distilling, fisheries, shipbuilding and shipping, especially the export of coal and iron. Until the opening of the Forth bridge, its commodious harbour was the northern station of the ferry across the firth from Granton, 5 m. south. The parish church, dating from 1594, is a plain structure, with a squat tower rising in two tiers from the centre of the roof. The public buildings include two hospitals, a town-hall, music hall, library and reading room and science institute. On the rocks forming the western end of the harbour stands Rossend Castle, where the amorous French poet Chastelard repeated the insult to Queen Mary which led to his execution. In 1667 it was ineffectually bombarded by the Dutch. The burgh was originally called Parva Kinghorn and later Wester Kinghorn. The origin and meaning of the present name of the town have always been a matter of conjecture. There seems reason to believe that it refers to the time when the site, or a portion of it, formed an island, as sea-sand is the subsoil even of the oldest quarters. Another derivation is from Gaelic words meaning "the island beyond the bend." With Dysart, Kinghorn and Kirkcaldy, it unites in returning one member to parliament.

BURR, AARON (1756-1836), American political leader, was born at Newark, New Jersey, on the 6th of February 1756. His father, the Rev. Aaron Burr (1715-1757), was the second president (1748-1757) of the College of New Jersey, now Princeton University; his mother was the daughter of Jonathan Edwards, the well-known Calvinist theologian. The son graduated from the College of New Jersey in 1772, and two years later began the study of law in the celebrated law school conducted by his brother-in-law, Tappan Reeve, at Litchfield, Connecticut. Soon after the outbreak of the War of Independence, in 1775, he joined Washington's army in Cambridge, Mass. He accompanied Arnold's expedition into Canada in 1775, and on arriving before Quebec he disguised himself as a Catholic priest and made a dangerous journey of 120 m. through the British lines to notify Montgomery, at Montreal, of Arnold's arrival. He served for a time on the staffs of Washington and Putnam in 1776-77, and by his vigilance in the retreat from Long Island he saved an entire brigade from capture. On becoming lieutenant-colonel in July 1777, he assumed the command of a regiment, and during the winter at Valley Forge guarded the "Gulf," a pass commanding the approach to the camp, and necessarily the first point that would be attacked. In the engagement at Monmouth, on the 28th of June 1778, he commanded one of the brigades in Lord Stirling's division. In January 1779 Burr was assigned to the command of the "lines" of Westchester county, a region between the British post at Kingsbridge and that of the Americans about 15 m. to the north. In this district there was much turbulence and plundering by the lawless elements of both Whigs and Tories and by bands of ill-disciplined soldiers from both armies. Burr established a thorough patrol system, rigorously enforced martial law, and quickly restored order.

He resigned from the army in March 1779, on account of ill-health, renewed the study of law, was admitted to the bar at Albany in 1782, and began to practise in New York city after its evacuation by the British in the following year. In 1782 he married Theodosia Prevost (d. 1794), the widow of a British army officer who had died in the West Indies during the War of Independence. They had one child, a daughter, Theodosia, born in 1783, who became widely known for her beauty and accomplishments, married Joseph Alston of South Carolina in 1801, and was lost at sea in 1813. Burr was a member of the state assembly (1784-1785), attorney-general of the state (1789-1791), United States senator (1791-1797), and again a member of the assembly (1798-1799 and 1800-1801). As national parties became clearly defined, he associated himself with the Democratic-Republicans. Although he was not the founder of Tammany Hall, he began the construction of the political machine upon which the power of that organization is based. In the election of 1800 he was placed on the Democratic-Republican presidential ticket with Thomas Jefferson, and each received the same number of electoral votes. It was well understood that the party intended that Jefferson should be president and Burr vice-president, but owing to a defect (later remedied) in the Constitution the responsibility for the final choice was thrown upon the House of Representatives. The attempts of a powerful faction among the Federalists to secure the election of Burr failed, partly because of the opposition of Alexander Hamilton and partly, it would seem, because Burr himself would make no efforts to obtain votes in his own favour. On Jefferson's election, Burr of course became vice-president. His fair and judicial manner as president of the Senate, recognized even by his bitterest enemies, helped to foster traditions in regard to that position quite different from those which have become associated with the speakership of the House of Representatives.

Hamilton had opposed Burr's aspirations for the vice-presidency in 1792, and had exerted influence through Washington to prevent his appointment as brigadier-general in 1798, at the time of the threatened war between the United States and France. It was also in a measure his efforts which led to Burr's lack of success in the New York gubernatorial campaign of 1804; moreover the two had long been rivals at the bar. Smarting under defeat and angered by Hamilton's criticisms, Burr sent the challenge which resulted in the famous duel at Weehawken, N.J., on the 11th of July 1804, and the death of Hamilton (q.v.) on the following day. After the expiration of his term as vice-president (March 4, 1805), broken in fortune and virtually an exile from New York, where, as in New Jersey, he had been indicted for murder after the duel with Hamilton, Burr visited the South-west and became involved in the so-called conspiracy which has so puzzled the students of that period. The traditional view that he planned a separation of the West from the Union is now discredited. Apart from the question of political morality he could not, as a shrewd politician, have failed to see that the people of that section were too loyal to sanction such a scheme. The objects of his treasonable correspondence with Merry and Yrujo, the British and Spanish ministers at Washington, were, it would seem, to secure money and to conceal his real designs, which were probably to overthrow Spanish power in the Southwest, and perhaps to found an imperial dynasty in Mexico. He was arrested in 1807 on the charge of treason, was brought to trial before the United States circuit court at Richmond, Virginia, Chief-Justice Marshall presiding, and he was acquitted, in spite of the fact that the political influence of the national administration was thrown against him. Immediately afterward he was tried on a charge of misdemeanour, and on a technicality was again acquitted. He lived abroad from 1808 to 1812, passing most of his time in England, Scotland, Denmark, Sweden and France; trying to secure aid in the prosecution of his filibustering schemes but meeting with numerous rebuffs, being ordered out of England and Napoleon refusing to receive him. In 1812 he returned to New York and spent the remainder of his life in the practice of law. Burr was unscrupulous, insincere and notoriously immoral, but he was pleasing in his manners, generous to a fault, and was intensely devoted to his wife and daughter. In 1833 he married Eliza B. Jumel (1769-1865), a rich New York widow; the two soon separated, however, owing to Burr's having lost much of her fortune in speculation. He died at Port Richmond, Staten Island, New York, on the 14th of September 1836.

The standard biography is James Parton's The Life and Times of Aaron Burr (first edition, 1857; enlarged edition, 2 vols., Boston and New York, 1898). W.F. McCaleb's The Aaron Burr Conspiracy (New York, 1903) is a scholarly defence of the West and incidentally of Burr against the charge of treason, and is the best account of the subject; see also I. Jenkinson, Aaron Burr (Richmond, Ind., 1902). For the traditional view of Burr's conspiracy, see Henry Adams's History of the United States, vol. iii. (New York, 1890).

BURRIANA, a seaport of eastern Spain, in the province of Castellón de la Plana; on the estuary of the river Séco, which flows into the Mediterranean Sea. Pop. (1900) 12,962. The harbour of Burriana on the open sea is annually visited by about three hundred small coasting-vessels. Its exports consist chiefly of oranges grown in the surrounding fertile plain, which is irrigated with water from the river Mijares, on the north, and also produces large quantities of grain, oil, wine and melons. Burriana is connected by a light railway with the neighbouring towns of Onda (6595), Almazóra (7070), Villarreal (16,068) and Castellón de la Plana (29,904). Its nearest station on the Barcelona-Valencia coast railway is Villarreal.

BURRITT, ELIHU (1810-1879), American philanthropist, known as "the learned blacksmith," was born in New Britain, Conn., on the 8th of December 1810. His father (a farmer and shoemaker), and his grandfather, both of the same name, had served in the Revolutionary army. An elder brother, Elijah, who afterwards published The Geography of the Heavens and other text-books, went out into the world while Elihu was still a boy, and after editing a paper in Georgia came back to New Britain and started a school. Elihu, however, had to pick up what knowledge he could get from books at home, where his father's long illness, ending in death, made his services necessary. At sixteen he was apprenticed to a blacksmith, and he made this his trade both there and at Worcester, Mass., where he removed in 1837. He had a passion for reading; from the village library he borrowed book after book, which he studied at his forge or in his spare hours; and he managed to find time for attending his brother's school for a while, and even for pursuing his search for culture among the advantages to be found at New Haven. He mastered Latin, Greek, French, Spanish, Italian and German, and by the age of thirty could read nearly fifty languages. His extraordinary aptitude gradually made him famous. He took to lecturing, and then to an ardent crusade on behalf of universal peace and human brotherhood, which made him travel persistently to various parts of the United States and Europe. In 1848 he organized the Brussels congress of Friends of Peace, which was followed by annual congresses in Paris, Frankfort, London, Manchester and Edinburgh. He wrote and published voluminously, leaflets, pamphlets and volumes, and started the Christian Citizen at Worcester to advocate his humanitarian views. Cheap trans-oceanic postage was an ideal for which he agitated wherever he went. His vigorous philanthropy keeps the name of Elihu Burritt green in the history of the peace movement, apart from the fame of his learning. His countrymen, at universities such as Yale and elsewhere, delighted to do him honour; and he was U.S. consul at Birmingham from 1865 to 1870. He returned to America and died at New Britain on the 9th of March 1879.

