VOLUME III SLICE V Bedlam to Benson, George (continued 7)

Quite distinct from the art of change-ringing is the science of “composing,” i.e. arranging and uniting by the proper “calls,” subject to certain fixed laws and conditions, a number of groups of changes, so that no one change, or series of changes represented in those groups, shall be repeated. A composition, long or short, is said to be “true” if it is free from, “false” if it involves, such repetition; and the body of ascertained laws and conditions governing true composition in any method constitutes the test or “proof” to be applied to a composition in that method to demonstrate its truth or falseness. Many practical ringers know little or nothing of the principles of composition, and are content with performing compositions received from composers, or published in ringing books and periodicals. An elaborate statement of the principles of composition in the “Grandsire” method may be found in an appendix to Snowdon’s Grandsire (1888), by the Rev. C.D.P. Davies. Those which apply to “Treble Bob” are explained in Snowdon’s Treatise on Treble Bob, Part I. But, so far as can be ascertained, there is no treatise dealing with the science of composition as a whole; nor is it possible here to attempt a popular exposition of its principles.

One of the objects kept in view by composers is musical effect. Certain sequences or contrasts of notes strike the ear as more musical than others; and an arrangement which brings up the more musical changes in quicker succession improves the musical effect of the “peal” or “touch.” On seven bells all the possible changes must be inserted in a true peal; but on larger numbers of bells, where the choice is from an immense number of possible changes, the composer is free to select those which are most musical. Unless, however, the bells of any given “ring” are in perfect tune and harmony with each other, their musical effect must be impaired, however well they are rung. This gives importance to the science and art of bell-tuning, in which great progress has been made (see above).

The art of scientific change-ringing, peculiar to England, does not seem to have been evolved before the middle of the 17th century. Societies or gilds of ringers, however, existed much earlier. A patent roll of 39 Henry III. (1255) confirms the “Brethren of the Guild of Westminster, who are appointed to ring the great bells there,” in the enjoyment of the “privileges and free customs which they have enjoyed from the time of Edward the Confessor.” In 1602 (as appears from a MS. in the library of All Souls’ College, Oxford) was founded a society called the “Scholars of Cheapside.” In 1637 began the “Ancient Society of College Youths,” so called from their meeting to practise on the six bells at St Martin’s, College Hill, a church destroyed in the Great Fire of London, 1666. At first only “rounds” and “call-changes” were rung, till about 1642, when 120 “Bob Doubles” were achieved; but slow progress was made till 1677, when Fabian Stedman of Cambridge published his Campanologia, dedicating it to this society, his method being first rung about this time by some of its members. Before the end of the 17th century was founded the “Society of London Scholars,” the name of which was changed in 1746 to “Cumberland Youths” in compliment to the victor of Culloden. These two metropolitan societies still exist, and include in their membership most of the leading change-ringers of England: one of the oldest provincial societies being that of Saffron Walden in Essex, founded in 1623, and still holding an annual ringing festival. In the latter half of the 18th and first half of the 19th century change-ringing, which at first seems to have been an aristocratic pastime, degenerated in social repute. Church bells and their ringers, neglected by church authorities, became associated with the lower and least reputable phases of parochial life; and belfries were too often an adjunct to the pothouse. In the last half of the 19th century there was a great revival of change-ringing, leading to improvements in belfries and in ringers, and to their gradual recognition as church workers. Diocesan or county associations for the promotion of change-ringing and of belfry reform spread knowledge of the art and aroused church officials to greater interest in and care for their bells. A Central Council of Church Bell Ringers, consisting of delegates from these various societies, meets annually in London or at some provincial centre to discuss ringing matters, and to collect and formulate useful knowledge upon practical questions—e.g. the proper care of bells and the means of preventing annoyance from their use in the neighbourhood of houses, rules for the conduct of belfries, &c. It is now less likely than ever that the Belgian carillons will be preferred in England to the peculiarly English system of ringing bells in peal; by which, whatever its difficulties, the musical sound of bells is most fully brought out, and their scientific construction best stimulated.

Authorities.—The literature of bell-lore (or campanology) consists chiefly of scattered treatises or pamphlets upon the technique of different methods of change-ringing, or upon the bells of particular counties or districts. The earliest that deal with the science and art of change-ringing are Campanologia or the Art of Ringing Improved (1677), and a chapter of “Advice to a Ringer” in the School of Recreations, or Gentleman’s Tutor (1684), showing that in its early days bell-ringing was a fashionable pastime. Then follow Campanologia, or the Art of Ringing made Easy (1766), Clavis Campanologia, a Key to Ringing (1788), and Shipway’s Campanologia (1816). The revival of change-ringing in recent years has produced many manuals: e.g. Snowdon’s Rope-Sight (explaining the “Plain Bob” method), Grandsire, Treatise on Treble Bob, Double Norwich Court Bob Major, and Standard Methods (with a book of diagrams); Troyte on Change-Ringing; The Duffield Method, by Sir A.P. Heywood, Bart., its inventor. Somewhat prior to these are various works by the Rev. H.T. Ellacombe, inventor of a chiming apparatus which bears his name, and a pioneer in belfry reform. Among these are accounts of the church bells of Devon, Somerset and Gloucester, and pamphlets on Belfries and Ringers, Chiming, &c.; much of their contents being summarized in The Ringer’s Guide to the Church Bells of Devon, by C. Pearson (1888). A Glossary of Technical Terms used in connexion with church bells and change-ringing was published (1901) under the auspices of the Central Council of Church Bell Ringers. On the history of church bells and customs connected with them much curious information is given in North’s English Bells and Bell Lore (1888). By the same author are monographs on the church bells of Leicestershire, Northamptonshire, Lincolnshire and Hertfordshire. There are similar works on the church bells of Suffolk and Cambridgeshire, by Dr Raven; of Huntingdonshire, by the Rev. T.M.N. Owen; and on the church bells of Essex, by the Rev. C. Deedes. A compilation and summary of many data of bell-lore will be found in A Book about Bells, by the Rev. G.S. Tyack; and in a volume by Dr Raven in the “Antiquary’s Books” series (Methuen, 1906), entitled The Bells of England, which deals with the antiquarian side of bell-lore. See also Quarterly Review, No. cxc. (September 1854); Windsor Magazine (December 1896); Lord Rayleigh’s paper “On the Tones of Bells” in the Phil. Mag. for January 1890; and a series of articles from the Guardian, reprinted as a pamphlet under the title, Church Bells and Bell-ringing.

(T. L. P.)

House Bells.—Buildings are commonly provided with bells, conveniently arranged so as to enable attendants to be summoned to the different rooms. In the old system, which has been largely superseded by pneumatic and still more by electric bells, the bells themselves are of the ordinary conical shape and are provided with clappers hung loosely inside them. Being supported on springs they continue to swing, and therefore to give out sound as the clapper knocks against the sides, for some time after they have been set in motion by means of the strings or wires by which each is connected to a bell-pull in the rooms. These wires are generally placed out of sight inside the walls, and bell-cranks are employed to take them round corners and to change the direction of motion as required. A lightly poised pendulum is often attached to each bell, to show by its motion when it has been rung. In pneumatic bells the wires are replaced by pipes of narrow bore, and the current of air which is caused to flow along these by the pressing of a push-button actuates a small hammer which impinges rapidly against a bell or gong. An electric bell consists of a small electro-magnet acting on a soft iron armature which is supported in such a way that normally it stands away from the magnet. When the latter is energized by the passage of an electric current, the armature is attracted towards it, and a small hammer attached to it strikes a blow on the bell or gong. This “single stroke” type of bell is largely used in railway signalling instruments. For domestic purposes, however, the bells are arranged so that the hammer strikes a series of strokes, continuing so long as the push-button which closes the electric circuit is pressed. A light spring is provided against which the armature rests when it is not attracted by the electro-magnet, and the current is arranged to pass through this spring and the armature on its way to the magnet. When the armature is attracted by the magnet it breaks contact with this spring, the current is interrupted, and the magnet being no longer energized allows the armature to fall back on the spring and thus restore the circuit. In this way a rapid to and fro motion is imparted to the hammer. The electric current is supplied by a battery, usually either of Leclanché or of dry cells. One bell will serve for all the rooms of a house, an “indicator” being provided to show from which it has been rung. Such indicators are of two main types: the current either sets in motion a pendulum, or causes a disk bearing the name or number of the room concerned to come into view. Each push must have one wire appropriated to itself leading from the battery through the indicator to the bell, but the return wire from the bell to the battery may be common to all the pushes. Bells of this kind cease to ring whenever the electrical continuity of any of these wires is interrupted, but in some cases, as in connexion with burglar-alarms, it is desirable that the bell, once set in action, shall continue to ring even though the wires are cut. For this purpose, in “continuous ringing” bells, the current, started by the push or alarm apparatus, instead of working the bell, is made to operate a relay-switch and thus to bring into circuit a second battery which continues to ring the bell, no matter what happens to the first circuit.

(H. M. R.)

BELLABELLA, the common name (popularized from the Indian corruption of Milbank) for a tribe of Kwakiutl Indians at Milbank, British Columbia, including the subtribes Kokaitk, Oetlitk and Ocalitk. They were converted to Christianity by Protestant missionaries, and number about 300.

BELLACOOLA or Bilqula, a tribe of North American Indians of Salishan stock, inhabiting the coast of British Columbia. They number some 300.

BELLADONNA (from the Ital. bella donna, “beautiful lady,” the berries having been used as a cosmetic), the roots and leaves of Atropa belladonna, or deadly nightshade (q.v.), widely used in medicine on account of the alkaloids which they contain. Of these the more important are atropine (or atropia), hyoscyamine, hyoscine and belladonine; atropine is the most important, occurring as the malate to the extent of about 0.47% in the leaves, and from 0.6 to 0.25% in the roots.

