chief centre of the Swiss wood-carving industry) and, on the west, Bönigen (1515 inhabitants), close to Interlaken. Its length is about 9 m., its width 112 m., and its maximum depth 856 ft., while its area is 1112 sq. m., and the surface is 1857 ft. above the sea-level. On the south shore are the Giessbach Falls and the hamlet of Iseltwald. On the north shore are a few small villages. The character of the lake is gloomy and sad as compared with its neighbour, that of Thun. Its chief affluent is the Lütschine (flowing from the valleys of Grindelwald and Lauterbrunnen). The first steamer was placed on the lake in 1839. (W. A. B. C.)
BRIERLEY, BENJAMIN (1825–1896), English weaver and writer in Lancashire dialect, was born near Manchester, the son of humble parents, and started life in a textile factory, educating himself in his spare time. At about the age of thirty he began to contribute articles to local papers, and the republication of some of his sketches of Lancashire character in A Summer Day in Daisy Nook (1859) attracted attention. In 1863 he definitely took to journalism and literature as his work, publishing in 1863 his Chronicles of Waverlow, and in 1864 a long story called The Layrock of Langley Side (afterwards dramatized), followed by others. He started in 1869 Ben Brierley’s Journal, a weekly, which continued till 1891, and he gave public readings from his own writings, visiting America in 1880 and 1884. His various Ab-o'-th'-Yate sketches (about America, London, &c.), and his pictures of Lancashire common life were very popular, and were collected after his death. In 1884 he lost his savings by the failure of a building society, and a fund was raised for his support. He died on the 18th of January 1896, and two years later a statue was erected to him in Queen’s Park, Manchester.
BRIERLY, SIR OSWALD WALTERS (1817–1894), English marine painter, who came of an old Cheshire family, was born at Chester. He entered Sass’s art-school in London, and after studying naval architecture at Plymouth he exhibited some drawings of ships at the Royal Academy in 1839. He had a passion for the sea, and in 1841 started round the world with Benjamin Boyd (1796–1851), afterwards well known as a great Australian squatter, in the latter’s ship “Wanderer,” and having got to New South Wales, made his home at Auckland for ten years. Brierly Point is called after him. He added to his sea experiences by voyages on H.M.S. “Rattlesnake” in 1848, and with Sir Henry Keppel on the “Meander” in 1850; he returned to England in 1851 on this ship, and illustrated Keppel’s book about his cruise (1853). He was again with Keppel during the Crimean War, and published in 1855 a series of lithographs illustrating “The English and French fleets in the Baltic.” He was now taken up by Queen Victoria and other members of the royal family, and was attached to the suites of the duke of Edinburgh and the prince of Wales on their tours by sea, the results being seen in further marine pictures by him; and in 1874 he was made marine-painter to the queen. He exhibited at the Academy, but more largely at the Royal Water-colour Society, his more important works including the historical pictures, “The Retreat of the Spanish Armada” (1871) and “The Loss of the Revenge” (1877). In 1885 he was knighted, and he died on the 14th of December 1894. He was twice married and had an active and prosperous life, but was no great artist; his best pictures are at Melbourne and Sydney.
BRIEUX, EUGÈNE (1858–), French dramatist, was born in Paris of poor parents on the 19th of January 1858. A one-act play, Bernard Palissy, written in collaboration with M. Gaston Salandri, was produced in 1879, but he had to wait eleven years before he obtained another hearing, his Ménage d’ artistes being produced by Antoine at the Théâtre Libre in 1890. His plays are essentially didactic, being aimed at some weakness or iniquity of the social system. Blanchette (1892) pointed out the evil results of education of girls of the working classes; M. de Réboval (1892) was directed against pharisaism; L’Engrenage (1894) against corruption in politics; Les Bienfaiteurs (1896) against the frivolity of fashionable charity; and L’Évasion (1896) satirized an indiscriminate belief in the doctrine of heredity. Les Trois Filles de M. Dupont (1897) is a powerful, somewhat brutal, study of the miseries imposed on poor middle-class girls by the French system of dowry; Le Résultat des courses (1898) shows the evil results of betting among the Parisian workmen; La Robe rouge (1900) was directed against the injustices of the law; Les Remplaçantes (1901) against the practice of putting children out to nurse. Les Avariés (1901), forbidden by the censor, on account of its medical details, was read privately by the author at the Théâtre Antoine; and Petite amie (1902) describes the life of a Parisian shop-girl. Later plays are La Couvée (1903, acted privately at Rouen in 1893), Maternité (1904), La Déserteuse (1904), in collaboration with M. Jean Sigaux, and Les Hannetons, a comedy in three acts (1906).
