Page:EB1911 - Volume 03.djvu/760

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BEN LEDI—BENNETT, J. G.
  

goodwill with which Benjamin had been received by the English legal profession had gone far enough. Towards the close of his career he was in ill health, and he suffered from the results of a fall from a tramcar. He retired in 1882 to a house in Paris which he had built and where he had been in the habit of passing his vacations with his wife, who was a Frenchwoman. He never returned to practice, but came back to London to be entertained by the bench and bar of England at a banquet in the Inner Temple Hall on the 30th of June 1883. He died at Paris on the 6th of May 1884.

Benjamin was thick-set and stout, with an expression of great shrewdness. An early portrait of him is to be found in Jefferson Davis’s Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government. His political history may be traced in that work, and in John W. Draper’s American Civil War and von Holst’s Constitutional History of the United States. Many allusions to his English career will be found in works describing English lawyers of his period, and there are some interesting reminiscences of him by Baron Pollock in the Fortnightly Review for March 1898. His Treatise on the Law of Sale of Personal Property with References to the American Decisions and to the French Code and Civil Law—a bulky volume known to practitioners as Benjamin on Sales—is the principal text-book on its subject, and a fitting monument of the author’s career at the English bar, of his industry and learning. Many of his American speeches have been published.

See Judah P. Benjamin, by Pierce Butler (Philadelphia, 1907, with a good bibliography).


BEN LEDI (Gaelic, “the hill of God”), a mountain of Perthshire, Scotland, 2875 ft. high, 5 m. by road N.W. of Callander. It is situated close to some of the most romantic scenery in the Highlands, and is particularly well known through Scott’s Lady of the Lake. Its name is supposed to point to the time when Beltane rites were observed on its summit. A cairn was built on the top in 1887 to commemorate Queen Victoria’s jubilee. On one of the sides of the mountain is a tarn which bears the name of Lochan nan Corp, “the little loch of the dead,” from an accident to a funeral party by which 200 lives were lost.


BENLLIURE Y GIL, JOSÉ (1858–  ), Spanish painter, was born at Valencia, studied painting under Domingo, and showed from the first such marked talent that he was sent to the Spanish school in Rome. He was one of the select circle pensioned by the Spanish government for residence in Italy and executed several state orders for the decoration of public buildings; but he owes his chief fame to his large historical paintings, notably the “Vision in the Coliseum.” He became the leader of the Spanish art colony in Rome, where he practised as painter and sculptor.


BEN LOMOND, a mountain in the north-west of Stirlingshire, Scotland. It is situated near the eastern bank of Loch Lomond, about 9 m. from the head and about 15 from the foot. It is 3192 ft. high, and the prevailing rocks are granite, mica schist, diorite, porphyry and quartzite, the last, where it crops out on the surface, gleaming in the distance like snow. Duchray Water, a head-stream of the Forth, rises in the north-east shoulder. The hill, which is covered with grass to the top, is a favourite climb, being ascended from Rowardennan (the easiest) or Inversnaid on the lake, or Aberfoyle 10 m. inland due east. The view from the summit extends northward as far as the Grampians, with occasional glimpses of Ben Nevis; westward to Jura in the Atlantic; south-westward to Arran in the Firth of Clyde; southward to Tinto Hill, the Lowthers and Cairnsmore; and eastward to Edinburgh Castle and Arthur’s Seat.


BENLOWES, EDWARD (1603?–1676), English poet, son of Andrew Benlowes of Brent Hall, Essex, was born about 1603. He matriculated at St John’s College, Cambridge, in 1620, and on leaving the university he made a prolonged tour on the continent of Europe. He was a Roman Catholic in middle life, but became a convert to Protestantism in his later years. He dissipated his fortune by openhanded generosity to his friends and relations, and possibly by serving in the Civil War; so that he was in great poverty at the time of his death, which occurred on the 18th of December 1676. The last eight years of his life were passed at Oxford. Many of his writings are in Latin. His most important work is Theophila, or Love’s Sacrifice, a Divine Poem (1652). The poem deals with mystical religion, telling how the soul, represented by Theophila, ascends by humility, zeal and contemplation, and triumphs over the sins of the senses. It is written in a curious stanza of three lines of unequal length rhyming together. Until recent times justice has hardly been done to Benlowes’ poetical merits and indisputable piety. Samuel Butler, who satirized him in his “Character of a Small Poet,” found abundant matter for ridicule in his eccentricities; and Pope and Warburton noted him as a patron of bad poets.