Atropine, C17H23NO3, was discovered in 1833 by P.L. Geiger and Hesse and by Mein in the tissues of Atropa belladonna, from which it may be extracted by means of chloroform. By crystallization from alcohol it is obtained as colourless needles, melting at 115°. Hydrolysis with hydrochloric acid or baryta water gives tropic acid and tropine; on the other hand, by boiling equimolecular quantities of these substances with dilute hydrochloric acid, atropine is reformed. Since both these substances have been synthesized (see Tropine), the artificial formation of atropine is accomplished. Atropine is optically inactive; hyoscyamine, possibly a physical isomer, which yields atropine when heated to 108.6°, is laevorotatory.

Medicine.—The official doses of atropine are from 1⁄200 to 1⁄100 grain, and the sulphate, which is in general use in medicine, has a similar dose. It is highly important to observe that the official doses of the various pharmacopoeias may with safety be greatly exceeded in practice. They are based on the experimental toxic, as distinguished from lethal dose. A toxic dose causes unpleasant symptoms, but in certain cases, such as this, it may require very many times a toxic dose to produce the lethal effect. In other words, whilst one-fiftieth of a grain may cause unpleasant symptoms, it may need more than a grain to kill. So valuable are certain of the properties of atropine that it is often desirable to give doses of one-twentieth or one-tenth of a grain; but these will never be ventured upon by the practitioner who is ignorant of the great interval between the minimum toxic and the minimum lethal dose. It actually needs twenty to thirty grains of atropine to kill a rabbit: the animal is, however, somewhat exceptional in this regard. The most valuable preparations of this potent drug are the liquor atropinae sulphatis, which is a 1% solution, and the lamella—for insertion within the conjunctival sac—which contains one five-thousandth part of a grain of the alkaloid.

Pharmacology.—When rubbed into the skin with such substances as alcohol or glycerine, which are absorbed, atropine is carried through the epidermis with them, and in this manner—or when simply applied to a raw surface—it paralyses the terminals of the pain-conducting sensory nerves. It acts similarly, though less markedly, upon the nerves which determine the secretion of the perspiration, and is therefore a local anaesthetic or anodyne and an anhidrotic. Being rapidly absorbed into the blood, it exercises a long and highly important series of actions on nearly every part and function of the nervous system. Perhaps its most remarkable action is that upon the terminals of nearly all the secretory nerves in the body. This causes the entire skin to become dry—as in the case of the local action above mentioned; and it arrests the secretion of saliva and mucus in the mouth and throat, causing these parts to become very dry and to feel very uncomfortable. This latter result is due to paralysis of the chorda tympani nerve, which is mainly responsible for the salivary secretion. Certain nerve fibres from the sympathetic nervous system, which can also cause the secretion of a (specially viscous) saliva, are entirely unaffected by atropine. A curious parallel to this occurs in its action on the eye. There is much uncertainty as to the influence of atropine on the secretions of the stomach, intestines, liver, pancreas and kidneys, and it is not possible to make any definite statement, save that in all probability the activities of the nerves innervating the gland-cells in these organs are reduced, though they are certainly not arrested, as in the other cases. The secretion of mucus by the bronchi and trachea is greatly reduced and their muscular tissue is paralysed—a fact of which much use is made in practical medicine. The secretion of milk, if occurring in the mammary gland, is much diminished or entirely arrested. Given internally, atropine does not exert any appreciable sedative action upon the nerves of pain.

The action of atropine on the motor nerves is equally important. Those that go to the voluntary muscles are depressed only by very large and dangerous doses. The drug appears to have no influence upon the contractile cells that constitute muscle-fibre, any more than it has directly upon the secretory cells that constitute any gland. But moderate doses of atropine markedly paralyse the terminals of the nerves that go to involuntary muscles, whether the action of those nerves be motor or inhibitory. In the intestine, for instance, are layers of muscle-fibre which are constantly being inhibited or kept under check by the splanchnic nerves. These are paralysed by atropine, and intestinal peristalsis is consequently made more active, the muscles being released from nervous control. The motor nerves of the arteries, of the bladder and rectal sphincters, and also of the bronchi, are paralysed by atropine, but the nervous arrangements of those organs are highly complex and until they are further unravelled by physiologists, pharmacology will be unable to give much information which might be of great value in the employment of atropine. The action upon the vaso-motor system is, however, fairly clear. Whether effected entirely by action on the nerve terminals, or by an additional influence upon the vaso-motor centre in the medulla oblongata, atropine certainly causes extreme dilatation of the blood-vessels, so much so that the skin becomes flushed and there may appear, after large doses, an erythematous rash, which must be carefully distinguished, in cases of supposed belladonna poisoning, from that of scarlet fever: more especially as the temperature may be elevated and the pulse is very rapid in both conditions. But whilst the characteristic action of atropine is to dilate the blood-vessels, its first action is to stimulate the vaso-motor centre—thereby causing temporary contraction of the vessels—and to increase the rapidity of the heart’s action, so that the blood-pressure rapidly rises. Though transient, this action is so certain, marked and rapid, as to make the subcutaneous injection of atropine invaluable in certain conditions. The respiratory centre is similarly stimulated, so that atropine must be regarded as a temporary but efficient respiratory and cardiac stimulant.

Toxic doses of atropine—and therefore of belladonna—raise the temperature several degrees. The action is probably nervous, but in the present state of our knowledge regarding the control of the temperature by the nervous system, it cannot be further defined. In small therapeutic and in small toxic doses atropine stimulates the motor apparatus of the spinal cord, just as it stimulates the centres in the medulla oblongata. This is indeed, as Sir Thomas Fraser has pointed out, “a strychnine action.” In large toxic and in lethal doses the activity of the spinal cord is lowered.

No less important than any of the above is the action of atropine on the cerebrum. This has long been a debated matter, but it may now be stated, with considerable certainty, that the higher centres are incoordinately stimulated, a state closely resembling that of delirium tremens being induced. In cases of poisoning the delirium may last for many hours or even days. Thereafter a more or less sleepy state supervenes, but it is not the case that atropine ever causes genuine coma. The stuporose condition is the result of exhaustion after the long period of cerebral excitement. It is to be noted that children, who are particularly susceptible to the influence of certain of the other potent alkaloids, such as morphine and strychnine, will take relatively large doses of atropine without ill-effect.

The action of atropine on the eye is of high theoretical and practical importance. The drug affects only the involuntary muscles of the eye, just as it affects only the involuntary or non-striated portion of the oesophagus. The result of its instillation into the eye—and the same occurs when the atropine has been absorbed elsewhere—is rapidly to cause wide dilatation of the pupil. This can be experimentally shown—by the method of exclusion—to be caused by a paralysis of the terminals of the third cranial nerve in the sphincter pupillae of the iris. The action of atropine in dilating the pupil is also aided by a stimulation of the fibres from the sympathetic nervous system, which innervate the remaining muscle of the iris—the dilator pupillae. As a result of the extreme pupillary dilatation, the tension of the eyeball is greatly raised. The sight of many an eye has been destroyed by the use of atropine—in ignorance of this action on the intra-ocular tension—in cases of incipient glaucoma. The use of atropine is absolutely contra-indicated in any case where the intra-ocular tension already is, or threatens to become, unduly high. This warning applies notably to those—usually women—who are accustomed indiscriminately to use belladonna or atropine in order to give greater brilliancy to their eyes. The fourth ocular result of administering atropine is the production of a slight but definite degree of local anaesthesia of the eyeball. It follows from the above that a patient who is definitely under the influence of atropine will display rapid pulse, dilated pupils, a dry skin and a sense of discomfort, due to dryness of the mouth and throat.

Therapeutics.—The external uses of the drug are mainly analgesic. The liniment or plaster of belladonna will relieve many forms of local pain. Generally speaking, it may be laid down that atropine is more likely than iodine to relieve a pain of quite superficial origin; and conversely. Totally to be reprobated is the use, in order to relieve pain, of belladonna or any other application which affects the skin, in cases where the surgeon may later be required to operate. In such cases, it is necessary to use such anodyne measures as will not interfere with the subsequent demands that may be made of the skin, i.e. that it be aseptic and in a condition so sound that it is able to undertake the process of healing itself after the operation has been performed. Atropine is universally and constantly used in ophthalmic practice in order to dilate the pupil for examination of the retina by the ophthalmoscope, or in cases where the inflamed iris threatens to form adhesions to neighbouring parts. The drug is often replaced in ophthalmology by homatropine—an alkaloid prepared from tropine—which acts similarly to atropine but has the advantage of allowing the ocular changes to pass away in a much shorter time. The anhidrotic action of atropine is largely employed in controlling the night-sweats so characteristic of pulmonary tuberculosis, small doses of the solution of the sulphate being given at night.

The uses of atropine in cardiac affections are still obscure and dubious. It can only be laid down that the drug is a valuable though temporary stimulant in emergencies, and that its use as a plaster or internally often relieves cardiac pain. Recollection of the extraordinary complexity of the problems which are involved in the whole question of pain of cardiac origin will emphasize the extreme vagueness of the above assertion. Professor Schäfer recommended the use of atropine prior to the administration of a general anaesthetic, in cases where the action of the vagus nerve upon the heart is to be dreaded; and there is little doubt of the value of this precaution, which has no attendant disadvantages, in all such cases. Atropine is often of value as an antidote, as in poisoning by pilocarpine, muscarine (mushroom poisoning), prussic acid, &c.

Omitting numerous minor applications of this drug, we may pass to two therapeutic uses which are of unquestionable utility. In cases of whooping-cough or any other condition in which there is spasmodic action of the muscular fibre in the bronchi—a definition which includes nearly every form of asthma and many cases of bronchitis—atropine is an almost invaluable drug. Not only does it relieve the spasm, but it lessens the amount of secretion—often dangerously excessive—which is often associated with it. The relief of symptoms in whooping-cough is sharply to be distinguished from any influence on the course of the disease, since the drug does not abbreviate its duration by a single day. In treating an actual and present attack of asthma, it is advisable to give the standardized tincture of belladonna—unless expense is no consideration, in which case atropine may itself be used—in doses of twenty minims every quarter of an hour as long as no evil effects appear. Relief is thereby constantly obtained. Smaller doses of the drug should be given three times a day between the attacks.

The nocturnal enuresis or urinary incontinence of children and of adults is frequently relieved by this drug. The excellent toleration of atropine displayed by children must be remembered, and if its use is “pushed” a cure may almost always be expected.

