Page:Imperial Dictionary of Universal Biography Volume 1.pdf/797

BRI engagement with superior numbers, he was taken prisoner. He was executed as a traitor in 1350.—, duke of Athenes, constable of France under John II., killed at the battle of Poitiers in 1356. He was brought up at the court of Robert, king of Naples, who in 1326 sent him to Florence under the title of vicar of the duke of Calabria. Here he so ingratiated himself with the people, that, on the breaking out of the war with the Pisans in 1342, they raised him to the command of the city. But his popularity was of short duration; an insurrection of the populace in 1343 obliged him to take refuge in France.—J. S., G.  BRIERE DE BOISMONT, A., a French physician, was born at Rouen about the year 1796, and took his degree of doctor at Paris in 1825. He devoted much attention to mental diseases and the nerves, and wrote an elementary work on botany, in which he particularly considers plants in their relation to medicine and in their economical uses. He was aided in this work by Pettier of Rouen.—J. H. B.  BRIELE,, presided over the Jewish congregation of Mantua, in the early part of the eighteenth century. The fame of his talmudical "Responses" spread all over Italy, says Azulai (Vaad, part 2): he has also written on grammar, and he took an active part in the controversy against Nehemiah Chayún, the propagator of Shabbatai-Zebi's cabbalistical doctrines (Wolf, v. 3, No. 702). Rossi possessed several MSS. by Briele on the Jewish-Christian controversy—an evidence of the extensive range of Rabbi Briele's studies.—T. T.  BRIFAUT,, born at Dijon in 1781. Brifaut was one of those writers whose works, having at one time enjoyed popularity, occasioned by chiming in with a fleeting taste, or because of particular circumstances, are only referred to by after-generations as historically illustrative of the incidents of former days. Because the jealous censors of Napoleon interfered in 1807 with the representation of Brifaut's tragedy of "Lady Jane Grey," the public hastened to applaud it, when produced upon the return of the Bourbons in 1814, and gave a triumph at the same time to the sonorous versification of another tragedy, "Ninus." Elected a member of the academy in 1826, his position kept his name alive, while his agreeable manners insured him a welcome place in society. He died at Paris in 1857.—J. F. C.  BRIGANTI,, an Italian botanist, wrote a work on the sexual system of Linnæus, which was published at Naples in 1804; also treatises on a new species of pimpinella, on the fungi, and the rarer plants of the kingdom of Naples, and on the use of the bark of Loranthus europæus.—J. H. B.  BRIGGS,, one of the greatest mathematicians of the seventeenth century, was born at Warley Wood, near Halifax, Yorkshire, about the year 1560. He studied at St. John's college, Cambridge, became M.A. in 1585, and in 1596 was chosen the first reader in geometry at Gresham college, London. In 1609 he attracted the notice of Dr. James Usher, afterwards archbishop of Armagh, and they became intimate friends. The question of a northwest passage through the straits of North America, began now to excite attention, and he wrote upon it with much skill and discrimination. Having lectured at Gresham college with success for twenty-three years, he was invited by Sir Henry Savile to accept his lecture on geometry at Oxford, with a better stipend. He removed to Oxford in 1619, and was incorporated as M.A., Oxon., in the same year. In 1620 he published in London the six first books of Euclid, restored according to the old MSS., with Fred. Commandine's version corrected. He did not give his name in this edition. In 1624 he issued his "Arithmetica Logarithmica," London, fol. He died at Merton college, Jan. 26, 1630-31.—T. J.  BRIGGS,, a celebrated English physician, was born at Norwich about 1650. He studied at Cambridge, and afterwards travelled into France, where he attended the lectures of Vienssens at Montpellier, and on his return to England in 1676, published a work on ophthalmic surgery, entitled "Ophthalmo" graphia," &c. In the following year, 1677, he took his doctor's degree, was admitted into the College of Physicians, and elected a fellow of the Royal Society. In 1683 he became one of the physicians of St. Thomas' hospital, and after the revolution of 1688 was appointed physician-in-ordinary to William III. He died at Town-Malling in Kent in 1704. The structure of the eye, and the diseases to which that delicate organ is subject, constituted his principal study, he inserted a paper on the theory of vision in the Philosophical Transactions, and Sir Isaac Newton corresponded with him, and esteemed him an authority in all matters connected with the visual organs. Besides the above, Briggs had a second paper in the Philosophical Transactions, and before his death he had announced other works on the eye, never published.