Page:EB1911 - Volume 03.djvu/237

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BAILLIE—BAILMENT

beautiful songs, The Chough and the Crow in Orra, and the lover’s song in the Phantom. Miss Baillie died on the 23rd of February 1851, at the advanced age of 89, her faculties remaining unimpaired to the last. Her gentleness and sweetness of disposition made her a universal favourite, and her little cottage at Hampstead was the centre of a brilliant literary society.

See Joanna Baillie’s Dramatic and Poetical Works (London, 1851).

BAILLIE, ROBERT (1602–1662), Scottish divine, was born at Glasgow. Having graduated there in 1620, he gave himself to the study of divinity. In 1631, after he had been ordained and had acted for some years as regent in the university, he was appointed to the living of Kilwinning in Ayrshire. In 1638 he was a member of the famous Glasgow Assembly, and soon after he accompanied Leslie and the Scottish army as chaplain or preacher. In 1642 he was made professor of divinity at Glasgow, and in the following year was selected as one of the five Scottish clergymen who were sent to the Westminster Assembly. In 1649 he was one of the commissioners sent to Holland for the purpose of inviting Charles II. to Scotland, and of settling the terms of his admission to the government. He continued to take an active part in all the minor disputes of the church, and in 1661 was made principal of Glasgow University. He died in August of the following year, his death being probably hastened by his mortification at the apparently firm establishment of episcopacy in Scotland. Baillie was a man of learning and ability; his views were not extreme, and he played but a secondary part in the stirring events of the time. His Letters, by which he is now chiefly remembered, are of first-rate historical importance, and give a very lively picture of the period.

A complete memoir and a full notice of all his writings will be found in D. Laing’s edition of the Letters and Journals of Robert Baillie (1637–1662), Bannatyne Club, 3 vols. (Edinburgh, 1841–1842). Among his works are Ladensium αὐτοκατάκρισις, an answer to Lysimachus Nicanor, an attack on Laud and his system, in reply to a publication which charged the Covenanters with Jesuitry; Anabaptism, the true Fountain of Independency, Brownisme, Antinomy, Familisme, &c., a sermon; An Historical Vindication of the Government of the Church of Scotland; The Life of William (Laud) now Lord Archbishop of Canterbury Examined (London, 1643); A Parallel of the Liturgy with the Mass Book, the Breviary, the Ceremonial and other Romish Rituals (London, 1661).

BAILLIE, ROBERT (d. 1684), Scottish conspirator, known as Baillie of Jerviswood, was the son of George Baillie of St. John’s Kirk, Lanarkshire. He incurred the resentment of the Scottish government by rescuing, in June 1676, his brother-in-law Kirkton, a Presbyterian minister who had illegally been seized and confined in a house by Carstairs, an informer. He was fined £500, remaining in prison for four months and then being liberated on paying one-half the fine to Carstairs. In despair at the state of his country he determined in 1683 to emigrate to South Carolina, but the plan came to nothing. The same year Baillie, with some of his friends, went to London and entered into communication with Monmouth, Russell and their party in order to obtain redress; and on the discovery of the Rye House Plot he was arrested. Questioned by the king himself he repudiated any knowledge of the conspiracy, but with striking truthfulness would not deny that he had been consulted with the view of an insurrection in Scotland. He was subsequently loaded with irons and sent back a prisoner to Scotland. Though there was no evidence whatever to support his connexion with the plot, he was fined £6000 and kept in close confinement. He was already in a languishing state when on the 23rd of December 1684 he was brought up again before the high court on the charge of treason. He was pronounced guilty on the following day and hanged the same afternoon at the market cross at Edinburgh with all the usual barbarities. His shocking treatment was long remembered as one of the worst crimes committed by the Stuart administration in Scotland. Bishop Burnet, who was his cousin, describes him as “in the presbyterian principles but ... a man of great piety and virtue, learned in the law, in mathematics and in languages.” He married a sister of Sir Archibald Johnston, Lord Warriston, and left a son, George, who took refuge in Holland, afterwards returning with William III. and being restored to his estates.