Toxicology.—The symptoms of poisoning by belladonna or atropine are dealt with above. The essential point here to be added is that death takes place from combined cardiac and respiratory failure. This fact is, of course, the key to treatment. This consists in the use of emetics or the stomach-pump, with lime-water, which decomposes the alkaloid. These measures are, however, usually rendered nugatory by the very rapid absorption of the alkaloid. Death is to be averted by such measures as will keep the heart and lungs in action until the drug has been excreted by the kidneys. Inject stimulants subcutaneously; give coffee—hot and strong—by the mouth and rectum, or use large doses of caffeine citrate; and employ artificial respiration. Do not employ such physiological antagonists as pilocarpine or morphine, for the lethal actions of all these drugs exhibit not mutual antagonism but coincidence.

BELLAGIO, a town of Lombardy, Italy, in the province of Como, about 15 m. N.N.E. by steamer from the town of Como, situated on the promontory which divides the two southern arms of the Lake of Como. Pop. (1901) 3536. It is chiefly remarkable for the beauty of its scenery, and is a very favourite resort in the spring and autumn. Some of the gardens of its villas are remarkably fine. The manufacture of silks and carving in olive wood are carried on.

BELLAIRE, a city of Belmont county, Ohio, U.S.A., on the Ohio river, 5 m. S. of Wheeling, West Virginia. Pop. (1890) 9934; (1900) 9912 (1159 foreign-born); (1910) 12,946. It is served by the Baltimore & Ohio, the Pennsylvania, and the Ohio River & Western railways. Bellaire is the shipping centre of the Belmont county coalfield which in 1907 produced 19.3% of the total output of coal for the state. Iron, limestone and fireclay are found in the vicinity; among the manufactures are iron and steel, glass, galvanized and enamelled ware, agricultural implements and stoves. The value of the city’s factory products increased from $8,837,646 in 1900 to $10,712,438 in 1905, or 21.2%. Bellaire was settled about 1795, was laid out in 1836, was incorporated as a village in 1858, and was chartered as a city in 1874.

BELLAMY, EDWARD (1850-1898), American author and social reformer, was born at Chicopee Falls, Massachusetts, on the 25th of March 1850. He studied for a time at Union College, Schenectady, New York, and in Germany; was admitted to the bar in 1871; but soon engaged in newspaper work, first as an associate editor of the Springfield Union, Mass., and then as an editorial writer for the New York Evening Post. After publishing three novelettes (Six to One, Dr Heidenhoff’s Process and Miss Ludington’s Sister), pleasantly written and showing some inventiveness in situation, but attracting no special notice, in 1888 he caught the public attention with Looking Backward, 2000-1887. in which he set forth ideas of co-operative or semi-socialistic life in village or city communities. The book was widely circulated in America and Europe, and was translated into several foreign languages. It was at first judged merely as a romance, but was soon accepted as a statement of the deliberate wishes and methods of its author, who devoted the remainder of his life as editor, author, lecturer and politician, to the promotion of the communistic theories of Looking Backward, which he called “nationalism”; a Nationalist party (the main points of whose immediate programme, according to Bellamy, were embodied in the platform of the People’s party of 1892) was organized, but obtained no political hold. In 1897 Bellamy published Equality, a sequel to Looking Backward. He died at Chicopee Falls on the 22nd of May 1898.

BELLAMY, GEORGE ANNE (1727-1788), English actress, born at Fingal, Ireland, by her own account, on the 23rd of April 1733, but more probably in 1727, was the illegitimate daughter of Lord Tyrawley, British ambassador at Lisbon. Her mother married there a Captain Bellamy, and the child received the name George Anne, by mistake for Georgiana. Lord Tyrawley acknowledged the child, had her educated in a convent in Boulogne, and through him she came to know a number of notable people in London. On his appointment as ambassador to Russia, she went to live with her mother in London, made the acquaintance of Mrs Woffington and Garrick, and adopted the theatrical profession. Her first engagement was at Covent Garden as Monimia in the Orphan in 1744. Owing to her personal charms and the social patronage extended to her, her success was immediate, and till 1770 she acted in London, Edinburgh and Dublin, in all the principal tragic roles. She played Juliet to Garrick’s Romeo at Drury Lane at the time that Spranger Barry (q.v.) was giving the rival performances at Covent Garden, and was considered the better of the Juliets. Her last years were unhappy, and passed in poverty and ill-health. She died on the 16th of February 1788.

Her Apology (6 vols., 1785) gives an account of her long career and of her private life, the extravagance and licence of which were notorious.

BELLAMY, JOSEPH (1719-1790), American theologian, was born in Cheshire, Connecticut, on the 20th of February 1719. He graduated from Yale in 1735, studied theology for a time under Jonathan Edwards, was licensed to preach when scarcely eighteen years old, and from 1740 until his death, on the 6th of March 1790, was pastor of the Congregational church at Bethlehem, Connecticut. The publication of his best-known work, True Religion Delineated (1750), won for him a high reputation as a theologian, and the book was several times reprinted both in England and in America. Despite the fact that with the exception of the period of the “Great Awakening” (1740-1742), when he preached as an itinerant in several neighbouring colonies, his active labours were confined to his own parish, his influence on the religious thought of his time in America was probably surpassed only by that of his old friend and teacher Jonathan Edwards. This influence was due not only to his publications, but also to the “school” or classes for the training of clergymen which he conducted for many years at his home and from which went forth scores of preachers to every part of New England and the middle colonies (states). Bellamy’s “system” of divinity was in general similar to that of Edwards. During the War of Independence he was loyal to the American cause. The university of Aberdeen conferred upon him the honorary degree of D.D. in 1768. He was a powerful and dramatic preacher. His published works, in addition to that above mentioned, include The Wisdom of God in the Permission of Sin (1758), his most characteristic work; Theron, Paulinus and Aspasio; or Letters and Dialogues upon the Nature of Love to God, Faith in Christ, and Assurance of a Title to Eternal Life (1759); The Nature and Glory of the Gospel (1762); A Blow at the Root of Antinomianism (1763); There is but One Covenant (1769); Four Dialogues on the Half-Way Covenant (1769); and A Careful and Strict Examination of the External Covenant (1769).

His collected Works were published in 3 vols. (New York, 1811-1812), and were republished with a Memoir by Rev. Tryon Edwards (2 vols., Boston, 1850).

BELLARMINE (Ital. Bellarmino), ROBERTO FRANCESCO ROMOLO (1542-1621), Italian cardinal and theologian, was born at Monte Pulciano, in Tuscany, on the 4th of October 1542. He was destined by his father to a political career, but feeling a call to the priesthood he entered the Society of Jesus in 1560 After spending three years at Rome, he was sent to the Jesuit settlement at Mondovi in Piedmont, where he studied and at the same time taught Greek, and, though not yet in orders, gained some reputation as a preacher. In 1567 and 1568 he was at Padua, studying theology under a master who belonged to the school of St Thomas Aquinas. In 1569 he was sent by the general of his order to Louvain, and in 1570, after being ordained priest, began to lecture on theology at the university. His seven years’ residence in the Low Countries brought him into close relations with modes of thought differing essentially from his own; and, though he was neither by temperament nor training inclined to be affected by the prevailing Augustinian doctrines of grace and free-will, the controversy into which he fell on these questions compelled him to define his theological principles more clearly. On his return to Rome in 1576 he was chosen by Gregory XIII. to lecture on controversial theology in the newly-founded Roman College. The result of these labours appeared some years afterwards in the far-famed Disputationes de Controversiis Christianae Fidei adversus hujus temporis Haereticos (3 vols., 1581, 1582, 1593). These volumes, which called forth a multitude of answers on the Protestant side, exhaust the controversy as it was carried on in those days, and contain a lucid and uncompromising statement of Roman Catholic doctrine. For many years afterwards, Bellarmine was held by Protestant advocates as the champion of the papacy, and a vindication of Protestantism generally took the form of an answer to his works. In 1589 he was selected by Sixtus V. to accompany, in the capacity of theologian, the papal legation sent to France soon after the murder of Henry III. He was created cardinal in 1599 by Clement VIII., and two years later was made archbishop of Capua. His efforts on behalf of the clergy were untiring, and his ideal of the bishop’s office may be read in his address to his nephew, Angelo della Ciaia, who had been raised to the episcopate (Admonitio ad episcopum Theanensem, nepotem suum, Rome, 1612). Being detained in Rome by the desire of the newly-elected pope, Paul V., he resigned his archbishopric in 1605. He supported the church in its conflicts with the civil powers in Venice, France and England, and sharply criticized James I. for the severe legislation against the Roman Catholics that followed the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot. When health failed him, he retired to Monte Pulciano, where from 1607 to 1611 he acted as bishop. In 1610 he published his De Potestate summi Pontificis in rebus temporalibus directed against the posthumous work of William Barclay of Aberdeen, which denied the temporal power of the pope. Bellarmine trod here on difficult ground, for, although maintaining that the pope had the indirect right to depose unworthy rulers, he gave offence to Paul V. in not asserting more strongly the direct papal claim, whilst many French theologians, and especially Bossuet, condemned him for his defence of ultramontanism. As a consultor of the Sacred Office, Bellarmine took a prominent part in the first examination of Galileo’s writings. His conduct in this matter has been constantly misrepresented. He had followed with interest Galileo’s scientific discoveries and a respectful admiration grew up between them. Bellarmine did not proscribe the Copernican system, as has been maintained by Reusch (Der Process Galilei’s und die Jesuiten, Bonn, 1879, p. 125); all he claimed was that it should be presented as an hypothesis until it should receive scientific demonstration. When Galileo visited Rome in December 1615 he was warmly received by Bellarmine, and the high regard in which he was held is clearly testified in Bellarmine’s letters and in Galileo’s dedication to the cardinal of his discourse on “flying bodies.” The last years of Bellarmine’s life were mainly devoted to the composition of devotional works and to securing the papal approbation of the new order of the Visitation, founded by his friend St Francis de Sales, and the beatification of St Philip Neri. He died in Rome on the 17th of September 1621. Bellarmine, whose life was a model of Christian virtue, is the greatest of modern Roman Catholic controversialists, but the value of his theological works is seriously impaired by a very defective exegesis and a too frequent use of “forced” conclusions. His devotional treatises were very popular among English Roman Catholics in the penal days.