See Life, by Charles Northend, in the memorial volume (1879); and an article by Ellen Strong Bartlett in the New England Magazine (June, 1897).

BURROUGHS, GEORGE (c. 1650-1692), American congregational pastor, graduated at Harvard in 1670, and became the minister of Salem Village (now Danvers) in 1680, a charge which he held till 1683. He lived at Falmouth (now Portland, Maine) until the Indians destroyed it in 1690, when he removed to Wells. In May 1692 during the witchcraft delusion, on the accusation of some personal enemies in his former congregation who had sued him for debt, Burroughs was arrested and charged, among other offences, with "extraordinary Lifting and such feats of strength as could not be done without Diabolicall Assistance." Though the jury found no witch-marks on his body he was convicted and executed on Gallows Hill, Salem, on the 19th of August, the only minister who suffered this extreme fate.

BURROUGHS, JOHN (1837- ), American poet and writer on natural history, was born in Roxbury, Delaware county, New York, on the 3rd of April 1837. In his earlier years he engaged in various pursuits, teaching, journalism, farming and fruit-raising, and for nine years was a clerk in the treasury department at Washington. After publishing in 1867 a volume of Notes on Walt Whitman as poet and person (a subject to which he returned in 1896 with his Whitman: a Study), he began in 1871, with Wake-Robin, a series of books on birds, flowers and rural scenes which has made him the successor of Thoreau as a popular essayist en the plants and animals environing human life. His later writings showed a more philosophic mood and a greater disposition towards literary or meditative allusion than their predecessors, but the general theme and method remained the same. His chief books, in addition to Wake-Robin, are Birds and Poets (1877), Locusts and Wild Honey (1879), Signs and Seasons (1886), and Ways of Nature (1905); these are in prose, but he wrote much also in verse, a volume of poems, Bird and Bough, being published in 1906. Winter Sunshine (1875) and Fresh Fields (1884) are sketches of travel in England and France.

A biographical sketch of Burroughs is prefixed to his Year in the Fields (new ed., 1901). A complete uniform edition of his works was issued in 1895, &c. (Riverside edition, Cambridge, Mass.).

BURSAR (Med. Lat. bursarius), literally a keeper of the bursa or purse. The word is now chiefly used of the official, usually one of the fellows, who administers the finances of a college at a university, or of the treasurer of a school or other institution. The term is also applied to the holder of "a bursary," an exhibition at Scottish schools or universities, and also in England a scholarship or exhibition enabling a pupil of an elementary school to continue his education at a secondary school. The term "burse" (Lat. bursa, Gr. βόρσα, bag of skin) is particularly used of the embroidered purse which is one of the insignia of office of the lord high chancellor of England, and of the pouch which in the Roman Church contains the "corporal" in the service of the Mass. The "bursa" is a square case opening at one side only and covered and lined with silk or linen; one side should be of the colour of the vestments of the day.

BURSCHENSCHAFT, an association of students at the German universities. It was formed as a result of the German national sentiment awakened by the War of Liberation, its object being to foster patriotism and Christian conduct, as opposed to the particularism and low moral standard of the old Landsmannschaften. It originated at Jena, under the patronage of the grand-duke of Saxe-Weimar, and rapidly spread, the Allgemeine deutsche Burschenschaft being established in 1818. The loud political idealism of the Burschen excited the fears of the reactionary powers, which culminated after the murder of Kotzebue (q.v.) by Karl Sand in 1819, a crime inspired by a secret society among the Burschen known as the Blacks (Schwarzen). The repressive policy embodied in the Carlsbad Decrees (q.v.) was therefore directed mainly against the Burschenschaft, which none the less survived to take part in the revolutions of 1830. After the émeute at Frankfort in 1833, the association was again suppressed, but it lived on until, in 1848, all laws against it were abrogated. The Burschenschaften are now purely social and non-political societies. The Reformburschenschaften, formed since 1883 on the principle of excluding duelling, are united in the Allgemeiner deutscher Burschenbund.

BURSIAN, CONRAD (1830-1883), German philologist and archaeologist, was born at Mutzschen in Saxony, on the 14th of November 1830. On the removal of his parents to Leipzig, he received his early education at the Thomas school, and entered the university in 1847. Here he studied under Moritz Haupt and Otto Jahn until 1851, spent six months in Berlin (chiefly to attend Böckh's lectures), and completed his university studies at Leipzig (1852). The next three years were devoted to travelling in Belgium, France, Italy and Greece. In 1856 he became a Privat-docent, and in 1858 extraordinary professor at Leipzig; in 1861 professor of philology and archaeology at Tübingen; in 1864 professor of classical antiquities at Zurich; in 1869 at Jena, where he was also director of the archaeological museum; in 1874 at Munich, where he remained until his death on the 21st of September 1883. His most important works are: Geographie von Griechenland (1862-1872); Beiträge zur Geschichte der klassischen Studien im Mittelalter (1873); Geschichte der klassischen Philologie in Deutschland (1883); editions of Julius Firmicus Maternus' De Errore Profanarum Religionum (1856) and of Seneca's Suasoriae (1857). The article on Greek Art in Ersch and Gruber's Encyclopaedia is by him. Probably the work in connexion with which he is best known is the Jahresbericht über die Fortschritte der klassischen Altertumswissenschaft (1873, &c.), of which he was the founder and editor; from 1879 a Biographisches Jahrbuch für Altertumskunde was published by way of supplement, an obituary notice of Bursian, with a complete list of his writings, being in the volume for 1884.

BURSLEM, a market town of Staffordshire, England, in the Potteries district, 150 m. N.W. from London, on the North Staffordshire railway and the Grand Trunk Canal. Pop. (1891) 31,999; (1901) 38,766. In the 17th century the town was already famous for its manufacture of pottery. Here Josiah Wedgwood was born in 1730, his family having practised the manufacture in this locality for several generations, while he himself began work independently at the Ivy House pottery in 1759. He is commemorated by the Wedgwood Institute, founded in 1863. It comprises a school of art, free library, museum, picture-gallery and the free school founded in 1794. The exterior is richly and peculiarly ornamented, to show the progress of fictile art. The neighbouring towns of Stoke, Hanley and Longton are connected with Burslem by tramways. Burslem is mentioned in Domesday. Previously to 1885 it formed part of the parliamentary borough of Stoke, but it is now included in that of Hanley. It was included in the municipal borough of Stoke-on-Trent under an act of 1908.

BURTON, SIR FREDERICK WILLIAM (1816-1900), British painter and art connoisseur, the third son of Samuel Burton of Mungret, Co. Limerick, was born in Ireland in 1816. He was educated in Dublin, where his artistic studies were carried on with marked success under the direction of Mr Brocas, an able teacher, who foretold for the lad a distinguished career. That this estimate was not exaggerated was proved by Burton's immediate success in his profession. He was elected an associate of the Royal Hibernian Academy at the age of twenty-one and an academician two years later; and in 1842 he began to exhibit at the Royal Academy. A visit to Germany and Bavaria in 1851 was the first of a long series of wanderings in various parts of Europe, which gave him a profound and intimate knowledge of the works of the Old Masters, and prepared him admirably for the duties that he undertook in 1874 when he was appointed director of the British National Gallery in succession to Sir W. Boxall, R.A. During the twenty years that he held this post he was responsible for many important purchases, among them Leonardo da Vinci's "Virgin of the Rocks," Raphael's "Ansidei Madonna," Holbein's "Ambassadors," Van Dyck's equestrian portrait of Charles I., and the "Admiral Pulido Pareja," by Velasquez; and he added largely to the noted series of Early Italian pictures in the gallery. The number of acquisitions made to the collection during his period of office amounts to not fewer than 500. His own painting, most of which was in water-colour, had more attraction for experts than for the general public. He was elected an associate of the Royal Society of Painters in Water-Colours in 1855, and a full member in the following year. He resigned in 1870, and was re-elected as an honorary member in 1886. A knighthood was conferred on him in 1884, and the degree of LL.D. of Dublin in 1889. In his youth he had strong sympathy with the "Young Ireland Party," and was a close associate with some of its members. He died in Kensington on the 16th of March 1900.

