OpenLLM-France/wikimedia huggingface dataset:
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Hunnis, William

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​HUNNIS, WILLIAM (d. 1597), English musician and poet, was as early as 1549 in the service of William Herbert, afterwards earl of Pembroke. His friend Thomas Newton, in a poem prefixed to The Hive of Hunnye (1578), says: “In prime of youth thy pleasant Penne depaincted Sonets sweete,” and mentions his interludes, gallant lays, rondelets and songs, explaining that it was in the winter of his age that he turned to sacred lore and high philosophy. In 1550 he published Certayne Psalms . . . in Englishe metre, and shortly afterwards was made a gentleman of the Chapel Royal. At Mary’s accession he retained his appointment, but in 1555 he is said to have been one of a party of twelve conspirators who had determined to take Mary’s life. Nothing came of this plot, but shortly afterwards he was party to a conspiracy to dethrone Mary in favour of Elizabeth. Hunnis, having some knowledge of alchemy, was to go abroad to coin the necessary gold, but this doubtful mission was exchanged for the task of making false keys to the treasury in London, which he was able to do because of his friendship with Nicholas Brigham, the receiver of the exchequer. The conspirators were, however, betrayed by one of their number, Thomas Whyte. Some of them were executed, but Hunnis escaped with imprisonment. The death of Mary made him a free man, and in 1559 he married Margaret, Brigham’s widow, but she died within the year, and Hunnis married in 1560 the widow of a grocer. He himself became a grocer and freeman of the City of London, and supervisor of the Queen’s Gardens at Greenwich. In 1566 he was made Master of the Children of the Chapel Royal. No complete piece of his is extant, perhaps because of the rule that the plays acted by the Children should not have been previously printed. In his later years he purchased land at Barking, Essex. If the lines above his signature on a 1557 edition of Sir Thomas More’s works are genuine, he remained a poor man, for he refuses to make a will on the ground that “the good that I shall leave, will not pay all I owe.” In Harleian MS. 6403 is a story that one of his sons, in the capacity of page, drank the remainder of the poisoned cup supposed to have been provided by Leicester for Walter Devereux, 1st earl of Essex, but escaped with no injury beyond the loss of his hair.
Hunnis’s extant works include Certayne Psalms (1549), A Hive full of Hunnye (1578), Seven Sobbes of a sorrowful Soule for Sinne (1583), Hunnies Recreations (1588), sixteen poems in the Paradise of Dainty Devices (1576), and two in England’s Helicon (1600). See Mrs C. Carmichael Stopes’s tract on William Hunnis, reprinted (1892) from the Jahrbuch der deutschen Shakespeare Gesellschaft.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Bendigo

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​BENDIGO (formerly Sandhurst), a city of Bendigo county, Victoria, Australia, 101 m. by rail N.N.W. of Melbourne. Pop. (1901) 31,020. It is the centre of a large gold-field consisting of quartz ranges, with some alluvial deposits, and many of the mines are deep-level workings. The discovery of alluvial gold in 1851 brought many immigrants to the district; but the opening up of the quartz reefs in 1872 was the principal factor in the importance of Bendigo. It became a municipality in 1855 and a city in 1871. It is the seat of Anglican and Roman Catholic bishops. Besides mining, the local industries are the manufacture of Epsom pottery, bricks and tiles, iron-founding, stone-cutting, brewing, tanning and coach-building. The surrounding district produces quantities of wheat and fruits for export, and much excellent wine is made.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Benda

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​BENDA, the name of a family of German musicians, of whom the most important is Georg (d. 1795), who was a pupil of his elder brother Franz (1709–1786), Concertmeister in Berlin. Georg Benda was a famous clavier player and oboist, but his chief interest for modern musical history lies in his melodramas. Being a far more solid musician than Rousseau he earns the title of the musical pioneer of that art-form (i.e. the accompaniment of spoken words by illustrative music) in a sense which cannot be claimed for Rousseau’s earlier Pygmalion. Benda’s first melodrama, Ariadne auf Naxos, was written in 1774 after his return from a visit to Italy. He was a voluminous composer, whose works (instrumental and dramatic) were enthusiastically taken up by the aristocracy in the time of Mozart. Mozart’s imagination was much fired by Benda’s new vehicle for dramatic expression, and in 1778 he wrote to his father with the greatest enthusiasm about a project for composing a duodrama on the model of Benda’s Ariadne auf Naxos and Medea, both of which he considered excellent and always carried about with him. He concluded at the time that that was the way the problems of operatic recitative should be solved, or rather shelved, but the only specimen he has himself produced is the wonderful melodrama in his unfinished operetta, Zäide, written in 1780.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Bender