Bibliography.—Of the older editions of Bellarmine’s complete works the best is that in 7 vols. published at Cologne (1617-1620); modern editions appeared in 8 vols. at Naples (1856-1862, reprinted 1872), and in 12 vols. at Paris (1870-1874). For complete bibliography of all works of Bellarmine, of translations and controversial writings against him, see C. Sommervogel, Bibliothèque de la Compagnie de Jésus (Brussels and Paris, 1890 et seq.), vol. i. cols. 1151-1254; id., Addenda, pp. x.-xi. vol. viii., cols. 1797-1807. The main source for the life of Bellarmine is his Latin Autobiography (Rome, 1675; Louvain, 1753), which was reprinted with original text and German translation in the work of Dollinger and Reusch entitled Die Selbst-biographie des Cardinals Bellarmin (Bonn, 1887). The Epistolae Familiares, a very incomplete collection of letters, was published by J. Fuligatti (Rome, 1650), who is also the author of Vita del cardinale Bellarmino della Compagnia di Giesù (Rome, 1624). Cf. D. Bartoli, Della vita di Roberto cardinal Bellarmino (Rome, 1678), and M. Cervin, Imago virtutum Roberti card. Bellarmini Politiani (Siena, 1622), All these are panegyrics of small historical value. The best modern studies are J.B. Couderc’s Le Vénérable Cardinal Bellarmin (2 vols., Paris, 1893), and X. le Bachelet’s article in A. Vacant’s Dict. de theól, cat. cols. 560-599, with exhaustive bibliography.

BELLARY, or Ballari, a city and district of British India, in the Madras presidency. The city is 305 m. by rail from Madras. Pop. (1901) 58,247. The fort rises from a huge mass of granite rock, which with a circumference of nearly 2 m., juts up abruptly to a height of 450 ft. above the plain. The length of this rock from north-east to south-west is about 1150 ft. To the E. and S. lies an irregular heap of boulders, but to the W. is an unbroken precipice, and the N. is walled by bare rugged ridges. It is defended by two distinct lines of works. The upper fort is a quadrangular building on the summit, with only one approach, and was deemed impregnable by the Mysore princes. But as it has no accommodation for a garrison, it is now only occupied by a small guard of British troops in charge of prisoners. The ex-nawab of Kurnool was confined in it for forty years for the murder of his wife. It contains several cisterns, excavated in the rock. Outside the turreted rampart are a ditch and covered way. The lower fort lies at the eastern base of the rock and measures about half a mile in diameter. It contains the barracks and the commissariat stores, the Protestant church, orphanage, Masonic lodge, post-office and numerous private dwellings. The fort of Bellary was originally built by Hanumapa, in the 16th century. It was first dependent on the kingdom of Vijayanagar, afterwards on Bijapur, and subsequently subject to the nizam and Hyder Ali. The latter erected the present fortifications according to tradition with the assistance of a French engineer in his service, whom he afterwards hanged for not building the fort on a higher rock adjacent to it. Bellary is an important cantonment and the headquarters of a military division. There is a considerable trade in cotton, in connexion with which there are large steam presses, and some manufacture of cotton cloth. There is a cotton spinning mill. In 1901 Bellary was chosen as one of the places of detention in India for Boer prisoners of war.

The district of Bellary has an area of 5714 sq. m. It consists chiefly of an extensive plateau between the Eastern and Western Ghats, of a height varying from 800 to 1000 ft. above the sea. The most elevated tracts are on the west, where the surface rises towards the culminating range of hills, and on the south, where it rises to the elevated tableland of Mysore. Towards the centre the almost treeless plain presents a monotonous aspect, broken only by a few rocky elevations that rise abruptly from the black soil. The hill ranges in Bellary are those of Sandur and Kampli to the west, the Lanka Malla to the east and the Copper Mountain (3148 ft.) to the south-west. The district is watered by five rivers: the Tungabhadra, formed by the junction of two streams, Tunga and Bhadra, the Haggari, Hindri, Chitravati and Pennar, the last considered sacred by the natives. None of the rivers is navigable and all are fordable during the dry season. The climate of Bellary is characterized by extreme dryness, due to the passing of the air over a great extent of heated plains, and it has a smaller rainfall than any other district in south India. The average daily variation of the thermometer is from 67° to 83° F. The prevailing diseases are cholera, fever, small-pox, ophthalmia, dysentery and those of the skin among the lower classes. Bellary is subject to disastrous storms and hurricanes, and to famines arising from a series of bad seasons. There were memorable famines in 1751, 1793, 1803, 1833, 1854, 1866, 1877 and 1896.

In 1901 the population was 947,214, showing an increase of 8% in the decade. The principal crops are millet, other food-grains, pulse, oil-seeds and cotton. There are considerable manufactures of cotton and woollen goods, and cotton is largely exported. The district is traversed by the Madras and Southern Mahratta railways, meeting on the eastern border at Guntakal junction, where another line branches off to Bezwada.

Little is known of the early history of the district. It contains the ruined capital of the ancient Hindu kingdom of Vijayanagar, and on the overthrow of that state by the Mahommedans, in 1564, the tract now forming the district of Bellary was split up into a number of military holdings, held by chiefs called poligars. In 1635 the Carnatic was annexed to the Bijapur dominions, from which again it was wrested in 1680 by Sivaji, the founder of the Mahratta power. It was then included in the dominions of Nizam-ul-mulk, the nominal viceroy of the great Mogul in the Deccan, from whom again it was subsequently conquered by Hyder Ali of Mysore. At the close of the war with Tippoo Sultan in 1792, these territories fell to the share of the nizam of Hyderabad, by whom they were ceded to the British in 1800, in return for protection by a force of British troops to be stationed at his capital. In 1808 the “Ceded Districts,” as they were called, were split into two districts, Cuddapah and Bellary. In 1882 the district of Anantapur, which had hitherto formed part of Bellary, was formed into a separate collectorate.

See Bellary Gazetteer, 1904.

BELL-COT, Bell-gable, or Bell-turret, the place where one or more bells are hung in chapels or small churches which have no towers. Bell-cots are sometimes double, as at Northborough and Coxwell; a very common form in France and Switzerland admits of three bells. In these countries also they are frequently of wood and attached to the ridge. In later times bell-turrets were much ornamented; on the continent of Europe they run up into a sort of small, slender spire, called flèche in France, and guglio in Italy. A bell-cot, gable or turret often holds the “Sanctus-bell,” rung at the saying of the “Sanctus” at the beginning of the canon of the Mass, and at the consecration and elevation of the Elements in the Roman Church. This differs but little from the common bell-cot, except that it is generally on the top of the arch dividing the nave from the chancel. At Cleeve, however, the bell seems to have been placed in a cot outside the wall. Sanctus-bells have also been placed over the gables of porches.

BELLEAU, REMY (c. 1527-1577), French poet, and member of the Pléiade (see Daurat), was born at Nogent-le-Rotrou about 1527. He studied with Ronsard and others under Jean Daurat at the Collège de Coqueret. He was attached to Renè de Lorraine, marquis d’Elboeuf, in the expedition against Naples in 1557, where he did good military service. On his return he was made tutor to the young Charles, marquis d’Elboeuf, who, under Belleau’s training became a great patron of the muses. Belleau was an enthusiast for the new learning and joined the group of young poets with ardour. In 1556 he published the first translation of Anacreon which had appeared in French. In the next year he published his first collection of poems, the Petites inventions, in which he describes stones, insects and flowers. The Amours et nouveaux échanges des pierres précieuses ... (1576) contains perhaps his most characteristic work. Its title is quoted in the lines of Ronsard’s epitaph on his tomb:—

“Luy mesme a basti son tombeau Dedans ses Pierres Précieuses.”

He wrote commentaries to Ronsard’s Amours in 1560, notes which evinced delicate taste and prodigious learning. Like Ronsard and Joachim Du Bellay, he was extremely deaf. His days passed peacefully in the midst of his books and friends, and he died on the 6th of March 1577. He was buried in the nave of the Grands Augustins at Paris, and was borne to the tomb on the pious shoulders of four poets, Ronsard, J.A. de Baïf, Philippe Desportes and Amadis Jamyn. His most considerable work is La Bergerie (1565-1572), a pastoral in prose and verse, written in imitation of Sannazaro. The lines on April in the Bergerie are well known to all readers of French poetry. Belleau was the French Herrick, full of picturesqueness, warmth and colour. His skies drop flowers and all his air is perfumed, and this voluptuous sweetness degenerates sometimes into licence. Extremely popular in his own age, he shared the fate of his friends, and was undeservedly forgotten in the next. Regnier said: “Belleau ne parle pas comme on parle à la ville”; and his lyrical beauty was lost on the trim 17th century. His complete works were collected in 1578, and contain, besides the works already mentioned, a comedy entitled La Reconnue, in short rhymed lines, which is not without humour and life, and a comic masterpiece, a macaronic poem on the religious wars, Dictamen metrificum de bello huguenotico et reistrorum1 piglamine ad sodales (Paris, no date).

The Œuvres complètes (3 vols., 1867) of Remy Belleau were edited by A. Gouverneui; and his Œuvres poétiques (2 vols., 1879) by M. Ch. Marty-Laveaux in his Pléiade française; see also C.A. Sainte-Beuve, Tableau historique et critique de la poésie française au XVIe siècle (ed. 1876), i. pp. 155-160, and ii. pp. 296 seq.

1 reîtres, German soldiers of fortune.

BELLECOUR (1725-1778), French actor, whose real name was Jean Claude Gilles Colson, was born on the 16th of January 1725, the son of a portrait-painter. He showed decided artistic talent, but soon deserted the brush for the stage under the name of Bellecour. After playing in the provinces he was called to the Comédie Française, but his début, on the 21st of December 1750, as Achilles in Iphigénie was not a great success. He soon turned to more congenial comedy rôles, which for thirty years he filled with great credit. He was a very natural player, and his willingness to give others on the stage an opportunity to show their talents made him extremely popular. He wrote a successful play, Fausses apparences (1761), and was very useful to the Comédie Française in editing and adapting the plays of others. He died on the 19th of November 1778.

