OpenLLM-France/wikimedia huggingface dataset:
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Boscán Almogaver, Juan

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​BOSCÁN ALMOGAVER, JUAN (1490?–1542), Spanish poet, was born about the close of the 15th century. He was a Catalan of patrician birth, and, after some years of military service, became tutor to the duke of Alva. His poems were published in 1543 at Barcelona by his widow. They are divided into sections which mark the stages of Boscán’s poetical evolution. The first book contains poems in the old Castilian metres, written in his youth, before 1526, in which year he became acquainted with the Venetian ambassador, Andrea Navagiero, who urged him to adopt Italian measures, and this advice gave a new turn to Boscán’s activity. The remaining books contain a number of pieces in the Italian manner, the longest of these being Hero y Leander, a poem in blank verse, based on Musaeus. Boscán’s best effort, the Octava Rima, is a skilful imitation of Petrarch and Bembo. Boscán also published in 1534 an admirable translation of Castiglione’s Il Cortegiano. Italian measures had been introduced into Spanish literature by Santillana and Villalpando; it is Boscán’s distinction to have naturalized these forms definitively, and to have founded a poetic school.
The best edition of his poems is that issued at Madrid in 1875 by W. J. Knapp; for his indebtedness to earlier writers, see Francesco Flamini, Studi di storia literaria italiana e straniera (Livorno, 1895).
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Bosboom-Toussaint, Anna Louisa Geertruida

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​BOSBOOM-TOUSSAINT, ANNA LOUISA GEERTRUIDA (1812–1886), Dutch novelist, was born at Alkmaar in north Holland on the 16th of September 1812. Her father, named Toussaint, a local chemist of Huguenot descent, gave her a fair education, and at an early period of her career she developed a taste for historical research, fostered, perhaps, by a forced indoor life, the result of weak health. In 1851 she married the Dutch painter, Johannes Bosboom (1817–1891), and thereafter was known as Mrs Bosboom-Toussaint. Her first romance, Almagro, appeared in 1837, followed by the Graaf van Devonshire (The Earl of Devonshire) in 1838; the Engelschen te Rome (The English at Rome) in 1840, and Het Huis Lauernesse (The House of Lauernesse) in 1841, an episode of the Reformation, translated into many European languages. These stories, mainly founded upon some of the most interesting epochs of Dutch history, betrayed a remarkable grasp of facts and situations, combined with an undoubted mastery over her mother tongue, though her style is sometimes involved, and not always faultless. Ten years (1840–1850) were mainly devoted to further studies, the result of which was revealed in 1851–1854, when her Leycester in Nederland (3 vols.), Vrouwen van het Leycestersche Tydperk (Women of Leicester’s Epoch, 3 vols.), and Gideon Florensz (3 vols.) appeared, a series dealing with Robert Dudley’s adventures in the Low Countries. After 1870 Mrs Bosboom-Toussaint abandoned historical romance for the modern society novel, but her Delftsche Wonderdokter (The Necromancer of Delft, 1871, 3 vols.) and Majoor Frans (1875, 3 vols.) did not command the success of her earlier works. Major Frank has been translated into English (1885). She died at the Hague on the 13th of April 1886. Her novels have been published there in a collected edition (1885–1888, 25 vols.).
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Boscastle

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​BOSCASTLE, a small seaport and watering-place in the Launceston parliamentary division of Cornwall, England, 5 m. N. of Camelford station on the London & South-Western railway. Pop. (civil parish of Forrabury, 1901) 329. The village rises steeply above a very narrow cove on the north coast, sheltered, but difficult of access, vessels having to be warped into it by means of hawsers. A mound on a hill above the harbour marks the site of a Norman castle. The parish church of St Symphorian, Forrabury, also stands high, overlooking the Atlantic from Willapark Point. The tower is without bells, and the tradition that a ship bearing a peal hither was wrecked within sight of the harbour, and that the lost bells may still be heard to toll beneath the waves, has been made famous by a ballad of the Cornish poet Robert Stephen Hawker, vicar of Moorwinstow. The coast scenery near Boscastle is severely beautiful, with abrupt cliffs fully exposed to the sea, and broken only by a few picturesque inlets such as Crackington Cove and Pentargan Cove. Inland are bare moors, diversified by narrow dales.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Bosa