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​BENDER (more correctly Bendery), a town of Russia, in the government of Bessarabia, on the right bank of the Dniester, 37 m. by rail S.E. of Kishinev. It possesses a tobacco factory, candle-works and brick-kilns, and is an important river port, vessels discharging here their cargoes of corn, wine, wool, cattle, flour and tallow, to be conveyed by land to Odessa and to Yassy in Rumania. Timber also is floated down the Dniester. The citadel was dismantled in 1897. The town had in 1867 a population of 24,443, and in 1900 of 33,741, the greater proportion being Jews. As early as the 12th century the Genoese had a settlement on the site of Bender. In 1709 Charles XII., after the defeat of Poltava, collected his forces here in a camp which they called New Stockholm, and continued there till 1713. Bender was taken by the Russians in 1770, in 1789 and in 1806, but it was not held permanently by Russia till 1812.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Bench-mark

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​BENCH-MARK, a surveyor’s mark cut in stone or some durable material, to indicate a point in a line of levels for the determination of altitudes over a given district. The name is taken from the “angle-iron” which is inserted in the horizontal incision as a “bench” or support for the levelling staff. The mark of the “broad-arrow” is generally incised with the bench-mark so that the horizontal bar passes through its apex.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Bendl, Karel

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​BENDL, KAREL or Karl (1838–1897), Bohemian composer, was born on the 16th of April 1838 at Prague. He studied at the organ school, and in 1858 had already composed a number of small choral works. In 1861 his Poletuje holubice won a prize and at once became a favourite with the local choral societies. In 1864 Bendl went to Brussels, where for a short time he held the post of second conductor of the opera. After visiting Amsterdam and Paris he returned to Prague. Here in 1865 he was appointed conductor of the choral society known as Hlahoe, and he held the post until 1879, when Baron Dervies engaged his services for his private band. Bendl’s first opera Lejla was successfully produced in 1868. It was followed by Bretislav a Jitka (1870), Stary Zenich, a comic opera (1883), Karel Skreta (1883), Dite Tabera, a prize opera (1892), and Matki Mila (1891). Other operas by Bendl are Indicka princezna, Cernohorci, a prize opera, and the two operas Carovny Kvet and Gina. His ballad Svanda dudak acquired much popularity; he published a mass in D minor for male voices and another mass for a mixed choir; two songs to Ave Maria; a violin sonata and a string quartet in F; and a quantity of songs and choruses, many of which have come to be regarded as national possessions of Bohemia. Bendl died on the 20th of September 1897 at Prague.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Bench Table

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​BENCH TABLE (Fr. banc; Ital. sedile; Ger. Bank), the stone seat which runs round the walls of large churches, and sometimes round the piers; it very generally is placed in the porches.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Bend

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​BEND, (1) (From Old Eng. bendan), a bending or curvature, as in “the bend of a river,” or technically the ribs or “wales” of a ship. (2) (From Old Eng. bindan, to bind), a nautical term for a knot, the “cable bend,” the “fisherman’s bend.” (3) (From the Old Fr. bende, a ribbon), a term of heraldry, signifying a diagonal band or stripe across a shield from the dexter chief to the sinister base; also in tanning, the half of a hide from which the thinner parts have been trimmed away, “bend-leather” being the thickest and best sole-leather.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Gabelle