His wife, Rose Perrine le Roy de la Corbinaye, was born at Lamballe on the 20th of December 1730, the daughter of an artillery officer. Under the stage name of Beaumenard she made her first Paris appearance in 1743 as Gogo in Favart’s Le Coq du village. After a year at the Opéra Comique she played in several companies, including that of Marshal Saxe, who is said to have been not insensible to her charms. In 1749 she made her début at the Comédie Française as Dorine in Tartuffe, and her success was immediate. She retired in 1756, but after an absence of five years, during which she married, she reappeared as Madame Bellecour, and continued her successes in soubrette parts in the plays of Molière and de Regnard. She retired finally at the age of sixty, but troublous times had put an end to the pension which she received from Louis XVI. and from the theatre, and she died in abject poverty on the 5th of August 1799. There is a charming portrait of her owned by the Théâtre Français.

BELLEFONTAINE, a city and the county-seat of Logan county, Ohio, U.S.A., about 45 m. N.W. of Columbus. Pop. (1890) 4245; (1900) 6649 (267 foreign-born); (1910) 8238. It is served by the Cleveland, Cincinnati, Chicago & St Louis (which has large shops here) and the Ohio Central railways; also by the Dayton, Springfield & Urbana electric railway. It is built on the south-west slope of a hill having an elevation of about 1500 ft. above sea-level and at the foot of which are several springs of clear water which suggested the city’s name. Among the city’s manufactures are iron bridges, carriage-bodies, flour and cement. The municipality owns and operates its water-works system and its gas and electric-lighting plants. Bellefontaine was first settled about 1818, was laid out as a town and made the county-seat in 1820 and was incorporated in 1835.

BELLEGARDE, the name of an important French family. Roger de Saint-Lary, baron of Bellegarde, served with distinction in the wars against the French Protestants. He showed much devotion to Henry III., who loaded him with favours and made him marshal of France. He eventually fell into disgrace, however, and died by poisoning in 1579. His nephew, Roger de Saint-Lary de Termes, a favourite with Henry III., Henry IV. and Louis XIII., was royal master of the horse and governor of Burgundy. His estate of Seurre in Burgundy was created a duchy in the peerage of France (duché-pairie) in his favour under the name of Bellegarde, in 1619. In 1645 the title of this duchy was transferred to the estate of Choisy-aux-Loges in Gâtinais, and was borne later by the family of Pardaillan de Gondrin, heirs of the house of Saint-Lary-Bellegarde. When Seurre passed into the possession of the princes of Condé they in the same way acquired the title of dukes of Bellegarde.

(M. P.*)

BELLEGARDE, HEINRICH JOSEPH JOHANNES, Count von (1756-1845), Austrian soldier and statesman, was born at Dresden on the 29th of August 1756, and for a short time served in the Saxon army. Transferring his services to Austria in 1771 he distinguished himself greatly as colonel of dragoons in the Turkish War of 1788-1789, and served as a major-general in the Netherlands campaigns of 1793-1794. In the campaign of 1796 in Germany, as a lieutenant field marshal, he served on the staff of the archduke Charles, whom he accompanied to Italy in the following year. He was also employed in the congress of Rastatt. In 1799 he commanded a corps in eastern Switzerland, connecting the armies of the archduke and Suvarov, and finally joined the latter in north Italy. He conducted the siege of the citadel of Alessandria, and was present at the decisive battle of Novi. He served again in the latter part of the Marengo campaign of 1800 in the rank of general of cavalry. In 1805, when the archduke Charles left to take command in Italy, Bellegarde became president ad interim of the council of war. He was, however, soon employed in the field, and at the sanguinary battle of Caldiero he commanded the Austrian right. In the war of 1809 he commanded the extreme right wing of the main army (see Napoleonic Campaigns). Cut off from Charles as the result of the battle of Eckmühl, he retreated into Bohemia, but managed to rejoin before the great battles near Vienna (Aspern and Wagram). From 1809 to 1813 Bellegarde, now field marshal, was governor-general of Galicia, but was often called to preside over the meetings of the Aulic Council, especially in 1810 in connexion with the reorganization of the Austrian army. In 1813, 1814 and 1815 he led the Austrian armies in Italy. His successes in these campaigns were diplomatic as well as military, and he ended them by crushing the last attempt of Murat in 1815. From 1816 to 1825 (when he had to retire owing to failing eyesight) he held various distinguished civil and military posts. He died in 1845.

See Smola, Das Leben des F.M. van Bellegarde (Vienna, 1847).

BELLE-ÎLE-EN-MER, an island off the W. coast of France, forming a canton of the department of Morbihan, 8 m. S. by W. of the peninsula of Quiberon. Pop. (1906) 9703. Area, 33 sq. m. The island is divided into the four communes of Le Palais, Bangor, Sauzon and Locmaria. It forms a treeless plateau with an average height of 130 ft. above sea-level, largely covered with moors and bordered by a rugged and broken coast. The climate is mild, the fig-tree and myrtle growing in sheltered spots and the soil, where cultivated, is productive. The inhabitants are principally engaged in agriculture and the fisheries, and in the preservation of sardines, anchovies, &c. The breed of draught horses in the island is highly prized. The chief town, Le Palais (pop. 2637), has an old citadel and fortifications, and possesses a port which is accessible to vessels drawing 13 ft. of water. Belle-Île must have been inhabited from a very early period, as it possesses several stone monuments of the class usually called Druidic.

The Roman name of the island seems to have been Vindilis, which in the middle ages became corrupted to Guedel. In 1572 the monks of the abbey of Ste Croix at Quimperlé ceded the island to the Retz family, in whose favour it was raised to a marquisate in the following year. It subsequently came into the hands of the family of Fouquet, and was ceded by the latter to the crown in 1718. It was held by English troops from 1761 to 1763 when the French got it in exchange for Nova Scotia. A few of the inhabitants of the latter territory migrated to Belle-Île, which is partly peopled by their descendants. In the state prison of Nouvelle Force at Le Palais political prisoners have at various times been confined.

BELLE-ISLE, CHARLES LOUIS AUGUSTE FOUQUET, Comte, and later Duc, de (1684-1761), French soldier and statesman, was the grandson of Nicholas Fouquet, superintendent of finances under Louis XIV., and was born at Villefranche de Rouergue. Although his family was in disgrace, he entered the army at an early age and was made proprietary colonel of a dragoon regiment in 1708. He rose during the War of the Spanish Succession to the rank of brigadier, and in March 1718 to that of maréchal de camp. In the Spanish War of 1718-1719 he was present at the capture of Fontarabia in 1718 and at that of St Sebastian in 1719. When the duke of Bourbon became prime minister, Belle-Isle was imprisoned in the Bastille, and then relegated to his estates, but with the advent of Cardinal Fleury to power he regained some measure of favour and was made a lieutenant-general. In the War of the Polish Succession he commanded a corps under the orders of Marshal Berwick, captured Trier and Trarbach and took part in the siege of Philippsburg (1734). When peace was made in 1736 the king, in recognition both of his military services and of the part he had taken in the negotiations for the cession of Lorraine, gave him the government of the three important fortresses of Metz, Toul and Verdun—an office which he kept till his death. His military and political reputation was now at its height, and he was one of the principal advisers of the government in military and diplomatic affairs. In 1741 he was sent to Germany as French plenipotentiary to carry out, in the interests of France, a grand scheme of political reorganization in the moribund empire, and especially to obtain the election of Charles, elector of Bavaria, as emperor. His diplomacy was thus the mainspring of the War of the Austrian Succession (q.v.), and his military command in south Germany was full of incidents and vicissitudes. He had been named marshal of France in 1741, and received a large army, with which it is said that he promised to make peace in three months under the walls of Vienna. The truth of this story is open to question, for no one knew better than Belle-Isle the limitations imposed upon commanders by the military and political circumstances of the times. These circumstances in fact rendered his efforts, both as a general and as a statesman, unavailing, and the one redeeming feature in the general failure was his heroic retreat from Prague. In ten days he led 14,000 men into and across the Bohemian Forest, suffering great privations and harassed by the enemy, but never allowing himself to be cut off, and his subordinate Chevert defended Prague so well that the Austrians were glad to allow him to rejoin his chief. The campaign, however, had discredited Belle-Isle; he was ridiculed at Paris by the wits and the populace, even Fleury is said to have turned against him, and, to complete his misfortunes, he was taken prisoner by the English in going from Cassel to Berlin through Hanover. He remained a year in England, in spite of the demands of Louis XV. and of the emperor Charles VII. During the campaign of 1746 he was in command of the “Army of Piedmont” on the Alpine frontier, and although he began his work with a demoralized and inferior army, he managed not only to repel the invasion of the Spanish and Italian forces but also to carry the war back into the plain of Lombardy. At the peace, having thus retrieved his military reputation, he was created duke and peer of France (1748). In 1757 his credit at court was considerable, and the king named him secretary for war. During his three years’ ministry he undertook many reforms, such as the development of the military school for officers, and the suppression of the proprietary colonelcies of nobles who were too young to command; and he instituted the Order of Merit. But the Seven Years’ War was by that time in progress and his efforts had no immediate effect. He died at Versailles on the 26th of January 1761. Belle-Isle interested himself in literature; was elected a member of the French Academy in 1740, and founded the Academy of Metz in 1760. The dukedom ended with his death, his only son having been killed in 1758 at the battle of Crefeld.

His brother, Louis Charles Armand Fouquet, known as the Chevalier de Belle-Isle (1693-1746), was also a soldier and a diplomatist. He served as a junior officer in the War of the Spanish Succession and as brigadier in the campaign of 1734 on the Rhine and Moselle, where he won the grade of maréchal de camp. He was employed under his brother in political missions in Bavaria and in Swabia in 1741-1742, became a lieutenant-general, fought in Bohemia, Bavaria and the Rhine countries in 1742-1743, and was arrested and sent to England with the marshal in 1744. On his release he was given a command in the Army of Piedmont. He fell a victim to his romantic bravery at the action of Exilles (Col de l’Assiette) on the 19th of July 1746.

