Page:Imperial Dictionary of Universal Biography Volume 1.pdf/587

BER BERTIE,, an English admiral, born in 1758, and died in 1825. The name Bertie was assumed by him after his marriage. He entered the navy in 1773, and served on board the Sea Horse with Nelson and Trowbridge. He distinguished himself in the battle between Keppel and d'Orvilliers (27th July, 1778), and in December, 1779, destroyed two French vessels on the shore of Martinique, without the loss of a single man. In 1782 he commanded the sloop the Duke of Estissac, and gained numerous victories on the coast of America. He took part in the conquest of St. Domingo in 1795. On his return to England he was appointed to the Ardent, and effected numerous improvements in the construction of ships of war. His last service was with Nelson at the bombardment of Copenhagen, where his conduct was warmly eulogized.—J. T.  BERTIN,, a French amatory poet, born in the isle of Bourbon, 1752; died at Saint Domingo in 1790. What established his reputation as a verse-writer, was his "Amours," published in London, 1780. This work, of which, strange to say, La Harpe makes no mention, breathes a good deal of the spirit of Propertius; but it has been censured for the inequality of its style, and occasionally feeble and prosaic versification. He also wrote "Un Voyage en Bourgogne."—J. G.  BERTIN,, a French litterateur, born at Paris about 1760; died 1804 at St. Petersburg. He incurred the displeasure of the directory, and took refuge in Hamburgh in 1799. He was on the point of being delivered up to Buonaparte, when Paul I. of Russia, whom he had celebrated in a poem, interfered, and attached him to the theatre at Petersburg. He wrote several dramatic pieces.—J. G.  BERTIN, a French politician and journalist, born at Paris in 1771; died in the same city 23rd April, 1842. His first essay as a public writer was in a journal called l'Eclair, but he was afterwards better known, in conjunction with his brother, Louis-François Bertin, as one of the founders and a most active manager of the well-known Journal des Debats. Harassed with prosecutions under the imperial regime, he for a time ceased to appear as a public writer, and in 1801 founded a banking-house, and became successively a magistrate and vice-president of the tribunal of commerce. At the Restoration he showed himself a warm supporter of the new government, and in 1815 was appointed first deputy, and soon after general secretary of the minister of police. In 1820 he was again elected deputy, and in 1824 and 1827 he sat as representative of Versailles. In 1829 he was one of the 221 deputies who voted the famous address, which ultimately led to the overthrow of Charles X. After the revolution of 1830, he became an active partisan of the new regime, and was sent by the government in a mission, first to Holland, and then to England. In 1832 he was called to the chamber of peers.—G. M.  BERTIN,, a distinguished French surgeon and anatomist of the last century, was born at Tremblay, near Rennes, on the 21st September, 1712. He practised as a surgeon, first at Rheims, and afterwards in Paris, from which place he went in 1741 to Moldavia as body surgeon to the hospodar. On his return to France in 1744, he became a member of the Academy of Sciences of Paris, and died in February, 1781, at Gohard, near his native town of Rennes. Bertin was an excellent anatomist, as is clearly shown by his "Traité d'Ostéologie," published at Paris in 1754, and in German, at Copenhagen in 1777. He also published at the Hague, in 1748, "Lettres sur le nouveau système de la Voix, et sur les artères lymphatiques," in the former of which he supports Dodart's theory of the voice. The Memoirs of the French academy contain valuable papers from his pen.—W. S. D.  BERTIN,, a French journalist, brother of Bertin de Veaux, born at Paris, 14th December, 1766; died 13th September, 1841. He was at first destined for the church, but, after the outbreak of the Revolution, he devoted himself to the labours of a public journalist, and was successively editor of the Journal Français, and of l'Eclair. After the 18th Brumaire, when many of the journals were suppressed by order of the consuls, and amongst others that of Bertin, he founded, in conjunction with his brother, a new periodical, called the Journal des Debats, which was at first chiefly dedicated to the discussion of literary and artistic subjects, politics being rigorously proscribed. Bertin, though he retained to the last an important pecuniary interest in this journal, soon after ceased to be its ostensible editor; and some articles having appeared in it offensive to the government, the whole property, which had become exceedingly valuable, was in 1811 confiscated to the state. Bertin, however, was reimbursed in 1814; and in 1815, having followed Louis XVIII. into exile, he commenced a publication, entited Le Moniteur de Gand. After the second restoration, he stedfastly adhered to the politics of the government, and the Journal des Debats, which was again revived, became a constant and able apologist of the new dynasty. Bertin was not only an ardent lover of literature and of learned men, but a passionate admirer of the beautiful in the arts, and numbered among his most cherished friends many of the first artists of his time.