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​GABELLE (French, from the Med. Lat. gabulum, gablum, a tax, for the origin of which see Gavelkind), a term which, in France, was originally applied to taxes on all commodities, but was gradually limited to the tax on salt. In process of time it became one of the most hated and most grossly unequal taxes in the country, but, though condemned by all supporters of reform, it was not abolished until 1790. First imposed in 1286, in the reign of Philip IV., as a temporary expedient, it was made a permanent tax by Charles V. Repressive as a state monopoly, it was made doubly so from the fact that the government obliged every individual above the age of eight years to purchase weekly a minimum amount of salt at a fixed price. When first instituted, it was levied uniformly on all the provinces in France, but for the greater part of its history the price varied in different provinces. There were five distinct groups of provinces, classified as follows: (a) the Pays de grandes gabelles, in which the tax was heaviest; (b) the Pays de petites gabelles, which paid a tax of about half the rate of the former; (c) the Pays de salines, in which the tax was levied on the salt extracted from the salt marshes; (d) the Pays rédimés, which had purchased redemption in 1549; and (e) the Pays exempts, which had stipulated for exemption on entering into union with the kingdom of France. Greniers à sel (dating from 1342) were established in each province, and to these all salt had to be taken by the producer on penalty of confiscation. The grenier fixed the price which it paid for the salt and then sold it to retail dealers at a higher rate.
See J. J. Clamagéran, Histoire de l’impôt en France (1876); A. Gasquet, Précis des institutions politiques de l’ancienne France (1885); Necker, Compte rendu (1781).
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Gaberdine

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​GABERDINE, or Gabardine, any long, loose over-garment, reaching to the feet and girt round the waist. It was, when made of coarse material, commonly worn in the middle ages by pilgrims, beggars and almsmen. The Jews, conservatively attached to the loose and flowing garments of the East, continued to wear the long upper garment to which the name “gaberdine” could be applied, long after it had ceased to be a common form as worn by non-Jews, and to this day in some parts of Europe, e.g. in Poland, it is still worn, while the tendency to wear the frock-coat very long and loose is a marked characteristic of the race. The fact that in the middle ages the Jews were forbidden to engage in handicrafts also, no doubt, tended to stereotype a form of dress unfitted for manual labour. The idea of the “gaberdine” being enforced by law upon the Jews as a distinctive garment is probably due to Shakespeare’s use in the Merchant of Venice, I. iii. 113. The mark that the Jews were obliged to wear generally on the outer garment was the badge. This was first enforced by the fourth Lateran Council of 1215. The “badge” (Lat. rota; Fr. rouelle, wheel) took generally the shape of a circle of cloth worn on the breast. It varied in colour at different times. In France it was of yellow, later of red and white; in England it took the form of two bands or stripes, first of white, then of yellow. In Edward I.’s reign it was made in the shape of the Tables of the Law (see the Jewish Encyclopedia, s.v. “Costume” and “Badge”). The derivation of the word is obscure. It apparently occurs first in O. Fr. in the forms gauverdine, galvardine, and thence into Ital. as gavardina, and Span. gabardina, a form which has influenced the English word. The New English Dictionary suggests a connexion with the O.H. Ger. wallevart, pilgrimage. Skeat (Etym. Dict., 1898) refers it to Span. gaban, coat, cloak; cabaña, hut, cabin.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Gabes

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​GABES, a town of Tunisia, at the head of the gulf of the same name, and 70 m. by sea S.W. of Sfax. It occupies the site of the Tacape of the Romans and consists of an open port and European quarter and several small Arab towns built in an oasis of date palms. This oasis is copiously watered by a stream called the Wad Gabes. The European quarter is situated on the right bank of the Wad near its mouth, and adjacent are the Arab towns of Jara and Menzel. The houses of the native towns are built largely of dressed stones and broken columns from the ruins of Tacape. Gabes is the military headquarters for southern Tunisia. The population of the oasis is about 20,000, including some 1500 Europeans. There is a considerable export trade in dates.
Gabes lies at the head of the shat country of Tunisia and is intimately connected with the scheme of Commandant Roudaire to create a Saharan sea by making a channel from the Mediterranean to these shats (large salt lakes below the level of the sea). Roudaire proposed to cut a canal through the belt of high ground between Gabes and the shats, and fixed on Wad Melah, a spot 10 m. N. of Gabes, for the sea end of the channel (see Sahara). The company formed to execute his project became simply an agricultural concern and by the sinking of artesian wells created an oasis of olive and palm trees.
The Gulf of Gabes, the Syrtis Minor of the ancients, is a semi-circular shallow indentation of the Mediterranean, about 50 m. across from the Kerkenna Islands, opposite Sfax on its northern shore, to Jerba Island, which lies at its southern end. The waters of the gulf abound in fish and sponge.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Gabel, Kristoffer