See Jean de Maugre, Oraison funèbre du maréchal de Belleisle (Montmédy, 1762); R.P. de Neuville, Mémoires du maréchal duc de Belleisle (Paris, 1761); D.C. (Chevrier), La Vie politigue et militaire du maréchal duc de Belleisle (London, 1760), and Testament politique du maréchal duc de Belleisle (Hague, 1762); Le Codicille et l’esprit ou commentaire des maximes du maréchal duc de Belleisle (Amsterdam, 1761); F.M. Chayert, Notice sur le maréchal de Belleisle (Metz, 1856); L. Leclerc, Éloge du maréchal de Belleisle (Metz, 1862); E. Michel, Éloge du maréchal de Belleisle (Paris, 1862); and Jobez, La France sous Louis XV (6 vols., Paris, 1868-1874).

BELLE ISLE, STRAIT OF, the more northern of the two channels connecting the Gulf of St Lawrence with the Atlantic Ocean. It separates northern Newfoundland from Labrador, and extends N.E. and S.W. for 35 m., with a breadth of 10 to 15 m. It derives its name from a precipitous granite island, 700 ft. in height, at its Atlantic entrance. On this lighthouses are maintained by the government of Canada and constant communication with the mainland is kept up by wireless telegraphy. The strait is in the most direct route from Europe to the St Lawrence, but is open only from June till the end of November, and even during this period navigation is often rendered dangerous by floating ice and fogs. Through it Jacques Cartier sailed in 1534. The southern or Cabot Strait, between Cape Ray in Newfoundland and Cape North in Cape Breton, was discovered later, and the expansion below Belle Isle was long known as La Grande Baie. Cabot Strait is open all the year, save for occasional inconvenience from drift ice.

BELLENDEN (Ballantyne or Bannatyne), JOHN (fl. 1533-1587), Scottish writer, was born about the end of the 15th century, in the south-east of Scotland, perhaps in East Lothian. He appears to have been educated, first at the university of St Andrews and then at that of Paris, where he took, the degree of doctor. From his own statement, in one of his poems, we learn that he had been in the service of James V. from the king’s earliest years, and that the post he held was clerk of accounts. At the request of James he undertook translations of Boece’s Historia Scotorum, which had appeared at Paris in 1527, and the first five books of Livy. As a reward for his versions, which he finished in 1533, he was appointed archdeacon of Moray and a canon of Ross. He was a strenuous opponent of the Reformation and was compelled to go into exile. He is said by some authorities to have died at Rome in 1550; by others to have been still living in 1587. His translation of Boece, entitled The History and Chronicles of Scotland, is a remarkable specimen of Scottish prose, distinguished by its freedom and vigour of expression. It was published in 1536; and was reprinted in 2 vols., edited by Maitland, in 1821. The translation of Livy was not printed till 1822 (also in 2 vols.). Two MSS. of the latter are extant, one, the older, in the Advocates’ library, Edinburgh (which was the basis of the normalized text of 1822), the other (c. 1550) in the possession of Mr Ogilvie Forbes of Boyndlie. An edition of the work was edited for the Scottish Text Society by Mr W.A. Craigie (2 vols. 1901, 1903). The second volume of this edition contains also a complete reprint of the portions of the holograph first draft which were discovered in the British Museum in 1902. Two poems by Bellenden—The Proheme to the Cosmographe and the Proheme of the History—appeared in the 1536 edition of the History of Scotland. Others, bearing his name in the well-known Bannatyne MS. collection, made by his namesake George Bannatyne (q.v.), may or may not be his. Sir David Lyndsay, in his prologue to the Papyngo, speaks vaguely of:

“Ane cunnyng Clark quhilk wrythith craftelie Ane plant of poetis callit Ballendyne, Quhose ornat workis my wit can nocht defyne.”

The chief sources of information regarding Belleriden’s life are the Accounts of the Lord High Treasurer of Scotland, his own works and the ecclesiastical records.

BELLENDEN, WILLIAM, Scottish classical scholar. Hardly anything is known of him. He lived in the reign of James I. (VI. of Scotland), who appointed him magister libellorum supplicum or master of requests. King James is also said to have provided Bellenden with the means of living independently at Paris, where he became professor at the university, and advocate in the parliament. The date of his birth cannot be fixed, and it can only be said that he died later than 1625. The first of the works by which he is known was published anonymously in 1608, with the title Ciceronis Princeps, a laborious compilation of all Cicero’s remarks on the origin and principles of regal government, digested and systematically arranged. In 1612 there appeared a similar work, devoted to the consideration of consular authority and the Roman senate, Ciceronis Consul, Senator, Senatusque Romanus. His third work, De Statu Prisci Orbls, 1615, is a good outline of general history. All three works were combined in a single large volume, entitled De Statu Libri Tres, 1615, which was first brought into due notice by Dr Samuel Parr, who, in 1787, published an edition with a preface, famous for the elegance of its Latinity, in which he eulogized Burke, Fox and Lord North as the “three English luminaries.” The greatest of Bellenden’s works is the extensive treatise De Tribus Luminibus Romanorum, printed and published posthumously at Paris in 1633. The book is unfinished, and treats only of the first luminary, Cicero; the others intended were apparently Seneca and Pliny. It contains a most elaborate history of Rome and its institutions, drawn from Cicero, and thus forms a storehouse of all the historical notices contained in that voluminous author. It is said that nearly all the copies were lost on the passage to England. One of the few that survived was placed in the university library at Cambridge, and freely drawn upon by Conyers Middieton, the librarian, in his History of the Life of Cicero. Both Joseph Warton and Dr Parr accused Middleton of deliberate plagiarism, which was the more likely to have escaped detection owing to the small number of existing copies of Bellenden’s work.

BELLEROPHON, or Bellerophontes, in Greek legend, son of Glaucus or Poseidon, grandson of Sisyphus and local hero of Corinth. Having slain by accident the Corinthian hero Bellerus (or, according to others, his own brother) he fled to Tiryns, where his kinsman Proetus, king of Argos, received him hospitably and purged him of his guilt. But Anteia (or Stheneboea), wife of Proetus, became enamoured of Bellerophon, and, when he refused her advances, charged him with an attempt upon her virtue. Proetus thereupon sent him to Iobates, his wife’s father, king of Lycia, with a letter or sealed tablet, in which were instructions, apparently given by means of signs, to take the life of the bearer. Arriving in Lycia, he was received as a guest and entertained for nine days. On the tenth, being asked the object of his visit, he handed the letter to the king, whose first plan for complying with it was to send him to slay the Chimaera, a monster which was devastating the country. Bellerophon, mounted on Pegasus (q.v.), kept up in the air out of the way of the Chimaera, but yet near enough to kill it with his spear, or, as he is at other times represented, with his sword or with a bow. He was next ordered out against the Solymi, a hostile tribe, and afterwards against the Amazons, from both of which expeditions he not only returned victorious, but also on his way back slew an ambush of chosen warriors whom Iobates had placed to intercept him. His divine origin was now proved; the king gave him his daughter in marriage; and the Lycians presented him with a large and fertile estate on which he lived (Apollodorus, ii. 3; Homer, Iliad, vi. 155). Bellerophon is said to have returned to Tiryns and avenged himself on Anteia: he persuaded her to fly with him on his winged horse, and then flung her into the sea near the island of Melos (Schol. Aristoph., Pax, 140). His ambitious attempt to ascend to the heavens on Pegasus brought upon him the wrath of the gods. His son was smitten by Ares in battle; his daughter Laodameia was slain by Artemis; he himself, flung from his horse, lamed or blinded, became a wanderer over the face of the earth until his death (Pindar, Isthmia, vi. [vii.], 44; Horace, Odes, iv. 11, 26). Bellerophon was honoured as a hero at Corinth and in Lycia. His story formed the subject of the Debates of Sophocles, and of the Bellerophontes and Stheneboea of Euripides. It has been suggested that Perseus, the local hero of Argos, and Bellerophon were originally one and the same, the difference in their exploits being the result of the rivalry of Argos and Corinth. Both are connected with the sun-god Helios and with the sea-god Poseidon, the symbol of the union being the winged horse Pegasus. Bellerophon has been explained as a hero of the storm, of which his conflict with the Chimaera is symbolical. The most frequent representations of Bellerophon in ancient art are (1) slaying the Chimaera, (2) departing from Argos with the letter, (3) leading Pegasus to drink. Among the first is to be noted a terra-cotta relief from Melos in the British Museum, where also, on a vase of black ware, is what seems to be a representation of his escape from Stheneboea.

See H.A. Fischer, Bellerophon (1851); R. Engelmann, Annali of the Archaeological Institute at Rome (1874); O. Treuber, Gechichte der Lykier (1887); articles in Pauly-Wissowa’s Real-Encyclopadie, W.H. Roscher’s Lexikon der Mythologie, Daremberg and Saglio’s Dictionnaire des antiquités; L. Preller, Griechische Mythologie.

BELLES-LETTRES (Fr. for “fine literature”), a term used to designate the more artistic and imaginative forms of literature, as poetry or romance, as opposed to more pedestrian and exact studies. The term appears to have been first used in English by Swift (1710).

BELLEVILLE, a city and port of entry of Ontario, Canada, and capital of Hastings county, 106 m. E.N.E. of Toronto, on Bay of Quinté and the Grand Trunk railway. Pop. (1901) 9117. Communication is maintained with Lake Ontario and St Lawrence ports by several lines of steamers. It is the commercial centre of a fine agricultural district, and has a large export trade in cheese and farm produce. The principal industries are planing mills and cement works, cheese factories and distilleries. There are several educational institutions, including a business college, a convent, and a government institute for the deaf and dumb. Albert College, under the control of the Methodist church, was formerly a university, but now confines itself to secondary education.