BURTON, JOHN HILL (1809-1881), Scottish historical writer, the son of an officer in the army, was born at Aberdeen on the 22nd of August 1809. After studying at the university of his native city, he removed to Edinburgh, where he qualified for the Scottish bar and practised as an advocate; but his progress was slow, and he eked out his narrow means by miscellaneous literary work. His Manual of the Law of Scotland (1839) brought him into notice; he joined Sir John Bowring in editing the works of Jeremy Bentham, and for a short time was editor of the Scotsman, which he committed to the cause of free trade. In 1846 he achieved high reputation by his Life of David Hume, based upon extensive and unused MS. material. In 1847 he wrote his biographies of Simon, Lord Lovat, and of Duncan Forbes, and in 1849 prepared for Chambers's Series manuals of political and social economy and of emigration. In the same year he lost his wife, whom he had married in 1844, and never again mixed freely with society, though in 1855 he married again. He devoted himself mainly to literature, contributing largely to the Scotsman and Blackwood, writing Narratives from Criminal Trials in Scotland (1852), Treatise on the Law of Bankruptcy in Scotland (1853), and publishing in the latter year the first volume of his History of Scotland, which was completed in 1870. A new and improved edition of the work appeared in 1873. Some of the more important of his contributions to Blackwood were embodied in two delightful volumes, The Book Hunter (1862) and The Scot Abroad (1864). He had in 1854 been appointed secretary to the prison board, an office which gave him entire pecuniary independence, and the duties of which he discharged most assiduously, notwithstanding his literary pursuits and the pressure of another important task assigned to him after the completion of his history, the editorship of the National Scottish Registers. Two volumes were published under his supervision. His last work, The History of the Reign of Queen Anne (1880), is very inferior to his History of Scotland. He died on the 10th of August 1881. Burton was pre-eminently a jurist and economist, and may be said to have been guided by accident into the path which led him to celebrity. It was his great good fortune to find abundant unused material for his Life of Hume, and to be the first to introduce the principles of historical research into the history of Scotland. All previous attempts had been far below the modern standard in these particulars, and Burton's history will always be memorable as marking an epoch. His chief defects as a historian are want of imagination and an undignified familiarity of style, which, however, at least preserves his history from the dulness by which lack of imagination is usually accompanied. His dryness is associated with a fund of dry humour exceedingly effective in its proper place, as in The Book Hunter. As a man he was loyal, affectionate, philanthropic and entirely estimable.

A memoir of Hill Burton by his wife was prefaced to an edition of The Book Hunter, which like his other works was published at Edinburgh (1882).

(R. G.)

BURTON, SIR RICHARD FRANCIS (1821-1890), British consul, explorer and Orientalist, was born at Barham House, Hertfordshire, on the 19th of March 1821. He came of the Westmorland Burtons of Shap, but his grandfather, the Rev. Edward Burton, settled in Ireland as rector of Tuam, and his father, Lieutenant-Colonel Joseph Netterville Burton, of the 36th Regiment, was an Irishman by birth and character. His mother was descended from the MacGregors, and he was proud of a remote drop of Bourbon blood piously believed to be derived from a morganatic union of the Grand Monarque. There were even those, including some of the Romany themselves, who saw gipsy written in his peculiar eyes as in his character, wild and resentful, essentially vagabond, intolerant of convention and restraint. His irregular education strengthened the inherited bias. A childhood spent in France and Italy, under scarcely any control, fostered the love of untrammelled wandering and a marvellous fluency in continental vernaculars. Such an education so little prepared him for academic proprieties, that when he entered Trinity College, Oxford, in October 1840, a criticism of his military moustache by a fellow-undergraduate was resented by a challenge to a duel, and Burton in various ways distinguished himself by such eccentric behaviour that rustication inevitably ensued. Nor was he much more in his element as a subaltern in the 18th Regiment of Bombay Native Infantry, which he joined at Baroda in October 1842. Discipline of any sort he abhorred, and the one recommendation of the East India Company's service in his eyes was that it offered opportunities for studying Oriental life and languages. He had begun Arabic without a master at Oxford, and worked in London at Hindustani under Forbes before he went out; in India he laboured indefatigably at the vernaculars, and his reward was an astonishingly rapid proficiency in Gujarati, Marathi, Hindustani, as well as Persian and Arabic. His appointment as an assistant in the Sind survey enabled him to mix with the people, and he frequently passed as a native in the bazaars and deceived his own munshi, to say nothing of his colonel and messmates. His wanderings in Sind were the apprenticeship for the pilgrimage to Mecca, and his seven years in India laid the foundations of his unparalleled familiarity with Eastern life and customs, especially among the lower classes. Besides government reports and contributions to the Asiatic Society, his Indian period produced four books, published after his return home: Scinde, or the Unhappy Valley (1851), Sindh and the Races that Inhabit the Valley of the Indus (1851), Goa and the Blue Mountains (1851), and Falconry in the Valley of the Indus (1852). None of these achieved popularity, but the account of Sind is remarkably vivid and faithful.

The pilgrimage to Mecca in 1853 made Burton famous. He had planned it whilst mixing disguised among the Muslims of Sind, and had laboriously prepared for the ordeal by study and practice. No doubt the primary motive was the love of adventure, which was his strongest passion; but along with the wanderer's restlessness marched the zest of exploration, and whilst wandering was in any case a necessity of his existence, he preferred to roam in untrodden ways where mere adventure might be dignified by geographical service. There was a "huge white blot" on the maps of central Arabia where no European had ever been, and Burton's scheme, approved by the Royal Geographical Society, was to extend his pilgrimage to this "empty abode," and remove a discreditable blank from the map. War among the tribes curtailed the design, and his journey went no farther than Medina and Mecca. The exploit of accompanying the Muslim hajj to the holy cities was not unique, nor so dangerous as has been imagined. Several Europeans have accomplished it before and since Burton's visit without serious mishap. Passing himself off as an Indian Pathan covered any peculiarities or defects of speech. The pilgrimage, however, demands an intimate proficiency in a complicated ritual, and a familiarity with the minutiae of Eastern manners and etiquette; and in the case of a stumble, presence of mind and cool courage may be called into request. There are legends that Burton had to defend his life by taking others'; but he carried no arms, and confessed, rather shamefastly, that he had never killed anybody at any time. The actual journey was less remarkable than the book in which it was recorded, The Pilgrimage to Al-Medinah and Meccah (1855). Its vivid descriptions, pungent style, and intensely personal "note" distinguish it from books of its class; its insight into Semitic modes of thought and its picture of Arab manners give it the value of an historical document; its grim humour, keen observation and reckless insobriety of opinion, expressed in peculiar, uncouth but vigorous language make it a curiosity of literature.

Burton's next journey was more hazardous than the pilgrimage, but created no parallel sensation. In 1854 the Indian government accepted his proposal to explore the interior of the Somali country, which formed a subject of official anxiety in its relation to the Red Sea trade. He was assisted by Capt. J.H. Speke and two other young officers, but accomplished the most difficult part of the enterprise alone. This was the journey to Harrar, the Somali capital, which no white man had entered. Burton vanished into the desert, and was not heard of for four months. When he reappeared he had not only been to Harrar, but had talked with the king, stayed ten days there in deadly peril, and ridden back across the desert, almost without food and water, running the gauntlet of the Somali spears all the way. Undeterred by this experience he set out again, but was checked by a skirmish with the tribes, in which one of his young officers was killed, Captain Speke was wounded in eleven places, and Burton himself had a javelin thrust through his jaws. His First Footsteps in East Africa (1856), describing these adventures, is one of his most exciting and most characteristic books, full of learning, observation and humour.

After serving on the staff of Beatson's Bashi-bazouks at the Dardanelles, but never getting to the front in the Crimea, Burton returned to Africa in 1856. The foreign office, moved by the Royal Geographical Society, commissioned him to search for the sources of the Nile, and, again accompanied by Speke, he explored the lake regions of equatorial Africa. They discovered Lake Tanganyika in February 1858, and Speke, pushing on during Burton's illness and acting on indications supplied by him, lighted upon Victoria Nyanza. The separate discovery led to a bitter dispute, but Burton's expedition, with its discovery of the two lakes, was the incentive to the later explorations of Speke and Grant, Baker, Livingstone and Stanley; and his report in volume xxxiii. of the Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society, and his Lake Regions of Equatorial Africa (1860), are the true parents of the multitudinous literature of "darkest Africa." Burton was the first Englishman to enter Mecca, the first to explore Somaliland, the first to discover the great lakes of Central Africa. His East African pioneering coincides with areas which have since become peculiarly interesting to the British Empire; and three years later he was exploring on the opposite side of Africa, at Dahomey, Benin and the Gold Coast, regions which have also entered among the imperial "questions" of the day. Before middle age Burton had compressed into his life, as Lord Derby said, "more of study, more of hardship, and more of successful enterprise and adventure, than would have sufficed to fill up the existence of half a dozen ordinary men." The City of the Saints (1861) was the fruit of a flying visit to the United States in 1860.