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​GABEL, KRISTOFFER (1617–1673), Danish statesman, was born at Glückstadt, on the 6th of January 1617. His father, Wulbern, originally a landscape painter and subsequently recorder of Glückstadt, was killed at the siege of that fortress by the Imperialists in 1628. Kristoffer is first heard of in 1639, as overseer and accountant at the court of Duke Frederick. When the duke ascended the Danish throne as Frederick III., Gabel followed him to Copenhagen as his private secretary and man of business. Gabel, who veiled under a mysterious reticence considerable financial ability and uncommon shrewdness, had great influence over the irresolute king. During the brief interval between King Charles X.’s first and second attack upon Denmark, Gabel was employed in several secret missions to Sweden; and he took a part in the intrigues which resulted in the autocratic revolution of 1660 (see Denmark: History). His services on this occasion have certainly been exaggerated; but if not the originator of the revolution, he was certainly the chief intermediary between Frederick III. and the conjoined Estates in the mysterious conspiracy which established absolutism in Denmark. His activity on this occasion won the king’s lifelong gratitude. He was enriched, ennobled, and in 1664 made governor of Copenhagen. From this year must be dated his open and official influence and power, and from 1660 to 1670 he was the most considerable personage at court, and very largely employed in financial and diplomatic affairs. When Frederick III. died, in February 1670, Gabel’s power was at an end. The new ruler, Christian V., hated him, and accusations against him poured in from every quarter. When, on the 18th of April 1670, he was dismissed, nobody sympathized with the man who had grown wealthy at a time when other people found it hard to live. He died on the 13th of October 1673.
See Carl Frederik Bricka, Dansk. Biograf. Lex. art “Gabel” (Copenhagen, 1887, &c.); Danmarks Riges Historie (Copenhagen, 1897–1905), vol. v.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Fārābī

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​FĀRĀBĪ [Abū Naṣr Muḥammad ibn Tarkhān ul-Fārābī] (ca. 870–950), Arabian philosopher, was born of Turkish stock at Fārāb in Turkestan, where also he spent his youth. Thence he journeyed to Bagdad, where he learned Arabic and gave himself to the study of mathematics, medicine and philosophy, especially the works of Aristotle. Later he went to the court of the Ḥamdānid Saif addaula, from whom he received a warm welcome and a small pension. Here he lived a quiet if not an ascetic life. ​He died in Damascus, whither he had gone with his patron. His works are very clear in style, though aphoristic rather than systematic in the treatment of subjects. Unfortunately the success of Avicenna seems to have led to the neglect of much of his work. In Europe his compendium of Aristotle’s Rhetoric was published at Venice, 1484. Two of his smaller works appear in Alpharabii opera omnia (Paris, 1638), and two are translated in F. A. Schmölders’ Documenta philosophiae Arabum (Bonn, 1836). More recently Fr. Dieterici has published at Leiden: Alfarabi’s philosophische Abhandlungen (1890; German trans. 1892); Alfarabi’s Abhandlung des Musterstaats (1895; German trans. with an essay “Über den Zusammenhang der arabischen und griechischen Philosophie,” 1900); Die Staatsleitung von Alfarabi in German, with an essay on “Das Wesen der arabischen Philosophie” (1904).
For Fārābi’s life see McG. de Slane’s translation of Ibn Khallikān (vol. 3, pp. 307 ff.); and for further information as to his works M. Steinschneider’s article in the Mémoires de l’Académie (St Petersburg, série 7, tom. 13, No. 4, 1869); and C. Brockelmann’s Gesch. der arab. Litteratur, vol. i. (Weimar, 1898), pp. 210-213.  (G. W. T.)
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Gabii