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​BOSA, a seaport and episcopal see on the W. coast of Sardinia, in the province of Cagliari, 30 m. W. of Macomer by rail. Pop. (1901) 6846. The height above the town is crowned by a castle of the Malaspina family. The cathedral, founded in the 12th century, restored in the 15th, and rebuilt in 1806, is fine. There are some tanneries, and the fishing industry is important, but the coral production of Sicily has entirely destroyed that of Bosa since 1887. The district produces oil and wine. The present town of Bosa was founded in 1112 by the Malaspina, 11/2 m. from the site of the ancient town (Bosa or Calmedia), where a well-preserved church still exists. The old town is of Roman origin, but is only mentioned by Pliny and Ptolemy, and as a station on the coast-road in the Itineraries (Corp. Inscr. Lat. x. 7939 seq.). One of the inscriptions preserved in the old cathedral records the erection of four silver statues, of Antoninus Pius, his wife Faustina and their two sons.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Bowtell

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​BOWTELL, a medieval term in architecture for a round or corniced moulding; the word is a variant of “boltel,” which is probably the diminutive of “bolt,” the shaft of an arrow or javelin. A “roving” bowtell is one which passes up the side of a bench end and round a finial, the term “roving” being applied to that which follows the line of a curve.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Bowyer, William

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​BOWYER, WILLIAM (1663–1737), English printer, was born in 1663, apprenticed to a printer in 1679, made a liveryman of the Stationers’ Company in 1700, and nominated as one of the twenty printers allowed by the Star Chamber. He was burned out in the great fire of 1712, but his loss was partly made good by the subscription of friends and fellow craftsmen, as recorded on a tablet in Stationers’ Hall, and in 1713 he returned to his Whitefriars shop and became the leading printer of his day. He died on the 27th of December 1737.
His son, William Bowyer (1699–1777), was born in London on the 19th of December 1699. He was educated at St John’s College, Cambridge, and in 1722 became a partner in his father’s business. In 1729 he was appointed printer of the votes of the House of Commons, and in 1736 printer to the Society of Antiquaries, of which he was elected a fellow in 1737. In 1737 he took as apprentice John Nichols, who was to be his successor and biographer. In 1761 Bowyer became printer to the Royal Society, and in 1767 printer of the rolls of the House of Lords and the journals of the House of Commons. He died on the 13th of November 1777, leaving unfinished a number of large works and among them the reprint of Domesday Book. He wrote a great many tracts and pamphlets, edited, arranged and published a host of books, but perhaps his principal work was an edition of the New Testament in Greek, with notes. His generous bequests in favour of his own profession are administered by the Stationers’ Company, of which he became a liveryman in 1738, and in whose hall is his portrait bust and a painting of his father. He was known as “the learned printer.”
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Bowline

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​BOWLINE (a word found in most Teutonic languages, probably connected with the “bow” of a ship), a nautical term for a rope leading from the edge of a sail to the bows, for the purpose of steadying the sail when sailing close to the wind—“on a bowline.”
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Bowling Green (Ohio)

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​BOWLING GREEN, a city and the county-seat of Wood county, Ohio, U.S.A., 20 m. S. by W. of Toledo, of which it is a residential suburb. Pop. (1890) 3467; (1900) 5067 (264 foreign-born); (1910) 5222. Bowling Green is served by the Cincinnati, Hamilton & Dayton and the Toledo & Ohio Central railways, and by the Toledo Urban & Interurban and the Lake Erie, Bowling Green & Napoleon electric lines, the former extending from Toledo to Dayton. It is situated in a rich agricultural region which abounds in oil and natural gas. Many of the residences and business places of Bowling Green are heated by a privately owned central hot-water heating plant. Among the manufactures are cut glass, stoves and ranges, kitchen furniture, guns, thread-cutting machines, brooms and agricultural implements. Bowling Green was first settled in 1832, was incorporated as a town in 1855, and became a city in 1904.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Bowness-on-Windermere

