Page:Imperial Dictionary of Universal Biography Volume 1.pdf/812

BRO at Eton, and afterwards at St. John's, Cambridge. Broome translated some books of the Iliad into prose, which were printed in the book called Ozell's Homer. He was soon afterwards employed by Pope in making extracts from Eustathius for the notes to his translation of the Iliad; and when he undertook the Odyssey, he abridged his labours by getting Broome and Fenton to translate a considerable part of it. Broome translated the second, sixth, eighth, eleventh, twelfth, sixteenth, eighteenth, and twenty-third books: he wrote all the notes.

The alliance produced no cordiality. In the Art of Sinking, Broome is reckoned as one of "the parrots who repeat another's words in such a hoarse odd tone as makes them seem their own;" and in the Dunciad we have the couplet—

Broome was rector of Starston in Suffolk, where he married a wealthy widow. In 1728 he became doctor of laws. He afterwards obtained some crown livings. In 1739 he published a collection of poems, among which was a part of the eleventh book of the Iliad in what he calls the style of Milton. It is curious that both he and Fenton, Pope's other assistant in the Odyssey, should both have left specimens of translations of the Iliad into blank verse, as if they had proposed to themselves the task reserved for Cowper.—J. A., D.  BROSAMER, or, an old German engraver, one of the "little masters;" born at Fulda about 1506. He worked on wood and copper in the style of Aldegrever. He executed portraits of Luther and Paracelsus, and seven sheets of a great procession by christian and pagan heroes on horseback.—W. T.  * BRORSEN, an astronomical observer of much merit at Kiel. We owe him the discovery of several comets, especially the periodical one whose period round the sun is 5581 years.  BROSCHI, .—See.  BROSSES,, born at Dijon in 1709, and died at Paris in 1777. He was a magistrate at Dijon, and, in addition to the performance of his public duties, cultivated letters with great zeal. He became president of the parliament of Dijon, and in 1746 was nominated a member of the Academy of Inscriptions. He was the first person to write a description of the ruins of Herculaneum. He published in 1760 a dissertation, in which he sought to identify the modern African fetichism with the old Egyptian religions. He had before this, at the suggestion of Buffon, published "L'Histoire des Navigations aux terres Australes," and he has the honour of being the first to use the names of Australasia and Polynesia. He wrote a treatise "On the Mechanism of Language," a work of some character. A work on which he expended considerable time, was the "Histoire du Septième Siècle de la République Romaine," in three volumes. It is a piece of skilful mosaic, in which such fragments as he found useful to his purpose are worked into a consistent whole. De Brosses died before he had completed his work; and a fourth volume which he had left in manuscript, containing the texts of Sallust and other writers whom he relied on as authorities, has never been printed. He printed a good many memoires in the Academy of Inscriptions and in the Dictionnaire Encyclopédique. "Letters from Italy, Historical and Critical," have been published under his name. The book is of doubtful authenticity.—J. A., D.  BROSSETTE,, lord of Varennes-Rappetour, a learned Frenchman, born at Lyons in 1671; died in 1743. He published, with historical illustrations, the works of Regnier and Boileau, with the latter of whom he maintained a long correspondence.  BROTERO,, a celebrated Portuguese botanist, was born at Santo-Antâo de Tojah, near Lisbon, on 25th November, 1744, and died on 4th August, 1828. He was deprived in early life of his parents, and his education was intrusted to a paternal uncle, and his maternal grandfather. He studied in a college founded by the monks of Mafra. He appears to have been in very poor circumstances, and in 1763 we find him engaged as a singer in the cathedral at Lisbon. He devoted himself, however, with ardour to his studies, and acquired a good knowledge of Latin and Greek. He was offered the chair of Greek at Bahia in Brazil, but he declined it. He went to Paris, and remained there for twelve years. There he took the name of Brotero, derived from the Greek words meaning mortal love. In Paris he became acquainted with Daubenton, Vicq d'Azyr, Brisson, Laurent de Jussieu, Condorcet, Cuvier, and Lamarck. He prosecuted natural history studies, and particularly gave his attention to botany—a science in which