BRIGADE (Fr. and Ger. brigade, Ital. brigata, Span. brigada; the English use of the word dates from the early 17th century), a unit in military organization commanded by a major-general, brigadier-general or colonel, and composed of two or more regiments of infantry, cavalry or artillery. The British infantry brigade consists as a rule of four battalions (or about 4000 bayonets) with supply, transport and medical units attached; the cavalry brigade of two or three regiments of cavalry. An artillery “brigade” (field, horse, and heavy) is in Great Britain a smaller unit, forming a lieut.-colonel’s command and consisting of two or three batteries. (See Army, Artillery, Infantry, and Cavalry.) The staff of an infantry or cavalry brigade usually consists of the brigadier commanding, his aide-de-camp, and the brigade-major, a staff officer whose duties are intermediate between those of an adjutant and those of a general staff officer.
BRIGANDAGE. The brigand is supposed to derive his name from the O. Fr. brigan, which is a form of the Ital. brigante, an irregular or partisan soldier. There can be no doubt as to the origin of the word “bandit,” which has the same meaning. In Italy, which is not unjustly considered the home of the most accomplished European brigands, a bandito was a man declared outlaw by proclamation, or bando, called in Scotland “a decree of horning” because it was delivered by a blast of a horn at the town cross. The brigand, therefore, is the outlaw who conducts warfare after the manner of an irregular or partisan soldier by skirmishes and surprises, who makes the war support itself by plunder, by extorting blackmail, by capturing prisoners and holding them to ransom, who enforces his demands by violence, and kills the prisoners who cannot pay. In certain conditions the brigand has not been a mere malefactor. “It is you who are the thieves”—“I Ladroni, siete voi,”—was the defence of the Calabrian who was tried as a brigand by a French court-martial during the reign of Murat in Naples. Brigandage may be, and not infrequently has been, the last resource of a people subject to invasion. The Calabrians who fought for Ferdinand of Naples, and the Spanish irregular levies, which maintained the national resistance against the French from 1808 to 1814, were called brigands by their enemies. In the Balkan peninsula, under Turkish rule, the brigands (called klephts by the Greeks and hayduks or haydutzi by the Slavs) had some claim to believe themselves the representatives of their people against oppressors. The only approach to an attempt to maintain order was the permission given to part of the population to carry arms in order to repress the klephts. They were hence called “armatoli.” As a matter of fact the armatole were rather the allies than the enemies of the klephts. The invader who reduces a nation to anarchy, and then suffers from the disorder he creates, always calls his opponents brigands. It is a natural consequence of such a war, but a very disastrous one, for the people who have to have recourse to these methods of defence, that the brigand acquires some measure of honourable prestige from his temporary association with patriotism and honest men. The patriot band attracts the brigand proper, who is not averse to continue his old courses under an honourable pretext. “Viva Fernando y vamos robando” (Long life to Ferdinand, and let us go robbing) has been said by not unfair critics to have been the maxim of many Spanish guerrilleros. Italy and Spain suffered for a long time from the disorder developed out of the popular resistance to the French. Numbers of the guerrilleros of both countries, who in normal conditions might have been honest, had acquired a preference