Since 1849 his connexion with the Indian army had been practically severed; in 1861 he definitely entered the service of the foreign office as consul at Fernando Po, whence he was shifted successively to Santos in Brazil (1865), Damascus (1869), and Trieste (1871), holding the last post till his death on the 20th of October 1890. Each of these posts produced its corresponding books: Fernando Po led to the publishing of Wanderings in West Africa (1863), Abeokuta and the Cameroons (1863), A Mission to Gelele, king of Dahomé (1864), and Wit and Wisdom from West Africa (1865). The Highlands of the Brazil (1869) was the result of four years' residence and travelling; and Letters from the Battlefields of Paraguay (1870) relate to a journey across South America to Peru. Damascus suggested Unexplored Syria (1872), and might have led to much better work, since no consulate in either hemisphere was more congenial to Burton's taste and linguistic studies; but he mismanaged his opportunities, got into trouble with the foreign office, and was removed to Trieste, where his Oriental prepossessions and prejudices could do no harm, but where, unfortunately, his Oriental learning was thrown away. He did not, however, abandon his Eastern studies or his Eastern travels. Various fresh journeys or revisitings of familiar scenes are recorded in his later books, such as Zanzibar (1872), Ultima Thule (1875), Etruscan Bologna (1876), Sind Revisited (1877), The Land of Midian (1879) and To the Gold Coast for Gold (1883). None of these had more than a passing interest. Burton had not the charm of style or imagination which gives immortality to a book of travel. He wrote too fast, and took too little pains about the form. His blunt, disconnected sentences and ill-constructed chapters were full of information and learning, and contained not a few thrusts for the benefit of government or other people, but they were not "readable." There was something ponderous about his very humour, and his criticism was personal and savage. By far the most celebrated of all his books is the translation of the "Arabian Nights" (The Thousand Nights and a Night, 16 vols., privately printed, 1885-1888), which occupied the greater part of his leisure at Trieste. As a monument of his Arabic learning and his encyclopaedic knowledge of Eastern life this translation was his greatest achievement. It is open to criticism in many ways; it is not so exact in scholarship, nor so faithful to its avowed text, as might be expected from his reputation; but it reveals a profound acquaintance with the vocabulary and customs of the Muslims, with their classical idiom as well as their vulgarest "Billingsgate," with their philosophy and modes of thought as well as their most secret and most disgusting habits. Burton's "anthropological notes," embracing a wide field of pornography, apart from questions of taste, abound in valuable observations based upon long study of the manners and the writings of the Arabs. The translation itself is often marked by extraordinary resource and felicity in the exact reproduction of the sense of the original; Burton's vocabulary was marvellously extensive, and he had a genius for hitting upon the right word; but his fancy for archaic words and phrases, his habit of coining words, and the harsh and rugged style he affected, detract from the literary quality of the work without in any degree enhancing its fidelity. With grave defects, but sometimes brilliant merits, the translation holds a mirror to its author. He was, as has been well said, an Elizabethan born out of time; in the days of Drake his very faults might have counted to his credit. Of his other works, Vikram and the Vampire, Hindu Tales (1870), and a history of his favourite arm, The Book of the Sword, vol. i. (1884), unfinished, may be mentioned. His translation of The Lusiads of Camoens (1880) was followed (1881) by a sketch of the poet's life. Burton had a fellow-feeling for the poet adventurer, and his translation is an extraordinarily happy reproduction of its original. A manuscript translation of the "Scented Garden," from the Arabic, was burnt by his widow, acting in what she believed to be the interests of her husband's reputation. Burton married Isabel Arundell in 1861, and owed much to her courage, sympathy and passionate devotion. Her romantic and exaggerated biography of her husband, with all its faults, is one of the most pathetic monuments which the unselfish love of a woman has ever raised to the memory of her hero. Another monument is the Arab tent of stone and marble which she built for his tomb at Mortlake.

Besides Lady Burton's Life of Sir Richard F. Burton (2 vols., 1893, 2nd edition, condensed, edited, with a preface, by W.H. Wilkins, 1898), there are A Sketch of the Career of R.F. Burton, by A.B. Richards, Andrew Wilson, and St Clair Baddeley (1886); The True Life of Captain Sir Richard F. Burton, by his niece, G.M. Stisted (1896); and a brief sketch by the present writer prefixed to Bohn's edition of the Pilgrimage to Al-Medinah and Meccah (1898), from which some sentences have here been by permission reproduced. In 1906 appeared the Life of Sir Richard Burton, by Thomas Wright of Olney, in two volumes, an industrious and rather critical work, interesting in particular for the doubts it casts on Burton's originality as an Arabic translator, and emphasizing his indebtedness to Payne's translation (1881) of the Arabian Nights.

(S. L.-P.)

BURTON, ROBERT (1577-1640), English writer, author of The Anatomy of Melancholy, son of a country gentleman, Ralph Burton, was born at Lindley in Leicestershire on the 8th of February 1576-7. He was educated at the free school of Sutton Coldfield and at Nuneaton grammar school; became in 1593 a commoner of Brasenose College, and in 1599 was elected student at Christ Church, where he continued to reside for the rest of his life. The dean and chapter of Christ Church appointed him, in November 1616, vicar of St Thomas in the west suburbs, and about 1630 his patron, Lord Berkeley, presented him to the rectory of Segrave in Leicestershire. He held the two livings "with much ado to his dying day" (says Antony à Wood, the Oxford historian, somewhat mysteriously); and he was buried in the north aisle of Christ Church cathedral, where his elder brother William Burton, author of a History of Leicestershire, raised to his memory a monument, with his bust in colour. The epitaph that he had written for himself was carved beneath the bust: Paucis notus, paucioribus ignotus, hic jacet Democritus Junior, cui vitam dedit et mortem Melancholia. Some years before his death he had predicted, by the calculation of his nativity, that the approach of his climacteric year (sixty-three) would prove fatal; and the prediction came true, for he died on the 25th of January 1639-40 (some gossips surmising that he had "sent up his soul to heaven through a noose about his neck" to avoid the chagrin of seeing his calculations falsified). His portrait in Brasenose College shows the face of a scholar, shrewd, contemplative, humorous.

A Latin comedy, Philosophaster, originally written by Robert Burton in 1606 and acted at Christ Church in 1617, was long supposed to be lost; but in 1862 it was printed for the Roxburghe Club from a manuscript belonging to the Rev. W.E. Buckley, who edited it with elaborate care and appended a collection of the academical exercises that Burton had contributed to various Oxford miscellanies ("Natalia," "Parentalia," &c.). Philosophaster is a vivacious exposure of charlatanism. Desiderius, duke of Osuna, invites learned men from all parts of Europe to repair to the university which he has re-established; and a crowd of shifty adventurers avail themselves of the invitation. There are points of resemblance to Philosophaster in Ben Jonson's Alchemist and Tomkis's Albumazar, but in the prologue Burton is careful to state that his was the earlier play. (Another manuscript of Philosophaster, a presentation copy to William Burton from the author, has since been found in the library of Lord Mostyn.)

In 1621 was issued at Oxford the first edition, a quarto, of The Anatomy of Melancholy ... by Democritus Junior. Later editions, in folio, were published in 1624, 1628, 1632, 1638, 1651, 1652, 1660, 1676. Burton was for ever engaged in revising his treatise. In the third edition (where first appeared the engraved emblematical title-page by C. Le Blond) he declared that he would make no further alterations. But the fourth edition again bore marks of revision; the fifth differed from the fourth; and the sixth edition was posthumously printed from a copy containing his latest corrections.

Not the least interesting part of the Anatomy is the long preface, "Democritus to the Reader," in which Burton sets out his reasons for writing the treatise and for assuming the name of Democritus Junior. He had been elected a student of "the most flourishing college of Europe" and he designed to show his gratitude by writing something that should be worthy of that noble society. He had read much; he was neither rich nor poor; living in studious seclusion, he had been a critically observant spectator of the world's affairs. The philosopher Democritus, who was by nature very melancholy, "averse from company in his latter days and much given to solitariness," spent his closing years in the suburbs of Abdera. There Hippocrates once found him studying in his garden, the subject of his study being the causes and cure of "this atra bilis or melancholy." Burton would not compare himself with so famous a philosopher, but he aimed at carrying out the design which Democritus had planned and Hippocrates had commended. It is stated that he actually set himself to reproduce the old philosopher's reputed eccentricities of conduct. When he was attacked by a fit of melancholy he would go to the bridge foot at Oxford and shake his sides with laughter to hear the bargemen swearing at one another, just as Democritus used to walk down to the haven at Abdera and pick matter for mirth out of the humours of waterside life.

Burton anticipates the objections of captious critics. He allows that he has "collected this cento out of divers authors" and has borrowed from innumerable books, but he claims that "the composition and method is ours only, and shows a scholar." It had been his original intention to write in Latin, but no publisher would take the risk of issuing in Latin so voluminous a treatise. He humorously apologizes for faults of style on the ground that he had to work single-handed (unlike Origen who was allowed by Ambrosius six or seven amanuenses) and digest his notes as best he might. If any object to his choice of subject, urging that he would be better employed in writing on divinity, his defence is that far too many commentaries, expositions, sermons, &c., are already in existence. Besides, divinity and medicine are closely allied; and, melancholy being both a spiritual and bodily infirmity, the divine and the physician must unite to cure it.

The preface is followed by a tabular synopsis of the First Partition with its several Sections, Members and Subsections. After various preliminary digressions Burton sets himself to define what Melancholy is and what are its species and kinds. Then he discusses the Causes, supernatural and natural, of the disorder, and afterwards proceeds to set down the Symptoms (which cannot be briefly summarized, "for the Tower of Babel never yielded such confusion of tongues as the Chaos of Melancholy doth of Symptoms"). The Second Partition is devoted to the Cure of Melancholy. As it is of great importance that we should live in good air, a chapter deals with "Air Rectified. With a Digression of the Air." Burton never travelled, but the study of cosmography had been his constant delight; and over sea and land, north, east, west, south—in this enchanting chapter—he sends his vagrant fancy flying. In the disquisition on "Exercise rectified of body and mind" he dwells gleefully on the pleasures of country life, and on the content that scholars find in the pursuit of their favourite studies. Love-Melancholy is the subject of the first Three Sections of the Third Partition, and many are the merry tales with which these pages are seasoned. The Fourth (and concluding) Section treats, in graver mood, of Religious Melancholy; and to the "Cure of Despair" he devotes his deepest meditations.