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​BOWNESS-ON-WINDERMERE, an urban district in the Appleby parliamentary division of Westmorland, England, on the east shore of Windermere, 11/4 m. S.W. of Windermere station on the London & North-Western railway. Together with the town of Windermere it forms an urban district (pop. 5061 in 1901), but the two towns were separate until 1905. Its situation is fine, the lake-shore here rising sharply, while at this point the lake narrows and is studded with islands. The low surrounding hills are richly wooded, and a number of country seats stand upon them. Bowness lies at the head of a small bay, is served by the lake-steamers of the Furness Railway Company, and is a ​favourite yachting, boating, fishing and tourist centre. The church of St Martin is ancient, and contains stained glass from Cartmel priory in Furness. (See Windermere.)
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Bowling Green (Kentucky)

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​BOWLING GREEN, a city and the county-seat of Warren county, Kentucky, U.S.A., on the Barren river, 113 m. S. by W. of Louisville. Pop. (1890) 7803; (1900) 8226, of whom 2593 were negroes; (1910) 9173. The city is served by the Louisville & Nashville railway (which maintains car shops here), and by steamboats navigating the river. Macadamized or gravel roads also radiate from it to all parts of the surrounding country, a rich agricultural and live-stock raising region, in which there are deposits of coal, iron ore, oil, natural gas, asphalt and building stone. The city is the seat of Potter College (for girls; non-sectarian, opened 1889); of Ogden College (non-sectarian, 1877), a secondary school, endowed by the bequest of Major Robert W. Ogden (1796–1873); of the West Kentucky State Normal School, opened (as the Southern Normal School and Business College) at Glasgow in 1875 and removed to Bowling Green in 1884; and of the Bowling Green Business University, formerly a part of the Southern Normal School and Business College. Bowling Green has two parks, a large horse and mule market, and a trade in other live-stock, tobacco and lumber; among its manufactures are flour, lumber, tobacco and furniture. The municipality owns and operates the water-works and the electric lighting plant. Bowling Green was incorporated in 1812. During the early part of the Civil War Bowling Green was on the right flank of the first line of Confederate defence in the West, and was for some time the headquarters of General Albert Sidney Johnston. It was abandoned, however, after the capture by the Federals of Forts Henry and Donelson.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Befana

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​BEFANA (Ital., corrupted from Epifania, Epiphany), the Italian female counterpart of Santa Claus, the Christmas benefactor (St Nicholas). On Epiphany, or Twelfth Night, she plays the fairy godmother to the children, filling their stockings with presents. Tradition relates that she was too busy with house duties to come to the window to see the Three Wise Men of the East pass on their journey to pay adoration to the Saviour, excusing herself on the ground that she could see them on their return. They went back another way, and Befana is alleged to have been punished by being obliged to look for them for ever. Her legends seem to be rather mixed, for in spite of her Santa Claus character, her name is used by Italian mothers as a bogey to frighten the babies. It was the custom to carry her effigy through Italian towns on the eve of the Epiphany.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Beet