BELLEVILLE, a city and the county-seat of St Clair county, Illinois, U.S.A., in the S.W. part of the state 14 m. S.E. of St Louis, Missouri. Pop. (1890) 15,361; (1900) 17,484, of whom 2750 were foreign-born; (1910) 21,122. Belleville is served by the Illinois Central, the Louisville & Nashville, and the Southern railways, also by extensive interurban electric systems; and a belt line to O’Fallon, Illinois, connects Belleville with the Baltimore & Ohio South Western railway. A large element of the population is of German descent or German birth, and two newspapers are published in German, besides three dailies, three weeklies and a semi-weekly in English. Among the industrial establishments of the city are stove and range factories, flour mills, rolling mills, distilleries, breweries, shoe factories, copper refining works, nail and tack factories, glass works and agricultural implement factories. The value of the city’s factory products increased from $2,873,334 in 1900 to $4,356,615 in 1905 or 51.6%. Belleville is in a rich agricultural region, and in the vicinity there are valuable coal mines, the first of which was sunk in 1852; from this dates the industrial development of the city. Belleville was first settled in 1813, was incorporated as a city in 1850, and was re-incorporated in 1876.

BELLEY, a town of eastern France, capital of an arrondissement in the department of Ain, 52 m. S.E. of Bourg by the Paris-Lyon railway. Pop. (1906), town, 3709; commune, 5707. It is situated on vine-covered hills at the southern extremity of the Jura, 3 m. from the right bank of the Rhone. Apart from the cathedral of St Jean, which, with the exception of the choir of 1413, is a modern building, there is little of architectural interest in the town. Belley is the seat of a bishopric and a prefect, and has a tribunal of first instance. The manufacture of morocco leather goods and the quarrying of the lithographic stone of the vicinity are carried on, and there is trade in cattle, grain, wine, truffles and dressed pork. Belley is of Roman origin, and in the 5th century became an episcopal see. It was the capital of the province of Bugey, which was a dependency of Savoy till 1601, when it was ceded to France. In 1385 the town was almost entirely destroyed by an act of incendiarism, but was subsequently rebuilt by the dukes of Savoy, who surrounded it with ramparts of which little is left.

BELLI, GIUSEPPE GIOACHINO (1791-1863), Italian poet, was born at Rome, and after a period of literary employment in poor circumstances was enabled by marriage with a lady of means to follow his own special bent. He is remembered for his vivid popular poetry in the Roman dialect, a number of satirical sonnets which in their own way are unique.

See Morandi’s edition, I sonetti romaneschi (1886-1889).

BELLIGERENCY, the state of carrying on war (Lat. bellum, war, and gerere, to wage) in accordance with the law of nations. Insurgents are not as such excluded from recognition as belligerents, and, even where not recognized as belligerents by the government against which they have rebelled, they may be so recognized by a neutral state, as in the case of the American Civil War, when the Southern states were recognized as belligerents by Great Britain, though regarded as rebels by the Northern states. The recognition by a neutral state of belligerency does not, however, imply recognition of independent political existence. The regulations annexed to the Hague Convention, relating to the laws and customs of war (29th of July 1899), contain a section entitled “Belligerents” which is divided into three chapters, dealing respectively with (i.) The Qualifications of Belligerents; (ii.) Prisoners of War; (iii.) The Sick and Wounded. To entitle troops to the special privileges attaching to belligerency, chapter i. provides that all regular, militia or volunteer forces shall alike be commanded by persons responsible for the acts of their men, that all such shall carry distinctive emblems, recognizable at a distance, that arms shall be carried openly and operations conducted in accordance with the usages of war observed among civilized mankind. It provides, nevertheless, for the emergency of the population of a territory, which has not already been occupied by the invader, spontaneously taking up arms to resist the invading forces, without having had time to comply with the above requirements; they, too, are to be treated as belligerents “if they respect the laws and customs of war.” In naval war, privateering having been finally abolished as among the parties to it by the declaration of Paris, a privateer is not entitled, as between such parties, to the rights of belligerency. As between states, one of whom is not a party to the Declaration, the right to grant letters of marque would remain intact for both parties, and the privateer, as between them, would be a belligerent; as regards neutrals, the situation would be complicated (see Privateer). On prisoners of war and sick and wounded, see War.

(T. Ba.)

BELLINGHAM, SIR EDWARD (d. 1549), lord deputy of Ireland, was a son of Edward Bellingham of Erringham, Sussex, his mother being a member of the Shelley family. As a soldier he fought in France and elsewhere, then became an English member of parliament and a member of the privy council, and in 1547 took part in some military operations in Ireland. In May 1548 he was sent to that country as lord deputy. Ireland was then in a very disturbed condition, but the new governor crushed a rebellion of the O’Connors in Leinster, freed the Pale from rebels, built forts, and made the English power respected in Münster and Connaught. Bellingham, however, was a headstrong man and was constantly quarrelling with his council; but one of his opponents admitted that he was “the best man of war that ever he had seen in Ireland.” His short but successful term of office was ended by his recall in 1549.

See R. Bagwell, Ireland Under the Tudors, vol. i. (1885).

BELLINGHAM, a city of Whatcom county, Washington, U.S.A., on the E. side of Bellingham Bay, 96 m. N. of Seattle. Pop. (1900) 11,062; (1905, state est.) 26,000; (1910, U.S. census) 24,298. Area about 23 sq. m. It is served by the Great Northern, the Northern Pacific, the Canadian Pacific, and the Bellingham Bay & British Columbia railways—being a terminus of the last named, which operates only 62 m. of line and connects with the Mt. Baker goldfields and the Nooksack valley farm and orchard region. A suburban electric line was projected in 1907. About 2½ m. south-east of the city is the main body of Lake Whatcom, 13 m. long, 1¼ m. wide, and 318 ft. higher than the city and the source of its water-supply, a gravity system which cost $1,000,000, being owned by the city. Bellingham has two Carnegie libraries. Among the principal buildings are the county court-house, the city hall, the Young Men’s Christian Association building, and Beck’s theatre, with a seating capacity of 2200. The largest of the state’s normal colleges is situated here; in 1907 it had a faculty of 25 and 350 students; there are two high schools, two business colleges, and one industrial school also in the city. The excellent harbour, and the fact that Bellingham is nearer to the great markets of Alaska than any other city in the states, make the port an important shipping centre. In the value of manufactured product the city was fourth in the state in 1905 (being passed only by Tacoma, Seattle and Spokane), with a value of $3,293,988; according to a census taken by the local chamber of commerce the value of the product in 1906 was $7,751,464. The principal industrial establishments are shingle (especially cedar) and saw-mills, salmon canneries and factories for the manufacture of tin cans, and machinery used in the canning of salmon. Motive and electric lighting power is brought 52 m. from the falls of the north fork of the Nooksack river, where there is a power plant which furnishes 3500 horsepower. There are deposits of clay and limestone in the surrounding country, and cement is manufactured in the vicinity of the city. The blue-grey Chuckanut sandstone is quarried on the shore of Chuckanut Bay, south of Bellingham; and a coarse, dark-brown sandstone is quarried on Sucia Island, west of the city. There are quarries also on Waldron Island. Bellingham was formed in 1903 by the consolidation of the cities of New Whatcom (pop. in 1900, 6834) and Fairhaven (pop. in 1900, 4228), and was chartered as a city of the first class in 1904; it is named from Bellingham Bay, which Vancouver is supposed to have named, in 1792, in honour of Sir Henry Bellingham.

BELLINI, the name of a family of craftsmen in Venice, three members of which fill a great place in the history of the Venetian school of painting in the 15th century and the first years of the 16th.

I. Jacopo Bellini (c. 1400-1470-71) was the son of a tinsmith or pewterer, Nicoletto Bellini, by his wife Franceschina. When the accomplished Umbrian master Gentile da Fabriano came to practise at Venice, where art was backward, several young men of the city took service under him as pupils. Among these were Giovanni and Antonio of Murano and Jacopo Bellini. Gentile da Fabriano left Venice for Florence in 1422, and the two brothers of Murano stayed at home and presently founded a school of their own (see Vivarini). But Jacopo Bellini followed his teacher to Florence, where the vast progress lately made, alike in truth to natural fact and in sense of classic grace and style, by masters like Donatello and Ghiberti, Masaccio and Paolo Uccello, offered him better instruction than he could obtain even from his Umbrian teacher. But his position as assistant to Gentile brought him into trouble. As a stranger coming to practise in Florence, Gentile was jealously looked on. One day some young Florentines threw stones into his shop, and the Venetian pupil ran out and drove them off with his fists. Thinking this might be turned against him, he went and took service on board the galleys of the Florentine state; but returning after a year, found he had in his absence been condemned and fined for assault. He was arrested and imprisoned, but the matter was soon compromised, Jacopo submitting to a public act of penance and his adversary renouncing further proceedings. Whether Jacopo accompanied his master to Rome in 1426 we cannot tell; but by 1429 we find him settled at Venice and married to a wife from Pesaro named Anna (family name uncertain), who in that year made a will in favour of her first child then expected. She survived, however, and bore her husband two sons, Gentile and Giovanni (though some evidences have been thought to point rather to Giovanni having been his son by another mother), and a daughter Nicolosia. In 1436 Jacopo was at Verona, painting a Crucifixion in fresco for the chapel of S. Nicholas in the cathedral (destroyed by order of the archbishop in 1750, but the composition, a vast one of many figures, has been preserved in an old engraving). Documents ranging from 1437 to 1465 show him to have been a member of the Scuola or mutual aid society of St John the Evangelist at Venice, for which he painted at an uncertain date a series of eighteen subjects of the Life of the Virgin, fully described by Ridolfi but now destroyed or dispersed. In 1439 we find him buying a panel of tarsia work at the sale of the effects of the deceased painter Jacobello del Fiore, and in 1440 entering into a business partnership with another painter of the city called Donato. About this time he must have paid a visit to the court of Ferrara, where there prevailed a spirit of free culture and humanism most congenial to his tastes. Pisanello, the first great naturalist artist of north Italy, whose influence on Jacopo at the outset of his career had been only second to that of Gentile da Fabriano, had been some time engaged on a portrait of Leonello d’Este, the elder son of the reigning marquis Niccolo III. Jacopo (according to an almost contemporary sonneteer) competed with a rival portrait, which was declared by the father to be the better of the two. In the next year, the last of the marquis Niccolo’s life, we find him making the successful painter a present of two bushels of wheat. The relations thus begun with the house of Este seem to have been kept up, and among Jacopo’s extant drawings are several that seem to belong to the scheme of a monument erected to the memory of the marquis Niccolo ten years later. He was also esteemed and employed by Sigismondo Malatesta at the court of Rimini. In 1443 Jacopo took as an articled pupil a nephew whom he had brought up from charity; in 1452 he painted a banner for the Scuola of St Mary of Charity at Venice, and the next year received a grant from the confraternity for the marriage of his daughter Nicolosia with Andrea Mantegna, a marriage which had the effect of transferring the gifted young Paduan master definitively from the following of Squarcione to that of Bellini. In 1456 he painted a figure of Lorenzo Giustiniani, first patriarch of Venice, for his monument in San Pietro de Castello, and in 1457, with a son for salaried assistant, three figures of saints in the great hall of the patriarch. For some time about these years Jacopo and his family would seem to have resided at, or at least to have paid frequent visits to Padua, where he is reported to have carried out works now lost, including an altar-piece painted with the assistance of his sons in 1459-1460 for the Gattamelata chapel in the Santo, and several portraits which are described by 16th-century witnesses but have disappeared. At Venice he painted a Calvary for the Scuola of St Mark (1466). His activity can be traced in documents down to August 1470, but in November 1471 his wife Anna describes herself as his relict, so that he must have died some time in the interval.