The Anatomy, widely read in the 17th century, for a time lapsed into obscurity, though even "the wits of Queen Anne's reign and the beginning of George I. were not a little beholden to Robert Burton" (Archbishop Herring). Dr Johnson deeply admired the work; and Sterne laid it heavily under contribution. But the noble and impassioned devotion of Charles Lamb has been the most powerful help towards keeping alive the memory of the "fantastic great old man." Burton's odd turns and quirks of expression, his whimsical and affectate fancies, his kindly sarcasm, his far-fetched conceits, his deep-lying pathos, descended by inheritance of genius to Lamb. The enthusiasm of Burton's admirers will not be chilled by the disparagement of unsympathetic critics (Macaulay and Hallam among them) who have consulted his pages in vain; but through good and evil report he will remain, their well-loved companion to the end.

The best of the modern editions of Burton was published in 1896, 3 vols. 8vo (Bell and Sons), under the editorship of A.R. Shilleto, who identified a large number of the classical quotations and many passages from post-classical authors. Prof. Bensley, of the university of Adelaide, has since contributed to the ninth and tenth series of Notes and Queries many valuable notes on the Anatomy. Dr Aldis Wright has long been engaged on the preparation of a definitive edition.

(A. H. B.)

BURTON, WILLIAM EVANS (1804-1860), English actor and playwright, born in London in September 1804, was the son of William George Burton (1774-1825), a printer and author of Research into the religions of the Eastern nations as illustrative of the scriptures (1805). He was educated for the Church, but, having entered his father's business, his success as an amateur actor led him to go upon the stage. After several years in the provinces, he made his first London appearance in 1831. In 1834 he went to America, where he appeared in Philadelphia as Dr Ollapod in The Poor Gentleman. He took a prominent place, both as actor and manager, in New York, Philadelphia and Baltimore, the theatre which he leased in New York being renamed Burton's theatre. He had much popular success as Captain Cuttle in John Brougham's dramatization of Dombey and Son, and in other low comedy parts in plays from Dickens's novels. Burton was the author of a large number of plays, one of which, Ellen Wareham (1833), was produced simultaneously at five London theatres. In Philadelphia he established the Gentleman's Magazine, of which Edgar Allan Poe was for some time the editor. He was himself the editor of the Cambridge Quarterly and the Souvenir, and the author of several books, including a Cyclopaedia of Wit and Humour (1857). He collected a library of over 100,000 volumes, especially rich in Shakespeariana, which was dispersed after his death at New York City on the 9th of February 1860.

BURTON-UPON-TRENT, a market town and municipal and county borough in the Burton parliamentary division of Staffordshire and the Southern parliamentary division of Derbyshire, England; lying mainly upon the left bank of the Trent, in Staffordshire. Pop. (1891) 46,047; (1901) 50,386. It is 127 m north-west from London by the London & North-Western and the Midland railways, and is also served by the Great Northern and North Staffordshire railways. The Trent is navigable from a point near the town downward. The neighbouring country is pleasant enough, particularly along the river, but the town itself is purely industrial, and contains no pre-eminent buildings. The church of St Mary and St Modwen is classic in style, of the 18th century, but embodies some remains of an ancient Gothic building. Of a Benedictine abbey dedicated to the same saints there remain a gatehouse and lodge, and a fine doorway. The former abbot's house at Seyney Park is a half-timbered building of the 15th century. The free grammar school was founded in 1525. A fine bridge over the Trent, and the municipal buildings, were provided by Lord Burton. There are pleasant recreation grounds on the Derbyshire side of the river.

Burton is the seat of an enormous brewing trade, representing nearly one-tenth of the total amount of this trade in the United Kingdom. It is divided between some twenty firms. The premises of Bass's brewery extend over 500 acres, while Allsopp's stand next; upwards of 5000 hands are employed in all, and many miles of railways owned by the firms cross the streets in all directions on the level, and connect with the lines of the railway companies. The superiority which is claimed for Burton ales is attributed to the use of well-water impregnated with sulphate of lime derived from the gypseous deposits of the district. Burton is governed by a mayor, 8 aldermen and 24 councillors. Area, 4202 acres.

Burton-upon-Trent (Burhton) is first mentioned towards the close of the 9th century, when St Modwen, an Irish virgin, is said to have established a convent on the Isle of Andressey opposite Burton. In 1002 Wulfric, earl of Mercia, founded here a Benedictine abbey, and by charter of 1004 granted to it the town with other large endowments. Burton was evidently a mesne borough under the abbot, who held the court of the manor and received the profits of the borough according to the charter of Henry I. granting sac and soc and other privileges and right in the town. Later charters were given by Henry II., by John in 1204 (who also granted an annual fair of three days' duration, 29th of October, at the feast of St Modwen, and a weekly market on Thursday), by Henry III. in 1227, by Henry VII. in 1488 (Henry VII. granted a fair at the feast of St Luke, 18th of October), and by Henry VIII. in 1509. At the dissolution Henry VIII. founded on the site of the abbey a collegiate church dissolved before 1545, when its lands, with all the privileges formerly vested in the abbot, were conferred on Sir William Paget, ancestor of the marquess of Anglesey, now holder of the manor. In 1878 it was incorporated under a mayor, 8 aldermen, 24 councillors. Burton was the scene of several engagements in the Civil War, when its large trade in clothing and alabaster was practically ruined. Although the abbey ale was mentioned as early as 1295, the brewing industry is comparatively of recent development, having begun about 1708. Forty years later it had a market at St Petersburg and the Baltic ports, and in 1796 there were nine brewing firms in the town.

See William Molyneux, History of Burton-on-Trent (1869); Victoria County History, Staffordshire.

BURU (Buro, Dutch Boeroe or Boeloe), an island of the Dutch East Indies, one of the Molucca Islands belonging to the residency of Amboyna, between 3° 4′ and 3° 50′ S. and 125° 58′ and 127° 15′ E. Its extreme measurements are 87 m. by 50 m., and its area is 3400 sq. m. Its surface is for the most part mountainous, though the seaboard district is frequently alluvial and marshy from the deposits of the numerous rivers. Of these the largest, the Kajeli, discharging eastward, is in part navigable. The greatest elevations occur in the west, where the mountain Tomahu reaches 8530 ft. In the middle of the western part of the island lies the large lake of Wakolo, at an altitude of 2200 ft., with a circumference of 37 m. and a depth of about 100 ft. It has been considered a crater lake; but this is not the case. It is situated at the junction of the sandstone and slate, where the water, having worn away the former, has accumulated on the latter. The lake has no affluents and only one outlet, the Wai Nibe to the north. The chief geological formations of Buru are crystalline slate near the north coast, and more to the south Mesozoic sandstone and chalk, deposits of rare occurrence in the archipelago. By far the larger part of the country is covered with natural forest and prairie land, but such portions as have been brought into cultivation are highly fertile. Coffee, rice and a variety of fruits, such as the lemon, orange, banana, pine-apple and coco-nut are readily grown, as well as sago, red-pepper, tobacco and cotton. The only important exports, however, are cajeput oil, a sudorific distilled from the leaves of the Melaleuca Cajuputi or white-wood tree; and timber. The native flora is rich, and teak, ebony and canari trees are especially abundant; the fauna, which is similarly varied, includes the babirusa, which occurs in this island only of the Moluccas. The population is about 15,000. The villages on the sea-coast are inhabited by a Malayan population, and the northern and western portions of the island are occupied by a light-coloured Malay folk akin to the natives of the eastern Celebes. In the interior is found a peculiar race which is held by some to be Papuan. They are described, however, as singularly un-Papuan in physique, being only 5 ft. 2 in. in average height, of a yellow-brown colour, of feeble build, and without the characteristic frizzly hair and prominent nose of the true Papuan. They are completely pagan, live in scattered hamlets, and have come very little in contact with any civilization. Among the maritime population a small number of Chinese, Arabs and other races are also found. The island is divided by the Dutch into two districts. The chief settlement is Kajeli on the east coast. A number of Mahommedan natives here are descended from tribes compelled in 1657 to gather together from the different parts of the island, while all the clove-trees were exterminated in an attempt by the Dutch to centralize the clove trade. Before the arrival of the Dutch the islanders were under the dominion of the sultan of Ternate; and it was their rebellion against him that gave the Europeans the opportunity of effecting their subjugation.

BURUJIRD, a province of Persia, bounded W. by Luristan, N. by Nehavend and Malayir, E. by Irak and S. by Isfahan. It is divided into the following administrative divisions:—(1) town of Burujird with villages in immediate neighbourhood; (2) Silakhor (upper and lower); (3) Japalak (with Sarlek and Burbarud); (4) nomad Bakhtiari. It has a population of about 250,000 or 300,000, and pays a yearly revenue of about £16,000. It is very fertile and produces much wheat, barley, rice and opium. With improved means of transport, which would allow the growers to export, the produce of cereals could easily be trebled. The province is sometimes joined with that of Luristan.

The town Burujird, the capital of the province, is situated in the fertile Silakhor plain on the river Tahīj, a tributary of the Dizful river (Ab i Diz), 70 m. by road from Hamadan and 212 m. from Isfahan, in 33° 55′ N. and 48° 55′ E., and at an elevation of 5315 ft. Pop. about 25,000. It manufactures various cotton stuffs (coarse prints, carpet covers) and felts (principally hats and caps for Lurs and Bakhtiaris). It has post and telegraph offices.