—W. S. D.  * BRIGHT,, a democratic politician of note, was born on the 16th of November, 1811, at Greenbank, in the immediate vicinity of Rochdale, still the seat of the manufacturing operations of the firm in which he is a partner. His father, who died at an advanced age, and in possession of considerable wealth, six or seven years ago, had raised himself from the ranks to the position of an opulent master cotton-spinner, and enjoyed, in his own locality, a well-earned reputation for shrewdness and energy. Mr. Bright was the second of ten children, the eldest of whom died young, and in earlier years his own feeble health was a source of constant anxiety to his parents. He received his first education at a school in Rochdale, whence he was removed to one at Ackworth in Yorkshire, supported by the Society of Friends, to which his parents belonged, and of which Mr. Bright himself is still ostensibly a member. After a further removal to York, his health being still found unsatisfactory, he was placed under the charge of a tutor at Newton in Bolland, and, invigorated by rambles upon its breezy uplands, he returned home to take a part in his father's manufacturing industry, and to be initiated into the mysteries of buying cotton, and selling cotton-yarn on Manchester 'Change, operations which, in later years, he has allowed to devolve on younger brothers. Mr. Bright's first appearance as a politician, dates from the local agitation which preceded and accompanied the reform bill of 1831-32. Rochdale was one of the populous boroughs, until then unrepresented, to which the reform bill proposed to assign the right to return a member to parliament. Mr. Bright's voice was of course heard on the popular side, but he was then only a youth of twenty, and beyond the fact that he did address his townsmen in favour of the reform bill, no information has been preserved of his first appearance in the political arena. It is recorded, however, that when, two years later, he and some other young townsmen resolved to hold a meeting for the discussion of the temperance question (Mr. Bright has been for many years a teetotaller), they selected, for the scene of the discussion, a hamlet some miles from Rochdale, so modest was their estimate of their own powers, so unpopular the theme of debate, and so great their fear of ridicule!

The time was, however, at hand, when Mr. Bright was to become first locally, and then nationally prominent. In 1835 he made a tour on the continent and to Palestine. It was the year of Mr. Cobden's continental travels, which resulted in the pamphlets by a Manchester Manufacturer, and the first acquaintance formed by Mr. Cobden with the name of his future fellow-labourer—personally they did not then meet—was at Athens, which Mr. Bright had quitted before the arrival of Mr. Cobden. On his return home, Mr. Bright began to lecture at a literary institution in Rochdale, which he had helped to found. His first subjects were his recent experiences of travel, and thence, by an easy transition, he passed to lectures on subjects connected with industrialism and political economy. It was about this time, too, that he threw himself into one of those violent church-rate contests, for which Rochdale had long been celebrated, and replaced the usual passive resistance of his sect by an active and energetic opposition. The name of "John Bright" was now well-known as that of a sturdy and combative Rochdale radical, when, suddenly, a question arose which led to his exchanging a local for a general notoriety. The Manchester Anti-corn-law association was formed in the autumn of 1838, and Mr. Bright's name appears in the list of its first committee. Early in 1839 this purely local association became the famous Anti-corn-law league; and in the course of the same year Mr. Cobden paid a missionary visit to Rochdale. It was on this occasion that the two free-trade leaders first made each other's personal acquaintance, and Mr. Cobden was so struck by the force and fire of Mr. Bright's oratory, that he insisted on pressing him into the service of the league, of which Mr. Bright became, before long, a most successful and an indispensable champion. Mr. Cobden's lucid and logical advocacy of free-trade was supplemented by the much more vigorous and impassioned rhetoric of Mr. Bright. The calmer friends of the cause might be startled, and its enemies be shocked by the <section end="797Zcontin" />