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​BEET, a cultivated form of the plant Beta vulgaris (natural order Chenopodiaceae), which grows wild on the coasts of Europe, North Africa and Asia as far as India. It is a biennial, producing, like the carrot, a thick, fleshy tap-root during the first year and a branched, leafy, flowering stem in the following season. The small, green flowers are borne in clusters. A considerable number of varieties are cultivated for use on account of their large fleshy roots, under the names of mangel-wurzel or mangold, field-beet and garden-beet. The cultivation of beet in relation to the production of sugar, for which purpose certain varieties of beet stand next in importance to the sugar cane, is dealt with under Sugar. The garden-beet has been cultivated from very remote times as a salad plant, and for general use as a table vegetable. The variety most generally grown has long, tapering, carrot-shaped roots, the “flesh” of which is of a uniform deep red colour throughout, and the leaves brownish red. It is boiled and cut into slices for being eaten cold; and it is also prepared as a pickle, as well as in various other forms. Beet is in much more common use on the continent of Europe as a culinary vegetable than in Great Britain, where it has, however, been cultivated for upwards of two centuries. The white beet, Beta cicla, is cultivated for the leaves, which are used as spinach. The midribs and stalks of the leaves are also stewed and eaten as sea-kale, under the name of Swiss chard. B. cicla is also largely used as a decorative plant for its large, handsome leaves, blood red or variegated in colour.
The beet prospers in a rich deep soil, well pulverized by the spade. If manure is required, it should be deposited at the bottom of the trench in preparing the ground. The seeds should be sown in drills 15 ins. asunder, in April or early in May, and the plants are afterwards to be thinned to about 8 in. apart in the lines, but not more, as moderate-sized roots are preferable. The plants should grow on till the end of October or later, when a portion should be taken up for use, and the rest laid in in a sheltered corner, and covered up from frost. The roots must not be bruised and the leaves must be twisted off—not closely cut, as they are then liable to bleed. In the north the crop may be wholly taken up in autumn, and stored in a pit or cellar, beyond reach of frost. If it is desired to have fresh roots early, the seeds should be sown at the end of February or beginning of March; and if a succession is required, a few more may be sown by the end of March.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Beetle

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​BEETLE (O. Eng. bityl; connected with “bite”), a name commonly applied to those insects which possess horny wing-cases; it is used to denote the cockroaches (q.v.) (black beetles), as well as the true beetles or Coleoptera (q.v.), the two belonging to different orders of Insecta.
The adjective “beetle-browed,” and similarly “beetling” (of a cliff), are derived from the name of the insect. From another word (O. Eng. betel, connected with “beat”) comes “beetle” in the sense of a mallet, and the “beetling-machine,” which subjects fabrics to a hammering process.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Beggar

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​BEGGAR, one who begs, particularly one who gains his living by asking the charitable contributions of others. The word, with the verbal form “to beg,” in Middle English beggen, is of obscure history. The words appear first in English in the 13th century, and were early connected with “bag,” with reference to the receptacle for alms carried by the beggars. The most probable derivation of the word, and that now generally accepted, is that it is a corruption of the name of the lay communities known as Beguines and Beghards, which, shortly after their establishment, followed the friars in the practice of mendicancy (see Beguines). It has been suggested, however, that the origin of “beg” and “beggars” is to be found in a rare Old English word, bedecian, of the same meaning, which is apparently connected with the Gothic bidjan, cf. German betteln; but between the occurrence of bedecian at the end of the 9th century and the appearance of “beggar” and “beg” in the 13th, there is a blank, and no explanation can be given of the great change in form. For the English law relating to begging and its history, see Charity, Poor Law and Vagrancy.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Beesly, Edward Spencer

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​BEESLY, EDWARD SPENCER (1831– ), English historian and positivist, son of the Rev. James Beesly, was born at Feckenham, Worcestershire, on the 23rd of January 1831. He was educated at Wadham College, Oxford, which may be regarded as the original centre of the English positivist movement. Richard Congreve (q.v.) was tutor at Wadham from 1849 to 1854, and three men of that time, Frederic Harrison (q.v.), Beesly and John Henry Bridges (1832–1906), became the leaders of Comtism in England. Beesly left Oxford in 1854 to become assistant-master at Marlborough College. In 1859 he was appointed professor of history at University College, London, and of Latin at Bedford College, London, in 1860. He resigned these appointments in 1893 and 1889, and in 1893 became the editor of the newly-established Positivist Review. He collaborated in the translation of Comte’s system of Positive Polity (4 vols., 1875–1879), translated his Discourse on the Positive Spirit (1903), and wrote a biography of Comte for a translation of the first two chapters of his Cours de philosophie positive, entitled Fundamental Principles of Positive Philosophy (1905). Professor Beesly stood unsuccessfully as Liberal candidate for Westminster in 1885 and for Marylebone in 1886, and is the author of numerous review articles on social and political topics, treated from the positivist standpoint, especially on the Irish question. His works also include a series of lectures on Roman history, entitled Catiline, Clodius, Tiberius (1878), in which he rehabilitates in some degree the character of each of his subjects, and Queen Elizabeth (1892), in the “Twelve English Statesmen” series.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Beets, Nikolaas