—G. M.  * BERTIN,, son of the preceding, born at Paris, 1801. He accompanied M. de Chateaubriand to London as his private secretary. Since the death of his father in 1841, he has conducted the Journal des Debats.  BERTIN,, an eminent French painter, was born at Paris in 1667. His father was a sculptor; but dying when Bertin was young, left him to study under Jouvenet and Bon Boullonge. At eighteen, the prodigy gained the great prize at the academy, and was sent to Rome as the king's pensioner. At Rome he was offered an appointment, but a reckless intrigue with a young princess compelled him to fly. In 1703, he was elected a member of the academy; and Louis XIV. and several foreign princes gave him commissions. His diploma picture was "Hercules delivering Prometheus;" for the king he painted "Vertumnus and Pomona;" and for the abbey of St. Germain des Prés his grandest work—"Philip baptizing the Eunuch"—a good Veronese subject. In 1716 he was made professor, and soon after director of the Roman Academy, through the kindness of the duke d'Antin. This favour, however, he refused, remembering the unlucky princess; nor would he attend even to the solicitations of the electors of Bavaria and Mayence; he died in 1736. His drawing and expression were both feeble; but his small pieces are better, and his landscape backgrounds pleasantly treated.—W. T. <section end="587H" /> <section begin="587I" />BERTIN,, a litterateur, born at Donemarie, 1751; died 1819. His works amount to more than one hundred volumes. None of them present anything remarkable except his "System of Stenography." <section end="587I" /> <section begin="587J" />BERTIN,, the son of Exupère Joseph, born at Gohard in 1767, was long on active service with the French armies, but finally settled down as principal surgeon to the Hôpital Cochin in Paris. Besides some good memoirs in the Journal des Médecins, René Bertin published an independent treatise "On the Venereal Disease in new-born infants, pregnant women, and nurses," Paris, 1810; and some other works, one of which relates to the French and English prisoners during the wars of the Republic.—W. S. D. <section end="587J" /> <section begin="587Knop" />BERTINI,, an Italian physician, born at Castel-Fiorentino on the 28th December, 1658, studied at Sienna and Pisa, where he acquired a knowledge of medicine, astronomy, mathematics, languages, and literature, and took his degree of doctor of philosophy and medicine in 1678, when only twenty years of age. He then took up his abode in Florence, where he became acquainted with the most celebrated philosophers of his age and country, such as L. Bellini, Redi, Cinelli, Magliabecchi, &c., and was shortly afterwards appointed to the professorship of the practice of medicine at the hospital of Santa Maria Nuova. His reputation soon extended all over Italy, and in 1722 he was called to Turin, to a consultation upon the illness of the duchess of Savoy. Bertini lived but a short time after his return to Florence from this expedition to Turin. He died in Florence on the 10th December, 1726. The reputation of Bertini does not appear to have extended much beyond the confines of Italy, and the works that he left behind him are entirely of a controversial nature, dictated rather by a wounded self-love, than by any desire for the advancement of science. The earliest in point of date is a "Defence of medicine against the calumnies of the vulgar, and from the oppositions of the learned, in two dialogues," published at Lucca in 1699. In this work he sounded the trumpet of praise in favour of all his colleagues but one (Moneglia), who, feeling himself aggrieved by such a proceeding, attacked the offending pamphlet in no measured terms. Bertini replied in the same style, in a pamphlet entitled, "Reply to the familiar discourse of Terfilo Samio, against the author of the Defence of Medicine," which was published at Lucca in 1700. He wrote several other works of a similar nature, to which it is unnecessary to refer in detail.—W. S. D. <section end="587Knop" />