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​GABII, an ancient city of Latium, between 12 and 13 m. E. of Rome, on the Via Praenestina, which was in early times known as the Via Gabina. The part played by it in the story of the expulsion of the Tarquins is well known; but its importance in the earliest history of Rome rests upon other evidence—the continuance of certain ancient usages which imply a period of hostility between the two cities, such as the adoption of the cinctus Gabinus by the consul when war was to be declared. We hear of a treaty of alliance with Rome in the time of Tarquinius Superbus, the original text of which, written on a bullock’s skin, was said by Dionysius of Halicarnassus to be still extant in his day. Its subsequent history is obscure, and we only hear of it again in the 1st century B.C. as a small and insignificant place, though its desolation is no doubt exaggerated by the poets. From inscriptions we learn that from the time of Augustus or Tiberius onwards it enjoyed a municipal organization. Its baths were well known, and Hadrian, who was responsible for much of the renewed prosperity of the small towns of Latium, appears to have been a very liberal patron, building a senate-house (Curia ​Aelia Augusta) and an aqueduct. After the 3rd century Gabii practically disappears from history, though its bishops continue to be mentioned in ecclesiastical documents till the close of the 9th. The primitive city occupied the eastern bank of the lake, the citadel being now marked by the ruins of the medieval fortress of Castiglione, while the Roman town extended farther to the south. The most conspicuous relic of the latter is a ruined temple, generally attributed to Juno, which had six columns in the front and six on each side. The plan is interesting, but the style of architecture was apparently mixed. To the east of the temple lay the Forum, where excavations were made by Gavin Hamilton in 1792. All the objects found were placed in the Villa Borghese, but many of them were carried off to Paris by Napoleon, and still remain in the Louvre. The statues and busts are especially numerous and interesting; besides the deities Venus, Diana, Nemesis, &c., they comprise Agrippa, Tiberius, Germanicus, Caligula, Claudius, Nero, Trajan and Plotina, Hadrian and Sabina, M. Aurelius, Septimius Severus, Geta, Gordianus Pius and others. The inscriptions relate mainly to local and municipal matters.
See E. Q. Visconti, Monumenti Gabini della Villa Pinciana (Rome, 1797, and Milan, 1835); T. Ashby in Papers of the British School at Rome, i. 180 seq.; G. Pinza in Bull. Com. (1903), 321 seq. (T. As.)
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Füssen

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​FÜSSEN, a town of Germany, in the kingdom of Bavaria, at the foot of the Alps (Tirol), on the Lech, 2500 ft. above the sea, with a branch line to Oberdorf on the railway to Augsburg. Pop. 4000. It has six Roman Catholic churches, a Franciscan monastery and a castle. Rope-making is an important industry. The castle, lying on a rocky eminence, is remarkable for the peace signed here on the 22nd of April 1745 between the elector Maximilian III., Joseph of Bavaria and Maria Theresa. Two miles to the S.E., immediately on the Austrian frontier, romantically situated on a rock overlooking the Schwanensee, is the magnificent castle of Hohenschwangau, and a little to the north, on the site of an old castle, that of Neuschwanstein, built by Louis II. of Bavaria.
See H. Feistle, Füssen und Umgebung (1898).
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Bentley, Richard (publisher)

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​BENTLEY, RICHARD (1794–1871), British publisher, was born in London in 1794. His father owned the General Evening Post in conjunction with John Nichols, to whom Richard Bentley, on leaving St Paul’s school, was apprenticed to learn the printing ​trade. With his brother Samuel (1785–1868), an antiquarian of some repute, he set up a printing establishment, but in 1829 he began business as a publisher in partnership with Henry Colburn in New Burlington Street. Colburn retired in 1832 and Bentley continued business on his own account. In 1837 he began Bentley’s Miscellany, edited for the first three years of its existence by Charles Dickens, whose Oliver Twist, with Cruikshank’s illustrations, appeared in its pages. Bentley and his son George (1828–1895), as Richard Bentley & Son, published works by R. H. Barham, Theodore Hook, Isaac D’Israeli, Judge Haliburton and others; also the “Library of Standard Novels” and the “Favourite Novel Library.” In the latter series Mrs Henry Wood’s East Lynne appeared. In 1866 the firm took over the publication of Temple Bar, with which Bentley’s Miscellany was afterwards incorporated. Richard Bentley died on the 10th of September 1871. His son, George Bentley, and his grandson, Richard Bentley, junior, continued the business until it was absorbed (1898) by Macmillan & Co.
See also R. Bentley & Son (Edinburgh, 1886), a history of the firm reprinted from Le Livre (October, 1885).