His Theophila was reprinted by S. W. Singer; and in Minor Poets of the Caroline Period, vol. i. (1905), Mr Saintsbury reprints Theophila and two other poems by Benlowes, “The Summary of Wisedome,” and “A Poetic Descant upon a Private Music-Meeting.”


BEN MACDHUI, more correctly Ben Muichdhui (Gaelic for “the mountain of the black pig,” in allusion to its shape), the second highest mountain (4296 ft.) in Great Britain, one of the Cairngorm group, on the confines of south-western Aberdeenshire and south-western Banffshire, not far from the eastern boundary of Inverness-shire. It is about 11 m. from Castleton of Braemar and about 10 from Aviemore. The ascent is usually made from Castleton of Braemar, by way of the Linn of Dee, Glen Lui and Glen Derry. From the head of Glen Derry, with its blasted trees, the picture of desolation, it becomes more toilsome, but is partly repaid by the view of the remarkable columnar cliffs of Corrie Etchachan. The summit is flat and quite bare of vegetation, but the panorama in every direction is extremely grand. At the foot of a vast gully, 2500 ft. above the sea, lies Loch Avon (or A’an), a narrow lake about 11/2 m. long, with water of the deepest blue and a margin of bright yellow sand. At the western end of the lake is the Shelter Stone, an enormous block of granite resting upon two other blocks, which can accommodate a dozen persons. Beautiful rock crystals occur in veins in the corries. The summit of Cairngorm, 31/2 m. north of that of Ben Macdhui, may be reached from the latter with scarcely any descent, by following the rugged ridge flanking the western side of Loch Avon. The other great peaks of the group are Braeriach (4248 ft.) and Cairntoul (4241 ft.), and 6 m. to the east are the twin masses of Ben a Bourd, the northern top of which is 3924 ft. and the southern 3860 ft. high. Ben A’an, an adjoining hill, is 3843 ft. high.


BENNETT, CHARLES EDWIN (1858–  ), American classical scholar, was born on the 6th of April 1858, in Providence, Rhode Island. He graduated from Brown University in 1878 and also studied at Harvard (1881–1882) and in Germany (1882–1884). He taught in secondary schools in Florida (1878–1879), New York (1879–1881), and Nebraska (1885–1889), and became professor of Latin in the University of Wisconsin in 1889, of classical philology at Brown University in 1891, and of Latin at Cornell University in 1892. His syntactical studies, notably various papers on the subjunctive, are based on a statistical examination of Latin texts and are marked by a fresh system of nomenclature; he ranks as one of the leaders of the “New American School” of syntacticians, who insist on a preliminary re-examination of all available data. Of great importance are his advocacy of “quantitative” reading of Latin verse and his Critique of Some Recent Subjunctive Theories in vol. ix. (1898) of Cornell Studies in Classical Philology, of which he was an editor. Bennett’s Latin Grammar (1895) is the first successful attempt in America to adopt the method of the brief, scholarly Schulgrammatik. Besides the Latin classics commonly read in secondary courses and other text-books in “Bennett’s Latin Series,” he edited Tacitus’s Dialogus de Oratoribus (1894), and Cicero’s De Senectute (1897) and De Amicitia (1897). He wrote, with George P. Bristol, The Teaching of Greek and Latin in Secondary Schools (1900), and The Latin Language, (1907), and with William Alexander Hammond translated The Characters of Theophrastus (1902).


BENNETT, JAMES GORDON (1794–1872), American journalist, founder and editor of the New York Herald, was born at Newmills in Banffshire, Scotland, in 1794 (not in 1800, as has been stated). He was educated for the Roman Catholic priesthood