BURY, JOHN BAGNELL (1861- ), British historian, was born on the 16th of October 1861, and was educated at Trinity College, Dublin, where he was elected to a fellowship in 1885. A fine Greek scholar, he edited Pindar's Nemean and Isthmian Odes; but he devoted himself chiefly to the study of history, and was chosen professor of modern history at Dublin in 1893, becoming regius professor of Greek in 1898. He resigned both positions in 1902, when he was elected regius professor of modern history in the university of Cambridge. His historical work was mainly concerned with the later Roman empire, and his edition of Gibbon's Decline and Fall, with a masterly introduction and valuable notes (1896-1900), is the standard text of this history. He also wrote a History of Greece to the Death of Alexander the Great (1900); History of the Later Roman Empire, 395-800 (1889); History of the Roman Empire 27 B.C.-180 A.D. (1893); Life of St Patrick and his Place in History (1905), &c. He was elected a fellow of King's College, Cambridge, and received honorary degrees from the universities of Oxford, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen and Durham.

BURY, a market-town and municipal, county and parliamentary borough of Lancashire, England, on the river Irwell, 195 m. N.W. by W. from London, and 10½ N. by W. from Manchester, on the Lancashire & Yorkshire railway and the Manchester & Bolton canal. Pop. (1891) 57,212; (1901) 58,029. The church of St Mary is of early foundation, but was rebuilt in 1876. Besides numerous other places of worship, there are a handsome town hall, athenaeum and museum, art gallery and public library, various assembly rooms, and several recreation grounds. Kay's free grammar school was founded in 1726; there are also municipal technical schools. The cotton manufacture is the principal industry; there are also calico printing, dyeing and bleaching works, machinery and iron works, woollen manufactures, and coal mines and quarries in the vicinity. Sir Robert Peel was born at Chamber Hall in the neighbourhood, and his father did much for the prosperity of the town by the establishment of extensive print-works. A monument to the statesman stands in the market-place. The parliamentary borough returns one member (since 1832). The county borough was created in 1888. The corporation consists of a mayor, 10 aldermen and 30 councillors. Area, 5836 acres.

Bury, of which the name is derived from the Anglo-Saxon burhg, birig or byrig (town, castle or fortified place), was the site of a Saxon station, and an old English castle stood in Castle Croft close to the town. It was a member of the Honour of Clitheroe and a fee of the royal manor of Tottington, which soon after the Conquest was held by the Lacys. The local family of Bury held lands here during the 13th century, and at least for a short time the manor itself, but before 1347 it passed by marriage to the Pilkingtons of Pilkington, with whom it remained till 1485, when on the attainder of Sir Thomas Pilkington it was granted to the first earl of Derby, whose descendants have since held it. Under a grant made by Edward IV. to Sir Thomas Pilkington, fairs are still held on March 5, May 3, and September 18, and a market was formerly held under the same grant on Thursday, which has, however, been long replaced by a customary market on Saturday. The woollen trade was established here through the agency of Flemish immigrants in Edward III.'s reign, and in Elizabeth's time this industry was of such importance that an aulneger was appointed to measure and stamp the woollen cloth. But although the woollen manufacture is still carried on, the cotton trade has been gradually superseding it since the early part of the 18th century. The family of the Kays, the inventors, belonged to this place, and Robert Peel's print-works were established here in 1770. The cognate trades of bleaching, dyeing and machine-making have been long carried on. A court-leet and view of frank pledge used to be held half-yearly at Easter and Michaelmas, and a court-baron in May. Until 1846 three constables were chosen annually at the court-leet to govern the place, but in that year the inhabitants obtained authority from parliament to appoint twenty-seven commissioners to undertake the local government. A charter of incorporation was granted in 1876. The well-known Bury Cooperative Society was established in 1856. There was a church here at the time of the Domesday Survey, and the earliest mention of a rector is found in the year 1331-1332. One-half of the town is glebe belonging to the rectory.

BURY ST EDMUNDS, a market town and municipal and parliamentary borough of Suffolk, England, on the Lark, an affluent of the Great Ouse; 87 m. N.E. by N. from London by the Great Eastern railway. Pop. (1901) 16,255. It is pleasantly situated on a gentle eminence, in a fertile and richly cultivated district. The tower or church-gate, one of the finest specimens of early Norman architecture in England, and the western gate, a beautiful structure of rich Decorated work, together with ruined walls of considerable extent, are all that remains of the great abbey. St Mary's church, with a beautifully carved roof, was erected in the earlier part of the 15th century, and contains the tomb of Mary Tudor, queen of Louis XII. of France. St James's church is also a fine Perpendicular building, with a modern chancel, and without a tower. All these splendid structures, fronting one of the main streets in succession, form, even without the abbey church, a remarkable memorial of the wealth of the foundation. Behind them lie picturesque gardens which contain the ruins, the plan of which is difficult to trace, though the outlines of some portions, as the chapter-house, have been made clear by excavation. There is a handsome Roman Catholic church of St Edmund. The so-called Moyses Hall (perhaps a Jew's House, of which there is a parallel example at Lincoln) retains transitional Norman work. The free grammar school, founded by Edward VI., has two scholarships at Cambridge, and six exhibitions to each university, and occupies modern buildings. The Church Schools Company has a school. There are large agricultural implement works, and the agricultural trade is important, cattle and corn markets being held. In the vicinity is Ickworth, the seat of the marquess of Bristol, a great mansion of the end of the 18th century. The parliamentary borough, which returns one member, is coextensive with the municipal borough. The town is governed by a mayor, 6 aldermen and 18 councillors. Area, 2947 acres.

Bury St Edmunds (Beodricesworth, St Edmund's Bury), supposed by some to have been the Villa Faustina of the Romans, was one of the royal towns of the Saxons. Sigebert, king of the East Angles, founded a monastery here about 633, which in 903 became the burial place of King Edmund, who was slain by the Danes about 870, and owed most of its early celebrity to the reputed miracles performed at the shrine of the martyr king. By 925 the fame of St Edmund had spread far and wide, and the name of the town was changed to St Edmund's Bury. Sweyn, in 1020, having destroyed the older monastery and ejected the secular priests, built a Benedictine abbey on its site. In 942 or 945 King Edmund had granted to the abbot and convent jurisdiction over the whole town, free from all secular services, and Canute in 1020 freed it from episcopal control. Edward the Confessor made the abbot lord of the franchise. By various grants from the abbots, the town gradually attained the rank of a borough. Henry III. in 1235 granted to the abbot two annual fairs, one in December (which still survives), the other the great St Matthew's fair, which was abolished by the Fairs Act of 1871. Another fair was granted by Henry IV. in 1405. Elizabeth in 1562 confirmed the charters which former kings had granted to the abbots, and James I. in 1606 granted a charter of incorporation with an annual fair in Easter week and a market. Further charters were granted by him in 1608 and 1614, and by Charles II. in 1668 and 1684. The reversion of the fairs and two markets on Wednesday and Saturday were granted by James I. in fee farm to the corporation. Parliaments were held here in 1272, 1296 and 1446, but the borough was not represented until 1608, when James I. conferred the privilege of sending two members. The Redistribution Act 1885 reduced the representation to one. There was formerly a large woollen trade.

See Richard Yates, Hist. and Antiqs. of the Abbey of St Edmund's Bury (2nd ed., 1843); H.R. Barker, History of Bury St Edmunds.

BUSBECQ, OGIER GHISLAIN DE [Augerius Gislenius] (1522-1592), Flemish writer and traveller, was born at Comines, and educated at the university of Louvain and elsewhere. Having served the emperor Charles V. and his son, Philip II. of Spain, he entered the service of the emperor Ferdinand I., who sent him as ambassador to the sultan Suleiman I. the Magnificent. He returned to Vienna in 1562 to become tutor to the sons of Maximilian II., afterwards emperor, subsequently taking the position of master of the household of Elizabeth, widow of Charles IX., king of France, and daughter of Maximilian. Busbecq was an excellent scholar, a graceful writer and a clever diplomatist. He collected valuable manuscripts, rare coins and curious inscriptions, and introduced various plants into Germany. He died at the castle of Maillot near Rouen on the 28th of October 1592. Busbecq wrote Itinera Constantinopolitanum et Amasianum (Antwerp, 1581), a work showing considerable insight into Turkish politics. This was published in Paris in 1589 as A.G. Busbequii legationis Turcicae epistolae iv., and has been translated into several languages. He was a frequent visitor to France, and wrote Epistolae ad Rudolphum II. Imperatorem e Gallia scriptae (Louvain, 1630), an interesting account of affairs at the French court. His works were published at Leiden in 1633 and at Basel in 1740. An English translation of the Itinera was published in 1744.

See C.T. Forster and F.H.B. Daniel, Life and Letters of Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq (London, 1881); Viertel, Busbecks Erlebnisse in der Turkei (Gottingen, 1902).