he afterwards attained great celebrity. At the time of the French revolution he had to leave Paris, and in 1790 he returned to Portugal. In 1791 he was appointed to the chair of botany and agriculture at Coimbra. Subsequently he became director of the royal museum and the botanic garden at Lisbon. Brotero's scientific studies were interrupted by the French invasion, and he had to take refuge in a faubourg of Lisbon, where he might have died from want had it not been for the kind intervention of Geoffrey St. Hilaire, who got the French government to give assistance. In 1811 he became professor in the university of Lisbon, and he continued to give regular courses of lectures on botany and natural history for more than twenty years. In 1821 he was elected a member of cortes for the province of Estramadura, but he did not long retain this appointment. He retired finally from active life, and quietly pursued his natural history studies. He died at Acolenade-Belem, at the age of eighty-four. Among his published works are the following—"Account of the rare plants of Spain, as well as a Flora Lusitanica;" "A Botanical Compendium; "and Principles of Philosophical Agriculture." He also contributed papers to the Linnæan Society, and to the Academy of Sciences of Lisbon.—J. H. B.  BROTIER,, the nephew of Gabriel, born at Taunay in 1751. Before the French revolution he took orders; but like many ecclesiastics of that age, he chiefly applied his mind to mathematics, botany, and literature. In 1791 he was one of the principal conductors of the Journal Genéral de France. A royalist by conviction, he plotted against the republic, and after many adventures was transported to Cayenne, where he died a victim to the climate in his sixty-ninth year. He published a new edition of the Theatre of the Greeks in 1783, which contains his own translation of Aristophanes.—T. J. <section end="812H" /> <section begin="812Zcontin" />BROUGHAM,, Lord, was born in Edinburgh on the 19th September, 1778. He was the eldest son of Henry Brougham, Esq., of Brougham Hall, and Eleanor Syme, only child of the Rev. James Syme, by Mary, sister of Dr. Robertson the historian. He was educated at the High school of Edinburgh along with Sir Walter Scott and Lord Jeffrey, and in 1793 he was sent to the university of Edinburgh, where he pursued his studies under Dugald Stewart, Professor Robison, Dr. Black, and Professor Playfair, then professors of moral philosophy, natural philosophy, chemistry, and mathematics, in that institution. Although he took a high place in all the classes which he attended, yet mathematics and natural philosophy particularly fixed his attention. In the year 1795, when he was only seventeen years of age, he devoted himself to the study of the inflexion, reflexion, and colours of light, and communicated the results which he obtained to the Royal Society of London, in a paper entitled "Experiments and Observations on the Inflexion, Reflexion, and Colours of Light" (Phil. Trans., 1796, pp. 227-277). In the following year he communicated another paper to the society, entitled "Farther Experiments and Observations on the Affections and Properties of Light" (Phil. Trans., 1797, pp. 352-385); and in 1798 he transmitted to the same body a mathematical paper, entitled "General Theorems, chiefly Porisms" (Phil. Trans., 1798, pp. 378-397). The two papers on light evince much ingenuity and knowledge of optics, and were sufficiently important to call forth a discussion of some of the more important points by Professor Prévost of Geneva (Phil. Trans., 1798, pp. 311-332); but the key which Dr. Thomas Young subsequently discovered to the class of phenomena discussed by Mr. Brougham and Professor Prévost, was required to determine the laws that regulate the influence which bodies exercise upon the light which passes by them. In the year 1800 Mr. Brougham was admitted to the Scottish bar, and was then one of the members of the Speculative Society, where so many distinguished Scotsmen acquired the habit of public speaking. When the Edinburgh Review was established in 1802, Mr. Brougham became one of its most active contributors, and exhibited a variety and extent of knowledge, seldom possessed by the same individual. These qualities were equally conspicuous in his "Inquiry into the Colonial Policy of the European Powers," a work which appeared in Edinburgh in 1803, and made him favourably known in the political world. In 1807, when he was pleading a case of appeal in the house of lords, he resolved to <section end="812Zcontin" />