The above are all the facts concerning the life of Jacopo Bellini which can be gathered from printed and documentary records. The materials which have reached posterity for a critical judgment on his work consist of four or five pictures only, together with two important and invaluable books of drawings. These prove him to have been a worthy third, following the Umbrian Gentile da Fabriano and the Veronese Pisanello, in that trio of remarkable artists who in the first half of the 15th century carried towards maturity the art of painting in Venice and the neighbouring cities. Of his pictures, an important signed example is a life-size Christ Crucified in the archbishop’s palace at Verona. The rest are almost all Madonnas: two signed, one in the Tadini gallery at Lovere, another in the Venice academy; a third, unsigned and long ascribed in error to Gentile da Fabriano, in the Louvre, with the portrait of Sigismondo Malatesta as donor; a fourth, richest of all in colour and ornamental detail, recently acquired from private hands for the Uffizi at Florence. Plausibly, though less certainly, ascribed to him are a fifth Madonna at Bergamo, a warrior-saint on horseback (San Crisogono) in the church of San Trovaso at Venice, a Crucifixion in the Museo Correr, and an Adoration of the Magi in private possession at Ferrara. Against this scanty tale of paintings we have to set an abundance of drawings and studies preserved in two precious albums in the British Museum and the Louvre. The former, which is the earlier in date, belonged to the painter’s elder son Gentile and was by him bequeathed to his brother Giovanni. It consists of ninety-nine paper pages, all drawn on both back and front with a lead point, an instrument unusual at this date. Two or three of the drawings have been worked over in pen; of the remainder many have become dim from time and rubbing. The album at the Louvre, discovered in 1883 in the loft of a country-house in Guienne, is equally rich and better preserved, the drawings being all highly finished in pen, probably over effaced preliminary sketches in chalk or lead. The range of subjects is much the same in both collections, and in both extremely varied, proving Jacopo to have been a craftsman of many-sided curiosity and invention. He passes indiscriminately from such usual Scripture scenes as the Adoration of the Magi, the Agony in the Garden, and the Crucifixion, to designs from classic fable, copies from ancient bas-reliefs, stories of the saints, especially St Christopher and St George, the latter many times repeated (he was the patron saint of the house of Este), fanciful allegories of which the meaning has now become obscure, scenes of daily life, studies for monuments, and studies of animals, especially of eagles (the emblem of the house of Este), horses and lions. He loves to marshal his figures in vast open spaces, whether of architecture or mountainous landscape. In designing such spaces and in peopling them with figures of relatively small scale, we see him eagerly and continually putting to the test the principles of the new science of perspective. His castellated and pinnacled architecture, in a mixed medieval and classical spirit, is elaborately thought out, and scarcely less so his groups and ranges of barren hills, broken in clefts or ascending in spiral terraces. With a predilection for tall and slender proportions, he draws the human figure with a flowing generalized grace and no small freedom of movement; but he does not approach either in mastery of line or in vehemence of action a Florentine draughtsman such as Antonio Pollaiuolo. Jacopo’s influence on the development of Venetian art was very great, not only directly through his two sons and his son-in-law Mantegna, but through other and independent contemporary workshops of the city, in none of which did it remain unfelt.

II. Gentile Bellini (1429-1430-1507), the elder son of Jacopo, first appears independently as the painter of a Madonna, much in his father’s manner, dated 1460, and now in the Berlin museum. We have seen how in the previous year he and his brother assisted their father in the execution of an altar-piece for the Santo at Padua. In July 1466 we find him contracting with the officers of the Scuola of St Mark as an independent artist to decorate the doors of their organ. These paintings still exist in a blackened condition. They represent four saints, colossal in size, and designed with much of the harsh and searching austerity which characterized the Paduan school under Squarcione. In December of the same year Gentile bound himself to execute for the great hall of the same company two subjects of the Exodus, to be done better than, or at least as well as, his father’s work in the same place. These paintings have perished. For the next eight years the history of Gentile’s life and work remains obscure. But he must have risen steadily in the esteem of his fellow-citizens, since in 1474 we find him commissioned by the senate to restore, renew, and when necessary replace, the series of paintings, the work of an earlier generation of artists, which were perishing from damp on the walls of the Hall of the Great Council in the ducal palace. This was evidently intended to be a permanent employment, and in payment the painter was to receive the reversion of a broker’s stall in the Fondaco dei Tedeschi; a lucrative form of sinecure frequently allotted to artists engaged for tasks of long duration. In continuation of this work Gentile undertook a series of independent paintings on subjects of Venetian history for the same hall, but had apparently only finished one, representing the delivery of the consecrated candle by the pope to the doge, when his labours were interrupted by a mission to the East. The sultan Mahommed II. had despatched a friendly embassy to Venice, inviting the doge to visit him at Constantinople and at the same time requesting the despatch of an excellent painter to work at his court. The former part of the sultan’s proposal the senate declined, with the latter they complied; and Gentile Bellini with two assistants was selected for the mission, his brother Giovanni being at the same time appointed to fill his place on the works for the Hall of the Great Council. Gentile gave great satisfaction to the sultan, and returned after about a year with a knighthood, some fine clothes, a gold chain and a pension. The surviving fruits of his labours at Constantinople consist of a large painting representing the reception of an ambassador in that city, now in the Louvre; a highly finished portrait of the sultan himself, now one of the treasures, despite its damaged condition, of the collection of the late Sir Henry Layard; an exquisitely wrought small portrait in water-colour of a scribe, found in 1905 by a private collector in the bazaar at Constantinople and now in the collection of Mrs Gardner at Boston; and two pen-and-ink drawings of Turkish types, now in the British Museum. Early copies of two or three other similar drawings are preserved in the Städel Institute at Frankfurt; such copies may have been made for the use of Gentile’s Umbrian contemporary, Pinturicchio, who introduced figures borrowed from them into some of his decorative frescoes in the Appartamento Borgia at Rome.

A place had been left open for Gentile to continue working beside his brother Giovanni (with whom he lived always on terms of the closest amity) in the ducal palace; and soon after 1480 he began to carry out his share in the great series of frescoes, unfortunately destroyed by fire in 1577, illustrating the part played by Venice in the struggles between the papacy and the emperor Barbarossa. These works were executed not on the wall itself but on canvas (the climate of Venice having so many times proved fatal to wall paintings), and probably in oil, a method which all the artists of Venice, following the example set by Antonello da Messina, had by this time learnt or were learning to practise. The subjects allotted to Gentile, in addition to the above-mentioned presentation of the consecrated candle, were as follows: the departure of the Venetian ambassadors to the court of Barbarossa, Barbarossa receiving the ambassadors, the pope inciting the doge and senate to war, the pope bestowing a sword and his blessing on the doge and his army (a drawing in the British Museum purports to be the artist’s original sketch for this composition), and according to some authorities also the gift of the symbolic ring by the pope to the victorious doge on his return. These works received the highest praise both from contemporary and from later Venetian critics, but no fragment of them survived the fire of 1577. Their character can to some extent be judged by a certain number of kindred historical and processional works by the same hand which have been preserved. Of such the Academy at Venice has three which were painted between 1490 and 1500 for the Scuola of St John the Evangelist, and represent certain events connected with a famous relic belonging to the Scuola, namely, a supposed fragment of the true cross. All have been, much injured and re-painted; nevertheless one at least, showing the procession of the relic through St Mark’s Place and the thanksgiving of a father who owed to it the miraculous cure of his son, still gives a good idea of the painter’s powers and style. Great accuracy and firmness of individual portraiture, a strong gift, derived no doubt from his father’s example, for grouping and marshalling a crowd of personages in spaces of fine architectural perspective, the severity and dryness of the Paduan manner much mitigated by the dawning splendour of true Venetian colour—these are the qualities that no injury has been able to deface. They are again manifest in an interesting Adoration of the Magi in the Layard collection; and reappear still more forcibly in the last work undertaken by the artist, the great picture now at the Brera in Milan of St Mark preaching at Alexandria; this was commissioned by the Scuola of St Mark in March 1505, and left by the artist in his will, dated 18th of February 1507, to be finished by his brother Giovanni. Of single portraits by this artist, who was almost as famous for them as for processional groups, there survive one of a doge at the Museo Correr in Venice, one of Catarina Cornaro at Budapest, one of a mathematician at the National Gallery, another of a monk in the same gallery, signed wrongly to all appearance with the name of Giovanni Bellini, besides one or two others in private hands. The features of Gentile himself are known from a portrait medallion by Camelio, and can be recognized in two extant drawings, one at Berlin supposed to be by the painter’s own hand, and another, much larger and more finished, at Christ Church, Oxford, which is variously attributed to Bonsignori and A. Vivarini.