BAILLY, JEAN SYLVAIN (1736–1793), French astronomer and orator, was born at Paris on the 15th of September 1736. Originally intended for the profession of a painter, he preferred writing tragedies until attracted to science by the influence of Nicolas de Lacaille. He calculated an orbit for the comet of 1759 (Halley’s), reduced Lacaille’s observations of 515 zodiacal stars, and was, in 1763, elected a member of the Academy of Sciences. His Essai sur la théorie des satellites de Jupiter (1766), an expansion of a memoir presented to the Academy in 1763, showed much original power; and it was followed up in 1771 by a noteworthy dissertation Sur les inégalités de la lumière des satellites de Jupiter. Meantime, he had gained a high literary reputation by his Éloges of Charles V., Lacaille, Molière, Corneille and Leibnitz, which were issued in a collected form in 1770 and 1790; he was admitted to the French Academy (February 26, 1784), and to the Académie des Inscriptions in 1785, when Fontenelle’s simultaneous membership of all three Academies was renewed in him. Thenceforth, he devoted himself to the history of science, publishing successively:—Histoire de l’astronomie ancienne (1775); Histoire de l’astronomie moderne (3 vols. 1779–1782); Lettres sur l’origine des sciences (1777); Lettres sur lVAtlantide de Platon (1779); and Traité de l’astronomie indienne et orientale (1787). Their erudition was, however, marred by speculative extravagances.

The cataclysm of the French Revolution interrupted his studies. Elected deputy from Paris to the states-general, he was chosen president of the Third Estate (May 5, 1789), led the famous proceedings in the Tennis Court (June 20), and acted as mayor of Paris (July 15, 1789, to November 16, 1791). The dispersal by the National Guard, under his orders, of the riotous assembly in the Champ de Mars (July 17, 1791) rendered him obnoxious to the infuriated populace, and he retired to Nantes, where he composed his Mémoires d’un témoin (published in 3 vols. by MM. Berville and Barrière, 1821–1822), an incomplete narrative of the extraordinary events of his public life. Late in 1793, Bailly quitted Nantes to join his friend Pierre Simon Laplace at Melun; but was there recognized, arrested and brought (November 10) before the Revolutionary Tribunal at Paris. On the 12th of November he was guillotined amid the insults of a howling mob. He met his death with patient dignity, having, indeed, disastrously shared the enthusiasms of his age, but taken no share in its crimes.

Notices of his life are contained in the Éloges by Mérard de Saint Just, Delisle de Salles, Lalande and Lacretelle; in a memoir by Arago, read the 26th of February 1844 before the Académie des Sciences, and published in Notices biographiques, t. ii. (1852). See also Delambre, Histoire de l’astronomie au 18me siècle, p. 735, and Lalande, Bibliographie astronomique, p. 730.

BAILMENT (from Fr. bailler, to place in charge of, cf. Bail), in law, a delivery of goods from one person called the bailor, to another person called the bailee, for some purpose, upon a contract, express or implied, that after the purpose has been fulfilled they shall be redelivered to the bailor, or otherwise dealt with according to his direction, or kept till he reclaims them. The following is Chief Justice Holt’s classification of bailments in Coggs v. Bernard, 1704, 1 Sm. L.C. 167, which is generally adopted. (1) Depositum, or bailment without reward, in order that the bailee may keep the goods for the bailor. In this case, the bailee has no right to use the thing entrusted to him, and is liable for gross negligence, but not for ordinary negligence. Thus, where a customer had deposited some securities with his banker (who received nothing for his services) and they were stolen by a cashier, it was held that as there was no proof of gross negligence the banker was not liable (Giblin v. McMullen, 1868, L.R. 2 P.C. 317). (2) Commodatum, or loan, where goods or chattels that are useful are lent to the bailee gratis, to be used by him. The bailee may be justly considered as representing himself to the bailor to be a person of competent skill to take care of the thing lent (Wilson v. Brett, 1843, 11 M. & W. 113), and the transaction being a gratuitous loan, and one for the advantage of the bailee solely, he is bound to use great diligence in the protection of the thing bailed and will be responsible even for slight negligence. Thus, where a