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 manufacture of lace now gives employment to at least 6000 persons in the town, and horticulture is carried on extensively in the suburbs. Commercial activity has been assisted by the new ship-canal to Zeebrugge, and by direct steamship service from Hull to Bruges. The steady growth of the population is evidence of increased prosperity. In 1880 the population was only 44,500, but it had risen in 1900 to 51,657 and in 1904 it was 53,728.

Bruges is said to have been a city in the 7th century, and the name Flanders was originally applied to it and not to the district. Baldwin II., count of Flanders, who married Elstrud, daughter of Alfred the Great, first fortified it, and made it his chief residence. Before the year 1180 Bruges was the recognized capital of Flanders, and the formality of proclaiming the new counts was always performed on the marché du vendredi, where the railway station is to-day. After 1180 the premier position was assumed by Ghent, but until access by sea was stopped by the silting up of the Zwyn, which was complete by the year 1490, Bruges was the equal in wealth and power of its neighbour. Proof of this is supplied by the marriage festivities in 1430, when Philip the Good, duke of Burgundy, wedded Isabel of Portugal, and founded the famous order of the Golden Fleece out of compliment to the staple industry of Bruges. Bruges was at the height of its prosperity in the 14th century, when it was the northern counterpart of Venice and its Bourse regulated the rate of exchange in Europe.

BRUGSCH, HEINRICH KARL (1827–1894), German Egyptologist, was the son of a Prussian cavalry officer, and was born in the barracks at Berlin, on the 18th of February 1827. He early manifested a great inclination to Egyptian studies, in which, though encouraged by Humboldt, he was almost entirely self-taught. After completing his university course and visiting foreign museums he was sent to Egypt by the Prussian government in 1853, and contracted an intimate friendship with Mariette. On his return he received an appointment in the Berlin museum. In 1860 he was sent to Persia on a special mission under Baron Minutoli, travelled over the country, and after Minutoli’s death discharged the functions of ambassador. In 1864 he was consul at Cairo, in 1868 professor at Gõttingen, and in 1870 director of the school of Egyptology, founded at Cairo by the khedive. From this post he was unceremoniously dismissed in 1879 by the European controllers of the public revenues, determined to economize at all hazards; and French influence prevented his succeeding his friend Mariette at the Bulaq Museum in 1883. He afterwards resided principally in Germany until his death on the 9th of September 1894, but frequently visited Egypt, took part in another official mission to Persia, and organized an Egyptian exhibit at the Philadelphia Exposition in 1876. He had been made a pasha by the khedive in 1881. He published his autobiography in 1894, concluding with a warm panegyric upon British rule in Egypt. Brugsch’s services to Egyptology are most important, particularly in the decipherment of demotic and the making of a vast hieroglyphic-demotic dictionary (1867–1882).

BRÜHL, HEINRICH, (1700–1763), German statesman at the court of Saxony, was born on the 13th of August 1700. He was the son of Johann Moritz von Brühl, a noble who held the office of Oberhofmarschall at the small court of Sachsen-Weissenfels. The father was ruined and compelled to part with his family estate, which passed into the hands of the prince. The son was first placed as page with the dowager duchess of Weissenfels, and was then received at her recommendation into the court of the elector of Saxony as Silberpage on the 16th of April 1719. He rapidly acquired the favour of the elector Frederick Augustus, surnamed the Strong, who had been elected to the throne of Poland in 1697. Brühl, who began as page and chamberlain, was largely employed in procuring money for his profuse master. He made himself useful in muzzling the Saxon states and was successively chief receiver of taxes and minister for the interior in 1731. He was at Warsaw when his master died in 1733, and he secured a hold on the confidence of the electoral prince, Frederick Augustus, who was at Dresden, by laying hands on the papers and jewels of the late ruler and bringing them promptly to his successor. During the whole of the thirty years of the reign of Frederick Augustus II. he was the real inspirer of his master and the practical chief of the Saxon court. He had for a time to put up with the presence of old servants of the electoral house, but after 1738 he was in effect sole minister. The title of prime minister was created for him in 1746, but he was not only a prime minister—he filled all the offices. His titles spread over several lines of print, and he drew the combined pay of the places besides securing huge grants of land. Brühl must therefore be held wholly responsible for the ruinous policy which destroyed the position of Saxony in Germany between 1733 and 1763; for the mistaken ambition which led Frederick Augustus II. to become a candidate for the throne of Poland; for the engagements into which he entered in order to secure the support of the emperor Charles VI.; for the shameless and ill-timed tergiversations of Saxony during the wars of the Austrian Succession; for the intrigues which entangled the electorate in the alliance against Frederick the Great, which led to the Seven Years’ War; and for the waste and want of foresight which left the country utterly unprepared to resist the attack of the king of Prussia. He was not only without political or military capacity, but was so garrulous that he could not keep a secret. His indiscretion was repeatedly responsible for the king of Prussia’s discoveries of the plans laid against him. Nothing could shake the confidence of his master, which survived the ignominious flight into Bohemia, into which he was trapped by Brühl at the time of the battle of Kesseldorf, and all the miseries of the Seven Years’ War. The favourite abused the confidence of his master shamelessly. Not content with the 67,000 talers a month which he drew as salary for his innumerable offices, he was found when an inquiry was held in the next reign to have abstracted more than five million talers of public money for his private use. He left the work of the government offices to be done by his lackeys, whom he did not even supervise. His profusion was boundless. Twelve tailors, it is said, were continually employed in making clothes for him, and he wore a new suit every day. His library of 70,000 volumes was one of his forms of ostentation, and so was his gallery of pictures. He died on the 28th of October 1763, having survived his master only for a few weeks. The new elector, Frederick Christian, dismissed him from office and caused an inquiry to be held into his administration. His fortune was found to amount to a million and a half of talers, and was sequestered but afterwards restored to his family. In 1736 he had been made a count of the Empire and had married the countess Franziska von Kolowrat-Kradowska, a favourite of the wife of Frederick Augustus. Four sons and a daughter survived him.

His youngest son, Hans Moritz von Brühl (d. 1811), was before the Revolution of 1789 a colonel in the French service, and afterwards general inspector of roads in Brandenburg and Pomerania. By his wife Margarethe Schleierweber, the daughter of a French corporal, but renowned for her beauty and intellectual gifts, he was the father of Karl Friedrich Moritz Paul von Brühl (1772–1837), the friend of Goethe, who as intendant-general of the Prussian royal theatres was of some importance in the history of the development of the drama in Germany. In 1830 he was appointed intendant-general of the royal museums.

BRÜHL, a town of Germany, in the Prussian Rhine province, 8 m. S.W. from Cologne on the main railway to Coblenz. Pop. (1900) 5000. Its pleasant situation at the foot of one of the spurs of the Eifel range and the beautiful grounds surrounding the royal palace render it a favourite resort of the inhabitants of Cologne. The palace, in Renaissance style, built in 1728 by Clement Augustus, elector of Cologne (1700–1761), was from 1809 until 1813 in the possession of the French marshal Davout, and in 1842 was restored by King Frederick William IV. of Prussia.