manners and customs of the Netherlands,[1] we find the following allusion:—“The diversions of the Dutch differ not much from those of the English, who seem to have borrowed from them the neatness of their drinking booths, skittle and other grounds . . . which form the amusements of the middle ranks, not to mention their hand-organs and other musical inventions.” An illustration of the hand-organ of that period is given in Knight’s London[2] being one of a collection of street views published by Dayes in 1789. In a description of Bartholomew Fair, as held at the beginning of the 18th century, is a further reference to the Dutch origin of the barrel-organ:—“A band at the west-end of the town, well known for playing on winter evenings before Spring Garden Coffee House, opposite Wigley’s great exhibition room, consisted of a double drum, a Dutch organ, the tambourine, violin, pipes and the Turkish jingle used in the army. This band was generally hired at one of the booths of the fair.”[3] Mr Thomas Brown relates that one Mr Stephens, a Poultry author, proposed to parliament for any one that should presume to keep an organ in a Publick House to be fined £20 and made incapable of being an ale-draper for the future.[4] In 1737 Horace Walpole writes[5]:—“I am now in pursuit of getting the finest piece of music that ever was heard; it is a thing that will play eight tunes. Handel and all the great musicians say that it is beyond anything they can do, and this may be performed by the most ignorant person, and when you are weary of those eight tunes, you may have them changed for any other that you like.” The organ was put in a lottery and fetched £1000.
There was a very small barrel-organ in use during the 18th and 19th centuries, known as the bird-organ (Fr. serinette, turlutaine, merline). One of these now in the collection of the Brussels Conservatoire is described by V. C. Mahillon.[6] The instrument is in the form of a book, on the back of which is the title “Le chant des oiseaux, Tome vi.” There are ten pewter stopped pipes giving the scale of G with the addition of F♭ and A two octaves higher. The whole instrument measures approximately 8 ✕ 512 ✕ 214 in. and plays eight tunes. Mozart wrote an Andante[7] for a small barrel-organ.
For an illustration of the construction of the barrel-organ during the 18th century, consult P. M. D. J. Engramelle, La Tonotechnie ou l’art de noter les cylindres et tout ce qui est susceptible de notage dans les instruments de concerts méchaniques (Paris, 1775), with engravings (not in the British Museum); and for a clear diagram of the modern instrument the article on “Automatic Appliances connected with Music,” by Dr. E. J. Hopkins, in Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians, vol. i. (1904), p. 134. (K. S.)
BARREN ISLAND, a volcanic island in the Bay of Bengal. It has an irregularly circular form of about 2 m. in diameter, composed of an outer rim rising to a height of from 700 to 1000 ft., with a central cone the altitude of which is 1015 ft. This cone rises from a depth of 800 fathoms below the sea. It was active between 1789 and 1832, but has since been dormant.
BARRÈS, MAURICE (1862–), French novelist and politician, was born at Charmes (Vosges) on the 22nd of September 1862; he was educated at the lycée of Nancy, and in 1883 went to Paris to continue his legal studies. He was already a contributor to the monthly periodical, Jeune France, and he now issued a periodical of his own, Les Taches d’encre, which survived for a few months only. After four years of journalism he went to Italy, where he wrote Sous l’œil des barbares (1888), the first volume of a trilogie du moi, completed by Un Homme libre (1889), and Le Jardin de Bérénice (1891). He divided the world into moi and the barbarians, the latter including all those antipathetic to the writer’s individuality. These apologies for individualism were supplemented by L’Ennemi des lois (1892), and an admirable volume of impressions of travel, Du sang, de la volupté et de la mort (1893). His early books are written in an elaborate style and are often very obscure. Barrès carried his theory of individualism into politics as an ardent partisan of General Boulanger. He directed a Boulangist paper at Nancy, and was elected deputy in 1889, retaining his seat in the legislature until 1893. His play, Une Journée parlementaire, was produced at the Comédie Française in 1894. In 1897 he began his trilogy, Le Roman de l’énergie nationale, with the publication of Les Déracinés. The series is a plea for local patriotism, and for the preservation of the distinctive qualities of the old French provinces. The first narrates the adventures of seven young Lorrainers, who set out to conquer fortune in Paris. Six of them survive in the second novel of the trilogy, L’Appel au soldat (1900), which gives the history of Boulangism; the sequel, Leurs figures (1902), deals with the Panama scandals. Later works are:—Scènes et doctrines du nationalisme (1902); Les Amitiés françaises (1903), in which he urges the inculcation of patriotism by the early study of national history; Ce que j’ai vu à Rennes (1904); Au service de l’Allemagne (1905), the experiences of an Alsatian conscript in a German regiment; Le Voyage de Sparte (1906). M. Barrès was admitted to the French Academy in 1906.
