BRANDES — BRASSE UR west of the town, is a tower (1880) to the memory of about 4000 Brandenburgers who fell in the wars of 1864, 1866, and 1870-71. There is considerable shipping and fishing on the river. Population (1880), 28,685 ; (1890), 37,817 ; (1900), 49,263. Brandes, Georg: Morris Cohen (1842), Danish critic and literary historian, generally known as Georg Brandes, was born in Copenhagen on 4th February 1842. He became a student in the university in 1859, and first studied jurisprudence. From this, however, his maturer taste soon turned to philosophy and aesthetics. In 1862 he won the gold medal of the university for an essay on The Nemesis Idea among the Ancients. Before this, indeed since 1858, he had shown a remarkable gift for verse-writing, the results of which, however, were not abundant enough to justify separate publication. Brandes, indeed, did not collect his poems until so late as 1898. At the university, which he left in 1864, Brandes was much under the influence of the writings of Heiberg in criticism and Soren Kierkegaard in philosophy, influences which have continued to leave traces on his work. From 1865 to 1871 Brandes travelled much in Europe, acquainting himself with the condition of literature in the principal centres of learning. His first important contribution to letters was his Jdsthetic Studies of 1868, in which, in several brief monographs on Danish poets, his maturer method is already foreshadowed. In 1870 he published several important volumes, The French ^Esthetics of Our Days, Criticisms and Portraits, and a translation of The Subjection of Women of John Stuart Mill, whom he had met that year during a visit to England. Brandes now took his place as the leading critic of the north of Europe, applying to local conditions and habits of thought the methods of Taine. He became docent or reader in Belles Lettres at the university of Copenhagen, where his lectures were the sensation of the hour. The professor of ^Esthetics was the poet Carsten Hauch, a very aged man; when he died in 1872, it was taken as a matter of course that Brandes would succeed him. But the young critic had offended many susceptibilities by his ardent advocacy of modern ideas; he was known to be a Jew, he was convicted of being a Radical, he was suspected of being an atheist. The authorities refused to elect him, but his fitness for the post was so obvious that the chair of Aesthetics remained vacant in the university of Copenhagen, no one else daring to take a post from which Brandes had been rejected. In the midst of these polemics the critic began to issue the most ambitious of his works, the Main Streams in the Literature of the Nineteenth Century, of which four volumes appeared between 1872 and 1875. The brilliant novelty of this criticism, as well as the tumult which gathered round the person of the critic, combined to give it unbounded success, and the reputation of Brandes grew apace, not only in his own country, but in Germany and Russia. His subsequent writings have been too numerous to be chronicled here in detail. But among them must be mentioned the monographs on Soren Kierkegaard (1877), on Esias Tegner (1878), on Lord Beaconsfield (1878), and on Henrik Ibsen (1899). Brandes has written with great fulness on the main contemporary poets and novelists of his own pountry and of Norway, and he and his disciples have long been the arbiters of literary fame in the north. His Danish Poets (1877), his Men of the Modern Transition (1883), and his Essays (1889), are volumes essential to the proper study of modern Scandinavian literature. In 1877 Brandes left Copenhagen and settled in Berlin, taking a considerable part in the aesthetic life of that city;
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he speaks and writes German like a native. His political views, however, made Prussia uncomfortable for him, and he returned in time to Copenhagen, where he found a whole new school of writers and thinkers eager to receive him as their leader. The most important of his recent works has been his study of Shakespeare, 1897-98, which was translated into English by Mr Archer, and at once took a high position. It is, perhaps, the most authoritative work on Shakespeare, not principally intended for an Englishspeaking audience, which has hitherto been published in any country. Dr Brandes has recently been engaged on a history of modern Scandinavian literature. In his critical work, which is extended over a wider field than that of any other living writer, Brandes has been aided by a singularly charming style, lucid and reasonable, enthusiastic without extravagance, brilliant and coloured without affectation. In 1900 he collected his works for the first time in a complete and popular edition. Brandon, a city and port of entry of Manitoba, Canada, on the Assiniboine river, and the Canadian Pacific and Canadian Northern railways, situated in 99° 57' W. and 49° 50' N., 1184 feet above the sea. It is in one of the finest agricultural sections of Manitoba, and contains grain elevators, saw-mills, and grist-mills. It was first settled in 1881, and incorporated as a city in 1882. Population (1891), 3778; (1901), 5380. Brandy Will© Creek, a small stream rising in Chester county, in South-east Pennsylvania, and flowing into Christiana Creek in Northern Delaware. Its banks in Pennsylvania were the scene of an engagement in 1777, during the American revolution, between the American forces under Washington and a British army under General Howe, in which the former were defeated. Brantford, a city and port of entry of Ontario, Canada, situated 22 miles S.S. W. of Hamilton, on the Grand river, and on the Grand Trunk and Toronto, Hamilton, and Buffalo railways. Agricultural implement, plough, engine, bicycle, and stove works and potteries, constitute the most important industrial establishments. It contains an institute for the education of the blind, maintained by the provincial Government, and a ladies’ college. The total value of the exports for 1899-1900 was $993,346, and imports $1,413,950. Incorporated as a city in 1877, the population in 1881 was 9616; in 1891, 12,753; and in 1901 it was 16,621. ,Brasseur de Bourbourg-, Charles Etienne (1814 -1874), Belgian ethnographer, was born at Bourbourg, near Dunkirk, 8th September 1814. He entered the Roman Catholic priesthood, was professor of ecclesiastical history in the Quebec seminary in 1845, vicar-general at Boston in 1846, and from 1848 to 1863 travelled as a missionary, chiefly in Mexico and Central America. He gave great attention to Mexican antiquities, published in 1857-59 a history of Aztec civilization, and edited a collection of documents in the indigenous languages from 1861 to 1864. In 1863 he announced the discovery of a key to Mexican hieroglyphic writing, but its value is very questionable. In 1864 he was archaeologist to the French military expedition in Mexico, and his Monumens anciens du Mexique was published by the French Government in 1866. Perhaps his greatest service was the publication of the Popot Vuh, a sacred book of the Indians in the Quichel language, in 1861, along with a Quichel Grammar, and an essay on Central American mythology. In 1871 he brought out his Bibliotheque Mexico-Guatemalienne, and in 1869-70 gave the principles of his decipherment of Indian picture-writing in his Manuscrit Troano, etudes sur le systeme graphique et le langue des Mayas. He died at Nice on 8th January 1874.
