Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 3.djvu/197

Rh roushi, with a number of his principal adherents, perished in the city of Zendian after an obstinate defence (May 1850). Ere this event had taken place, the Government had proceeded to the execution of the Bâb himself, who had now been confined for some time in the fortress of Cherigh, where he is said to have greatly impressed his gaolers by his patience and dignity. He was removed to Tabriz, and all attempts to induce him to retract having failed, he was suspended from the summit of a wall by the armpits in view of the people, along with one of his disciples; the object of this public exposure being to leave no doubt of the reality of his death. A company of soldiers discharged their muskets at the martyrs; but although the disciple was killed on the spot, the bullets merely cut the cords by which the Bâb himself was suspended, and he fell to the ground unhurt. With more presence of mind on his part, this apparently miraculous deliverance might have provoked a popular insurrection in his favour; but, bewildered by the fall, instead of invoking the people, he took refuge in a guard-house, where he was promptly despatched. His death was far from discouraging his followers, who recognised as his successor Mirza Yahya, a youth of noble birth. Yahya established himself at Baghdad, where he is or was recently still residing. No new event of importance occurred until 1852, when an attempt of several Babis to assassinate the Shah led to a ferocious persecution, in which the beautiful Gourred-Oul-Ayn perished with many others. In the opinion of M. Gobineau, this persecution has rather tended to encourage than to repress the sect, which is believed to be widely diffused in Persia at this moment, under the mask of conformity to the established creed. It can only be regarded as an individual symptom of a constantly recurring phenomenon—the essential incompatibility between the religious conceptions of Aryan and Semitic races. The doctrines of Bâbism are contained in an Arabic treatise, entitled Biyan (the Exposition), written by the Bâb himself. It is essentially a system of Pantheism, with additions from Gnostic, Cabbalistic, and even Buddhistic sources. All individual existence is regarded as an emanation from the Supreme Deity, by whom it will ultimately be reabsorbed. Great importance is attached to the number seven, being that of the attributes supposed to be displayed in the act of creation, and to the number nineteen, which mystically expresses the name of the Deity himself, and is, moreover, the sum of the prophets among whom the latest incarnation of the divine nature is conceived to be distributed in the present dispensation. Of these the Bâb is chief, but the other eighteen are regarded as no less participators in the divine nature. This sacred college cannot become extinct until the last judgment; the death of any of its members being immediately followed by a reincarnation, as in the case of the Grand Lama. The prophetic character of Moses, Christ, and Mahomet is acknowledged, but they are considered as mere precursors of the Bâb. The morality of the sect is pure and cheerful, and it manifests an important advance upon all previous Oriental systems in its treatment of woman. Polygamy and concubinage are forbidden, the veil is disused, and the equality of the sexes so thoroughly recognised that one at least of the nineteen sovereign prophets must always be a female. The other chief precepts of Bâbism inculcate hospitality, charity, and generous living, tempered by abstinence from intoxicating liquors and drugs. Asceticism is entirely discountenanced, and mendicancy, being regarded as a form of it, is strictly prohibited. 1em  BABOON, the popular name of s belonging to the Cynocephalus of the Simiadæ. See, vol. ii. p. 152.  BABRIUS, or, or (the original name being possibly Oriental), a Greek fabulist, who wrote, according to Sir G. C. Lewis, shortly before the Augustan age, though dates have been assigned to him from 250 B.C. to 250 A.D. One of his editors, Boissonade, believes that he was a Roman. His name occurs in some of the old grammarians, and a few fragments were ascribed to him. The first critic who made him more than a mere name, was Bentley in his Dissertation on the Fables of Æsop. In a careful examination of these prose Æsopian fables, which had been handed down in various collections from the time of Maximus Planudes, Bentley discovered traces of versification, and was able to extract a number of verses which he assigned to Babrius. Tyrwhitt followed up the researches of Bentley, and for some time the efforts of scholars were directed towards reconstructing the metrical original of the prose fables. In 1842, however, M. Mynas, a Greek, the discoverer of the Philosophoumena of Hippolytus, came upon a MS. of Babrius in the convent of St Laura on Mount Athos. This MS. contained 123 fables out of the supposed original number, 16O. The fables are written in choliambic, i.e., limping or imperfect iambic verse, having a spondee as the last foot, a metre originally appropriated to satire. The style is extremely good, the expression being terse, pointed, and elegant, and the construction of the stories is fully equal to that in the prose versions. The MS. was first published by Boissonade in 1844; afterwards by Lachmann, 1845; by Orelli and Baiter, 1845; by Sir George Cornewall Lewis, 1846; and by Schneidewin, 1853. The genuineness of this collection of the fables was generally admitted by scholars. In 1857 Mynas professed to have discovered at Mount Athos another part containing 94 fables and a proœmium. According to his statement, the monks, who had been willing to sell the MS. containing the first part for a sufficient price, refused altogether to part with the second. He therefore made a copy which was sold to the British Museum, and was published in 1859 by Sir G. C. Lewis. But these fables only purport to be Babrius spoiled,, after having passed through the hands of a &quot;diasceuast,&quot; that is, some late writer who has turned his verses into barbarous Greek and wretched metre. In a Latin dissertation, published in 1861, Professor Conington carefully examined this part, arriving at the conclusion that the fables were metrical versions of the prose stories, executed by some forger who must have been acquainted with Lachmann's conjectures on fragments formerly known. Cobet expresses a similar opinion, but in stronger terms. It is not impossible that the forger was Mynas himself. Sir G. C. Lewis, however, holds that the similarity between the fables and these existing prose versions appears such as might have been produced not by a forger copying from a prose writer, but rather by two grammarians recasting the same work of Babrius. The standard edition of Babrius is that of Sir. G. C. Lewis; there is a faithful translation in verse by Davies. For Conington's dissertation see his Miscellaneous Writings, vol. ii. pp. 460-491.