See also R. Doumic, Les Jeunes (1896); J. Lionnet, L’Évolution des idees (1903); Anatole France, La Vie littéraire (4th series, 1892).
BARRETT, LAWRENCE (1838–1891), American actor, was born of Irish parents in Paterson, New Jersey, on the 4th of April 1838. His family name was Brannigan. He made his first stage appearance at Detroit as Murad in The French Spy in 1853. In December 1856 he made his first New York appearance at the Chambers Street theatre as Sir Thomas Clifford in The Hunchback. In 1858 he was in the stock company at the Boston Museum. He served with distinction in the Civil War as captain in the 28th Massachusetts infantry regiment. From 1867 to 1870, with John McCullough, he managed the California theatre, San Francisco. Among his many and varied parts may be mentioned Hamlet, Lear, Macbeth, Shylock, Richard III., Wolsey, Benedick, Richelieu, David Garrick, Hernani, Alfred Evelyn, Lanciotto in George Henry Boker’s (1823–1890) Francesca da Rimini, and James Harebell in The Man o’ Airlie. He played Othello to Booth’s Iago and Cassius to his Brutus. He acted in London in 1867, 1881, 1883 and 1884, his Richelieu in Bulwer Lytton’s drama being considered his best part. He wrote a life of Edwin Forrest in the American Actors Series (Boston, 1881), and an admirable sketch of Edwin Booth in Edwin Booth and his Contemporaries (Boston, 1886). He died on the 20th of March 1891.
BARRETT, LUCAS (1837–1862), English naturalist and geologist, was born in London on the 14th of November 1837, and educated at University College school and at Ebersdorf. In 1855 he accompanied R. McAndrew on a dredging excursion from the Shetlands to Norway and beyond the Arctic Circle; and subsequently made other cruises to Greenland and to the coast of Spain. These expeditions laid the foundations of an extensive knowledge of the distribution of marine life. In 1855 he was engaged by Sedgwick to assist in the Woodwardian Museum at Cambridge, and during the following three years he aided the professor by delivering lectures. He discovered bones of birds in the Cambridge Greensand, and he also prepared a geological map of Cambridge on the one-inch Ordnance map. In 1859, when twenty-two years of age, he was appointed director of the Geological Survey of Jamaica. He there determined the Cretaceous age of certain rocks which contained Hippurites, the new genus Barrettia being named after him by S. P. Woodward; he also obtained many fossils from the Miocene and newer strata. He was drowned at the early age of twenty-five, on the 18th of December 1862, while investigating the sea-bottom off Kingston, Jamaica.
Obituary by S. P. Woodward in Geologist (Feb. 1863), p. 60.
BARRETT, WILSON (1846–1904), English actor, manager and playwright, was born in Essex on the 18th of February 1846, the
- ↑ Jedediah Morse American Geography, part ii. p. 334 (Boston, Mass., 1796).
- ↑ Knight’s London, vol. i. p. 144.
- ↑ Hone’s Every Day Book, i. p. 1248.
- ↑ Collection of all the Dialogues written by Mr Thomas Brown (London, 1704), p. 297.
- ↑ Hone’s Every Day Book, ii. pp. 1452-1453.
- ↑ See Catalogue descriptif (Ghent, 1880), Nos. 461 and 462.
- ↑ Breitkopf and Härtel’s Critically revised edition of Mozart’s Works, series x. no. 10.