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​BEETS, NIKOLAAS (1814–1903), Dutch poet, was born at Haarlem on the 13th of September 1814; constant references in his poems and sketches show how deeply the beauty of that town and its neighbourhood impressed his imagination. He studied theology in Leiden, but gave himself early to the cultivation of poetry. In his youth Beets was entirely carried away on the tide of Byronism which was then sweeping over Europe, and his early works—Jose (1834), Kuser (1835) and Guy de Vlaming (1837)—are gloomy romances of the most impassioned type. But at the very same time he was beginning in prose the composite work of humour and observation which has made him famous, and which certainly had nothing that was in the least Byronic about it. This was the celebrated Camera Obscura (1839), the most successful imaginative work which any Dutchman of the 18th century produced. This work, published under the pseudonym of “Hildebrand,” goes back in its earliest inception to the year 1835, when Beets was only twenty-one. It consists of complete short stories, descriptive sketches, studies of peasant life—all instinct with humour and pathos, and written in a style of great charm; it has been reprinted in countless editions. Beets became a professor at the university of Leiden, and the pastor of a congregation in that city. In middle life he published further collections of verse—Cornflowers (1853) and New Poems (1857)—in which the romantic melancholy was found to have disappeared, and to have left in its place a gentle sentiment and a depth of religious feeling. In 1873–1875 Beets collected his works in three volumes. In April 1883 the honorary degree of LL.D. Edin. was conferred upon him. He died at Utrecht on the 13th of March 1903.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Beffroy de Reigny, Louis Abel

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​BEFFROY DE REIGNY, LOUIS ABEL (1757–1811), French dramatist and man of letters, was born at Laon on the 6th of November 1757. Under the name of “Cousin Jacques” he founded a periodical called Les Lunes (1785–1787). The Courrier des planètes ou Correspondance du Cousin Jacques avec le firmament (1788–1792) followed. Nicodème dans la lune, ou la révolution pacifique (1790) a three-act farce, is said to have had more than four hundred representations. In spite of his protests against the evils of the Revolution he escaped interference through the influence of his brother, Louis Étienne Beffroy, who was a member of the Convention. Of La Petite Nanette (1795) and several other operas he wrote both the words and the music. His Dictionnaire néologique (3 vols., 1795–1800) of the chief actors and events in the Revolution was interdicted by the police and remained incomplete. Beffroy spent his last years in retirement, dying in Paris on the 17th of December 1811.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Begas, Karl

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​BEGAS, KARL (1794–1854), German historical painter, was born at Heinsberg near Aix-la-Chapelle. His father, a retired judge, destined him for the legal profession, but the boy’s tastes pointed definitely in another direction. Even at school he was remarked for his wonderful skill in drawing and painting, and in 1812 he was permitted to visit Paris in order to perfect himself in his art. He studied for eighteen months in the atelier of Gros and then began to work independently. In 1814 his copy of the Madonna della Sedia was bought by the king of Prussia, who was attracted by the young artist and did much to advance him. He was engaged to paint several large Biblical pictures, and in 1825, after his return from Italy, continued to produce paintings which were placed in the churches of Berlin and ​Potsdam. Some of these were historical pieces, but the majority were representations of Scriptural incidents. Begas was also celebrated as a portrait-painter, and supplied to the royal gallery a long series of portraits of eminent Prussian men of letters. At his death he held the post of court painter at Berlin. His son Oskar (1828–1883) was also a painter and professor of painting at Berlin. Reinhold, the sculptor, is noticed below.