BUSBY, RICHARD (1606-1695), English clergyman, and head master of Westminster school, was born at Lutton in Lincolnshire in 1606. He was educated at the school which he afterwards superintended for so long a period, and first signalized himself by gaining a king's scholarship. From Westminster Busby proceeded to Christ Church, Oxford, where he graduated in 1628. In his thirty-third year he had already become renowned for the obstinate zeal with which he supported the falling dynasty of the Stuarts, and was rewarded for his services with the prebend and rectory of Cudworth, with the chapel of Knowle annexed, in Somersetshire. Next year he became head master of Westminster, where his reputation as a teacher soon became great. He himself once boasted that sixteen of the bishops who then occupied the bench had been birched with his "little rod". No school in England has on the whole produced so many eminent men as Westminster did under the régime of Busby. Among the more illustrious of his pupils may be mentioned South, Dryden, Locke, Prior and Bishop Atterbury. He wrote and edited many works for the use of his scholars. His original treatises (the best of which are his Greek and Latin grammars), as well as those which he edited, have, however, long since fallen into disuse. Busby died in 1695, in his ninetieth year, and was buried in Westminster Abbey, where his effigy is still to be seen.

BUSBY, the English name for a military head-dress of fur. Possibly the original sense of a "busby wig" came from association with Dr Busby of Westminster; but it is also derived from "buzz", in the phrase "buzz wig". In its first Hungarian form the military busby was a cylindrical fur cap, having a "bag" of coloured cloth hanging from the top; the end of this bag was attached to the right shoulder as a defence against sword-cuts. In Great Britain "busbies" are of two kinds: (a) the hussar busby, cylindrical in shape, with a bag; this is worn by hussars and the Royal Horse Artillery; (b) the rifle busby, a folding cap of astrachan, in shape somewhat resembling a "Glengarry" but taller. Both have straight plumes in the front of the headdress. The word "busby" is also used colloquially to denote the tall bear-and-raccoon-skin "caps" worn by foot-guards and fusiliers, and the full dress feather bonnet of Highland infantry. Cylindrical busbies were formerly worn by the artillery engineers and rifles, but these are now obsolete in the regular army, though still worn by some territorial and colonial troops of these arms.

BUSCH, JULIUS HERMANN MORITZ (1821-1899), German publicist, was born at Dresden on the 13th of February 1821. He entered the university of Leipzig in 1841 as a student of theology, but graduated as doctor philosophiae, and from 1847 devoted himself entirely to journalism and literature. In 1851 he went to America, but soon returned disillusioned to Germany, and published an account of his travels. During the next years he travelled extensively in the East and wrote books on Egypt, Greece and Palestine. From 1856 he was employed at Leipzig on the Grenzboten, one of the most influential German periodicals, which, under the editorship of Gustav Freytag, had become the organ of the Nationalist party. In 1864 he became closely connected with the Augustenburg party in Schleswig-Holstein, but after 1866 he transferred his services to the Prussian government, and was employed in a semi-official capacity in the newly conquered province of Hanover. From 1870 onwards he was one of Bismarck's press agents, and was at the chancellor's side in this capacity during the whole of the campaign of 1870-71. In 1878 he published the first of his works on Bismarck—a book entitled Bismarck und seine Leute, während des Krieges mit Frankreich, in which, under the form of extracts from his diary, he gave an account of the chancellor's life during the war. The vividness of the descriptions and the cleverness with which the conversations were reported ensured a success, and the work was translated into several languages. This was followed in 1885 by another book, Unser Reichskanzler, chiefly dealing with the work in the foreign office in Berlin. Immediately after Bismarck's death Busch published the chancellor's famous petition to the emperor William II. dated the 18th of March 1890, requesting to be relieved of office. This was followed by a pamphlet Bismarck und sein Werk; and in 1898 in London and in English, by the famous memoirs entitled Bismarck: some Secret Pages of his History (German by Grunow, under title Tagebuchblätter), in which were reprinted the whole of the earlier works, but which contains in addition a considerable amount of new matter, passages from the earlier works which had been omitted because of the attacks they contained on people in high position, records of later conversations, and some important letters and documents which had been entrusted to him by Bismarck. Many passages were of such a nature that it could not be safely published in Germany; but in 1899 a far better and more complete German edition was published at Leipzig in three volumes and consisting of three sections. Busch died at Leipzig on the 16th of November 1899.

See Ernst Goetz, in Biog. Jahrbuch (1900).

BUSCH, WILHELM (1832-1908), German caricaturist, was born at Wiedensahl in Hanover. After studying at the academies of Düsseldorf, Antwerp and Munich, he joined in 1859 the staff of Fliegende Blätter, the leading German comic paper, and was, together with Oberländer, the founder of modern German caricature. His humorous drawings and caricatures are remarkable for the extreme simplicity and expressiveness of his pen-and-ink line, which record with a few rapid scrawls the most complicated contortions of the body and the most transitory movement. His humorous illustrated poems, such as Max und Moritz, Der heilige Antonius von Padua, Die Fromme Helene, Hans Huckebein and Die Erlebnisse Knopps des Junggesellen, play, in the German nursery, the same part that Edward Lear's nonsense verses do in England. The types created by him have become household words in his country. He invented the series of comic sketches illustrating a story in scenes without words, which have inspired Caran d'Ache and other leading caricaturists.

BÜSCHING, ANTON FRIEDRICH (1724-1793), German theologian and geographer, was born at Stadthagen in Schaumburg-Lippe, on the 27th of September 1724. In 1748 he was appointed tutor in the family of the count de Lynars, who was then going as ambassador to St Petersburg. On this journey he resolved to devote his life to the improvement of geographical science. Leaving the count's family, he went to reside at Copenhagen, and devoted himself entirely to this new pursuit. In 1752 he published his Description of the Counties of Schleswig and Holstein. In 1754 he removed to Göttingen, where in 1757 he was appointed professor of philosophy; but in 1761 he accepted an invitation to the German congregation at St Petersburg. There he organized a school which, under him, soon became one of the most flourishing in the north of Europe, but a disagreement with Marshal Münich led him, in spite of the empress's offers of high advancement, to return to central Europe in 1765. He first went to live at Altona; but next year he was called to superintend the famous "Greyfriars Gymnasium" (Gymnasium zum Grauen Kloster), which had been formed at Berlin by Frederick the Great. He died of dropsy on the 28th of May 1793, having by writing and example given a new impulse to education throughout Prussia. While at Göttingen he married the poetess, Christiana Dilthey.

Büsching's works (on geography, history, education and religion) amount to more than a hundred. The first class comprehends those upon which his fame chiefly rests; for although he did not possess the genius of D'Anville, he may be regarded as the creator of modern Statistical Geography. His magnum opus is the Erdebeschreibung, in seven parts, of which the first four, comprehending Europe, were published in 1754-1761, and have been translated into several languages (e.g. into English with a preface by Murdoch, in six volumes, London, 1762). In 1768 the fifth part was published, being the first volume upon Asia, containing Asiatic Turkey and Arabia. It displays an immense extent of research, and is generally considered as his masterpiece. Büsching was also the editor of a valuable collection entitled Magazin für d. neue Historie und Geographie (23 vols. 4to, 1767-1793); also of Wochentl. Nachrichten von neuen Landkarten (Berlin, 1773-1787). His works on education enjoyed great repute. In biography he wrote a number of articles for the above-mentioned Magazin, and a valuable collection of Beiträge zur Lebensgeschichte merkwürdiger Personen (6 vols., 1783-1789), including an elaborate life of Frederick the Great.

BUSENBAUM (or Busembaum), HERMANN (1600-1668), Jesuit theologian, was born at Nottelen in Westphalia. He attained fame as a master of casuistry, and out of his lectures to students at Cologne grew his celebrated book Medulla theologiae moralis, facili ac perspicua methodo resolvens casus conscientiae (1645). The manual obtained a wide popularity and passed through over two hundred editions before 1776. Pierre Lacroix added considerably to its bulk, and editions in two folio volumes appeared in both Germany (1710-1714) and France (1729). In these sections on murder and especially on regicide were much amplified, and in connexion with Damien's attempt on the life of Louis XV. the book was severely handled by the parlement of Paris. At Toulouse in 1757, though the offending sections were repudiated by the heads of the Jesuit colleges, the Medulla was publicly burned, and the episode undoubtedly led the way to the duc de Choiseul's attack on the society. Busenbaum also wrote a book on the ascetic life, Lilium inter spinas. He became rector of the Jesuit college at Hildesheim and then at Münster, where he died on the 31st of January 1668, being at the time father-confessor to Bishop Bernard of Galen.

BUSH. (1) (A word common to many European languages, meaning "a wood", cf. the Ger. Busch, Fr. bois, Ital. bosco and the med. Lat. boscus), a shrub or group of shrubs, especially of those plants whose branches grow low and thick. Collectively "the bush" is used in British colonies, particularly in Australasia and South Africa, for the tract of country covered with brushwood not yet cleared for cultivation. From the custom of hanging a bush as a sign outside a tavern comes the proverb "Good wine needs no bush." (2) (From a Teutonic word meaning "a box", cf. the Ger. Rad-büchse, a wheel box, and the termination of "blunderbuss" and "arquebus"; the derivation from the Fr. bouche, a mouth, is not correct), a lining frequently inserted in the bearings of machinery. When a shaft and the bearing in which it rotates are made of the same metal, the two surfaces are in certain cases apt to "seize" and abrade each other. To prevent this, bushes of some dissimilar metal are employed; thus a shaft of mild steel or wrought iron may be made to run in hard cast steel, cast iron, bronze or Babbitt metal. The last, having a low melting point, may be cast about the shaft for which it is to form a bearing.

