profitable livelihood, and Burke at once fell in with the plan. The two men inveigled obscure travellers to Hare’s or some other lodging-house, made them drunk and then suffocated them, taking care to leave no marks of violence. The bodies were sold to Dr Knox for prices averaging from £8 to £14. At least fifteen victims had been disposed of in this way when the suspicions of the police were aroused, and Burke and Hare were arrested. The latter turned king’s evidence, and Burke was found guilty and hanged at Edinburgh on the 28th of January 1829. Hare found it impossible, in view of the strong popular feeling, to remain in Scotland. He is believed to have died in England under an assumed name. From Burke’s method of killing his victims has come the verb “to burke,” meaning to suffocate, strangle or suppress secretly, or to kill with the object of selling the body for the purposes of dissection.
See George Macgregor, History of Burke and Hare and of the Resurrectionist Times (Glasgow, 1884).
BURLAMAQUI, JEAN JACQUES (1694–1748), Swiss publicist, was born at Geneva on the 24th of June 1694. At the age of twenty-five he was designated honorary professor of ethics and the law of nature at the university of Geneva. Before taking up the appointment he travelled through France and England, and made the acquaintance of the most eminent writers of the period. On his return he began his lectures, and soon gained a wide reputation, from the simplicity of his style and the precision of his views. He continued to lecture for fifteen years, when he was compelled on account of ill-health to resign. His fellow-citizens at once elected him a member of the council of state, and he gained as high a reputation for his practical sagacity as he had for his theoretical knowledge. He died at Geneva on the 3rd of April 1748. His works were Principes du droit naturel (1747), and Principes du droit politique (1751). These have passed through many editions, and were very extensively used as text-books. Burlamaqui’s style is simple and clear, and his arrangement of the material good. His fundamental principle may be described as rational utilitarianism, and in many ways it resembles that of Cumberland.
BURLESQUE (Ital. burlesco, from burla, a joke, fun, playful trick), a form of the comic in art, consisting broadly in an imitation of a work of art with the object of exciting laughter, by distortion or exaggeration, by turning, for example, the highly rhetorical into bombast, the pathetic into the mock-sentimental, and especially by a ludicrous contrast between the subject and the style, making gods speak like common men and common men like gods. While parody (q.v.), also based on imitation, relies for its effect more on the close following of the style of its counterpart, burlesque depends on broader and coarser effects. Burlesque may be applied to any form of art, and unconsciously, no doubt, may be found even in architecture. In the graphic arts it takes the form better known as “caricature” (q.v.). Its particular sphere is, however, in literature, and especially in drama. The Batrachomachia, or Battle of the Frogs and Mice, is the earliest example in classical literature, being a travesty of the Homeric epic. There are many true burlesque parts in the comedies of Aristophanes, e.g. the appearance of Socrates in the Clouds. The Italian word first appears in the Opere Burlesche of Francesco Berni (1497–1535). In France during part of the reign of Louis XIV., the burlesque attained to great popularity; burlesque Aeneids, Iliads and Odysseys were composed, and even the most sacred subjects were not left untravestied. Of the numerous writers of these, P. Scarron is most prominent, and his Virgile Travesti (1648–1653) was followed by numerous imitators. In English literature Chaucer’s Rime of Sir Thopas is a burlesque of the long-winded medieval romances. Among the best-known true burlesques in English dramatic literature may be mentioned the 2nd duke of Buckingham’s The Rehearsal, a burlesque of the heroic drama; Gay’s Beggar’s Opera, of the Italian opera; and Sheridan’s The Critic. In the later 19th century the name “burlesque” was given to a form of musical dramatic composition in which the true element of burlesque found little or no place. These musical burlesques, with which the Gaiety theatre, London, and the names of Edward Terry, Fred Leslie and Nellie Farren are particularly connected, developed from the earlier extravaganzas of J. R. Planché, written frequently round fairy tales. The Gaiety type of burlesque has since given place to the “musical comedy,” and its only survival is to be found in the modern pantomime.
BURLINGAME, ANSON (1820–1870), American legislator and diplomat, was born in New Berlin, Chenango county, New York, on the 14th of November 1820. In 1823 his parents took him to Ohio, and about ten years afterwards to Michigan. In 1838–1841 he studied in one of the “branches” of the university of Michigan, and in 1846 graduated at the Harvard law school. He practised law in Boston, and won a wide reputation by his speeches for the Free Soil party in 1848. He was a member of the Massachusetts constitutional convention in 1853, of the state senate in 1853–1854, and of the national House of Representatives from 1855 to 1861, being elected for the first term as a “Know Nothing” and afterwards as a member of the new Republican party, which he helped to organize in Massachusetts. He was an effective debater in the House, and for his impassioned denunciation (June 21, 1856) of Preston S. Brooks (1819–1857), for his assault upon Senator Charles Sumner, was challenged by Brooks. Burlingame accepted the challenge and specified rifles as the weapons to be used; his second chose Navy Island, above the Niagara Falls, and in Canada, as the place for the meeting. Brooks, however, refused these conditions, saying that he could not reach the place designated “without running the gauntlet of mobs and assassins, prisons and penitentiaries, bailiffs and constables.” To Burlingame’s appointment as minister to Austria (March 22, 1861) the Austrian authorities objected because in Congress he had advocated the recognition of Sardinia as a first-class power and had championed Hungarian independence. President Lincoln thereupon appointed him (June 14, 1861) minister to China. This office he held until November 1867, when he resigned and was immediately appointed (November 26) envoy extraordinary and minister plenipotentiary to head a Chinese diplomatic mission to the United States and the principal European nations. The embassy, which included two Chinese ministers, an English and a French secretary, six students from the Tung-wan Kwang at Peking, and a considerable retinue, arrived in the United States in March 1868, and concluded at Washington (28th of July 1868) a series of articles, supplementary to the Reed Treaty of 1858, and later known as “The Burlingame Treaty.” Ratifications of the treaty were not exchanged at Peking until November 23, 1869. The “Burlingame Treaty” recognizes China’s right of eminent domain over all her territory, gives China the right to appoint at ports in the United States consuls, “who shall enjoy the same privileges and immunities as those enjoyed by the consuls of Great Britain and Russia”; provides that “citizens of the United States in China of every religious persuasion and Chinese subjects in the United States shall enjoy entire liberty of conscience and shall be exempt from all disability or persecution on account of their religious faith or worship in either country”; and grants certain privileges to citizens of either country residing in the other, the privilege of naturalization, however, being specifically withheld. After leaving the United States, the embassy visited several continental capitals, but made no definite treaties. Burlingame’s speeches did much to awaken interest in, and a more intelligent appreciation of, China’s attitude toward the outside world. He died suddenly at St Petersburg, on the 23rd of February 1870.
His son Edward Livermore Burlingame (b. 1848) was educated at Harvard and at Heidelberg, was a member of the editorial staff of the New York Tribune in 1871–1872 and of the American Cyclopaedia in 1872–1876, and in 1886 became the editor of Scribner’s Magazine.
BURLINGTON, a city and the county-seat of Des Moines county, Iowa, U.S.A., on the Mississippi river, in the S.E. part of the state. Pop. (1890) 22,565; (1900) 23,201; (1905, state census) 25,318 (4492 foreign-born); (1910) 24,324. It is served by the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy (which has extensive