BUSHBUCK (Boschbok,) the South African name of a medium-sized red antelope (q.v.), marked with white lines and spots, belonging to a local race of a widely spread species, Tragelaphus scriptus. The males alone have rather small, spirally twisted horns. There are several allied species, sometimes known as harnessed antelopes, which are of a larger size. Some of these such as the situtunga (T. spekei) have the hoofs elongated for walking on swampy ground, and hence have been separated as Limnotragus.

BUSHEL (from the O. Fr. boissiel, cf. med. L. bustellus, busellus, a little box), a dry measure of capacity, containing 8 gallons or 4 pecks. It has been in use for measuring corn, potatoes, &c., from a very early date; the value varying locally and with the article measured. The "imperial bushel", legally established in Great Britain in 1826, contains 2218.192 cub.in., or 80 lb of distilled water, determined at 62° F., with the barometer at 30 in. Previously, the standard bushel used was known as the "Winchester bushel", so named from the standard being kept in the town hall at Winchester; it contained 2150.42 cub. in. This standard is the basis of the bushel used in the United States and Canada; but other "bushels" for use in connexion with certain commodities have been legalized in different states.

BUSHIDO (Japanese for "military-knight-ways"), the unwritten code of laws governing the lives of the nobles of Japan, equivalent to the European chivalry. Its maxims have been orally handed down, together with a vast accumulation of traditional etiquette, the result of centuries of feudalism. Its inception is associated with the uprise of feudal institutions under Yoritomo, the first of the Shoguns, late in the 12th century, but bushido in an undeveloped form existed before then. The samurai or nobles of Japan entertained the highest respect for truth. "A bushi has no second word" was one of their mottoes. And their sense of honour was so high as to dictate suicide where it was offended.

See Inazo Nitobe, Bushido: The Soul of Japan (1905); also Japan: Army.

BUSHIRE, or Bander Bushire, a town of Persia, on the northern shore of the Persian Gulf, in 28° 59′ N., 50° 49′ E. The name is pronounced Boosheer, and not Bew-shire, or Bus-hire; modern Persians write it Bushehr and, yet more incorrectly, Abushehr, and translate it as "father of the city," but it is most probably a contraction of Bokht-ardashir, the name given to the place by the first Sassanian monarch in the 3rd century. In a similar way Riv-ardashir, a few miles south of Bushire, has become Rishire (Reesheer). In the first half of the 18th century, when Bushire was an unimportant fishing village, it was selected by Nadir Shah as the southern port of Persia and dockyard of the navy which he aspired to create in the Persian Gulf, and the British commercial factory of the East India Company, established at Gombrun, the modern Bander Abbasi, was transferred to it in 1759. At the beginning of the 19th century it had a population of 6000 to 8000, and it is now the most important port in the Persian Gulf, with a population of about 25,000. It used to be under the government of Fars, but is (since about 1892) the seat of the governor of the Persian Gulf ports, who is responsible to the central government, and has under his jurisdiction the principal ports of the Gulf and their dependencies. The town, which is of a triangular form, occupies the northern extremity of a peninsula 11 m. long and 4 broad, and is encircled by the sea on all sides except the south. It is fortified on the land side by a wall with 12 round towers. The houses being mostly built of a white conglomerate stone of shells and coral which forms the peninsula, gives the city when viewed from a distance a clean and handsome appearance, but on closer inspection the streets are found to be very narrow, irregular, ill-paved and filthy. Almost the only decent buildings are the governor's palace, the British residency and the houses of some well-to-do merchants. The sea immediately east of the town has a considerable depth, but its navigation is impeded by sand-banks and a bar north and west of the town, which can be passed only by vessels drawing not more than 9 ft. of water, except at spring tides, when there is a rise of from 8 to 10 ft. Vessels drawing more than 9 ft. must anchor in the roads miles away to the west. The climate is very hot in the summer months and unhealthy. The water is very bad, and that fit for drinking requires to be brought from wells distant 1½ to 3 m. from the city wall.

Bushire carries on a considerable trade, particularly with India, Java and Arabia. Its principal imports are cotton and woollen goods, yarn, metals, sugar, coffee, tea, spices, cashmere shawls, &c., and its principal exports opium, wool, carpets, horses, grain, dyes and gums, tobacco, rosewater, &c. The importance of Bushire has much increased since about 1862. It is now not only the headquarters of the English naval squadron in the Persian Gulf, and the land terminus of the Indo-European telegraph, but it also forms the chief station in the Gulf of the British Indian Steam Navigation Company, which runs its vessels weekly between Bombay and Basra. Consulates of Great Britain, Germany, France, Russia and Turkey and several European mercantile houses are established at Bushire, and notwithstanding the drawbacks of bad roads to the interior, insufficient and precarious means of transport, and want of security, the annual value of the Bushire trade since 1890 averaged about £1,500,000 (one-third being for exports, two-thirds for imports), and over two-thirds of this was British. Of the 278,000 tons of shipping which entered the port in 1905, 244,000 were British.

During the war with Persia (1856-57) Bushire surrendered to a British force and remained in British occupation for some months. At Rishire, some miles south of Bushire and near the summer quarters of the British resident and the British telegraph buildings, there are extensive ruins among which bricks with cuneiform inscriptions have been found, showing that the place was a very old Elamite settlement.

(A. H.-S.)

BUSHMEN, or Bosjesmans, a people of South Africa, so named by the British and Dutch colonists of the Cape. They often call themselves Saan [Sing. Sá], but this appears to be the Hottentot name. If they have a national name it is Khuai, probably "small man," the title of one group. This Khuai has, however, been translated as the Bushman word for tablier égyptien (see below), adopted as the racial name because that malformation is one of their physical characteristics. The Kaffirs call them Abatwa, the Bechuana Masarwa (Maseroa). There is little reason to doubt that they constitute the aboriginal element of the population of South Africa, and indications of their former presence have been found as far north at least as the Nyasa and Tanganyika basins. "It would seem," writes Sir H.H. Johnston (British Central Africa, p. 52), "as if the earliest known race of man inhabiting what is now British Central Africa was akin to the Bushman-Hottentot type of negro. Rounded stones with a hole through the centre, similar to those which are used by the Bushmen in the south for weighting their digging-sticks (the graaf stock of the Boers), have been found at the south end of Lake Tanganyika." The dirty yellow colour of the Bushmen, their slightly slanting eyes and prominent cheek-bones had induced early anthropologists to dwell on their resemblance to the Mongolian races. This similarity has been now recognized as quite superficial. More recently a connexion has been traced between the Bushmen and the Pygmy peoples inhabiting the forests of Central Africa. Though the matter cannot be regarded as definitely settled, the latest researches rather tend to discredit this view. In fact it would appear that the two peoples have little in common save diminutive proportions and a nomadic and predatory form of existence. Owing to the discovery of steatopygous figurines in Egyptian graves, a theory has been advanced that the Egyptians of the early dynasties were of the same primitive pygmy negroid stock as the Bushmen. But this is highly speculative. The physical characteristics of Egyptian skulls have nothing of the Bushman in them. Of the primitive pygmy negroid stock the Hottentots (q.v.), once considered the parent family, are now regarded as an offshoot of mixed Bantu-Bushman blood from the main Bushman race.

It seems probable that the Bushmen must be regarded as having extended considerably to the north of the area occupied by them within the memory of white men. Evidence has been produced of the presence of a belated Hottentot or Hottentot-Bushman group as far north as the district between Kilimanjaro and Victoria Nyanza. They were probably driven south by the Bantu tribes, who eventually outflanked them and confined them to the less fertile tracts of country. Before the arrival of Europeans in South Africa the Bushman race appears to have been, what it so essentially is to-day, a nomadic race living in widely scattered groups. The area in which the Bushmen are now found sporadically may be defined as extending from the inner ranges of the mountains of Cape Colony, through the central Kalahari desert to near Lake Ngami, and thence north-westward to the districts about the Ovambo river north of Damaraland. In short, they have been driven by European and Kaffir encroachments into the most barren regions of South Africa. A few remain in the more inaccessible parts of the Drakensberg range about the sources of the Vaal. Only in one or two districts are they found in large numbers, chiefly in Great Bushman Land towards the Orange river. A regularly planned and wholesale destruction of the Bushmen on the borders of Cape Colony in the earlier years of European occupation reduced their numbers to a great extent; but this cruel hunting of the Bushmen has ceased. In retaliation the Bushmen were long the scourge of the farms on the outer borders of the colony, making raids on the cattle and driving them off in large numbers. On the western side of the deserts they are generally at enmity with the Koranna Hottentots, but on the eastern border of the Kalahari they have to some extent fraternized with the earliest Bechuana migrants. Their language, which exists in several dialects, has in common with Hottentot, but to a greater degree, the peculiar sounds known as "clicks." The Hottentot language is more agglutinative, the Bushman more monosyllabic; the former recognizes a gender in names, the latter does not; the Hottentots form the plural by a suffix, the Bushmen by repetition of the name; the former count up to twenty, the latter can only number two, all above that being "many." F.C.Selous records that Koranna Hottentots were able to converse fluently with the Bushmen of Bechuanaland.