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and exchange. It also possesses a Church of England institute, with a considerable library, a free grammar school, and several charities. Its staple manufacture is cotton, which in 1872 gave employment to 7972 men and 8267 women of twenty years of age and upwards. Worsted, which was formerly the chief article, is still manufactured to a considerable extent. Calico-printing, machine-making, brewing, tanning, and several other important industries are carried on in the town; and in the neighbourhood there are iron mines and stone quarries, which gave employment in 1872 to 1376 and 360 workmen respectively. From the number of Roman remains found at various times on the spot, Burnley seems to be the site of some Roman station; and it has also been suggested that it may coincide with Brunnauburh, the famous battle-field of the Saxons. There are but few facts of importance in its history. During the cotton famine it suffered severely, and the operatives were employed in an extensive system of improvements, to which the present satisfactory condition of the town is mainly due. In 1861 it was incorporated by royal charter, the government being placed in the hands of a mayor, eight aldermen, and twenty -four councillors ; and in 1867 it was entrusted with the right of electing one member of Parliament. The population of the parliamentary borough in 1871 was 44,320 persons, of whom 21.368 were males and 22,952 females; the inhabited houses were

8804, and the registered electors 5628.

BURNOUF, Eugène (1801-1852), an Oriental scholar, was born at Paris in 1801. He was educated for the legal profession, but soon after taking his degree began to devote himself entirely to the study of Oriental languages. In 1826 he published an Essai sur le Pali, and in the following year Observations Grammaticales stir quelqucs Passages de I Essai sur le Pali. The next great work he undertook was the deciphering of the Zend manuscripts brought to France by Anquetil du Perron. By his labours a knowledge of the Persian language and religion was first brought into the scientific world of Europe. He caused the Vendidad Sade to be lithographed with the utmost care, and published it in folio, 1829-43. The contributions he made to Oriental literature in the Journal Asiatiqne were numerous and im portant. From 1833 to 1835 he published his Commentaries sur le Yacna, Vun des livres liturgiques des Perses ; in 1840 he began the publication of the Sanskrit text and French translation of the Bhagavata Purana, which was completed in three folio volumes. His last works were Introduction a CHistoire du JBouddhisme Indien, and a translation of Le Lotus de la Bonne Loi. The latter work was passing through the press when the author died on the 28th May 1852 He was a member of the Academic des Inscriptions, and from 1832 had held the post of professor of Sanskrit in the College de France.

BURNOUF, Jean Louis (1775-1844), the father of Eugene Burnouf, was born in 1775. During the intervals of leisure left him by his commercial employment he prosecuted his studies in classical literature, and in 1808 was appointed assistant-professor at the Lycee Charlemagne. He soon afterwards obtained the chair of rhetoric at the Lycee Imperial, which he held till 1826, when he was made the inspector of the Academy. In 1817 he had been appointed professor of Latin eloquence at the College de France, and from 1811 to 1822 he acted as president of the Ecole Normale. In 1830 Burnouf was named inspector- general of studies, and on his resignation of this post in 1836 was made librarian of the university. He died in 1844. His most important work was the Methode pour etudier la Langue Grecque, 1814, which marks an epoch in the study of Greek in France. He also published a valuable edition of Sallust and some excellent translations of Tacitus, and of parts of Sallust and Cicero.

BURNS, Robert (1759-1796). In a company of German critics who were weighing the claims and estimat ing the rank of the poets, their contemporaries, the leader of their chorus, the genial humorist, Jean Paul Richter, is said to have hushed his audience when the name of Goethe was introduced, exclaiming" We are not to sit in judgment on that sacred head." Scotsmen are apt to attach the same half-superstitious reverence to the name which is, more than any other, that of Scotland condensed in a personality, the representative of what is noblest and also of much that is erring in their race.

Robert Burns was born on the 25th of January 1759, in a cottage about two miles from Ayr, the eldest son of a small farmer, William Burness, of Kincardineshire stock, who wrought hard, practised integrity, wished to bring up his children in the fear of God, but had to fight all his days against the winds and tides of adversity. " The poet," says Mr Carlyle, his best biographer, " was fortunate in his father a man of thoughtful intense character, as the best of our peasants are, valuing knowledge, possessing some and open-minded for more, of keen insight and devout heart, friendly and fearless : a fully unfolded man seldom found in any rank in society, and worth descending far in society to seek. . . . Had he been ever so little richer, the whole might have issued otherwise. But poverty sunk the whole family even below the reach of our cheap school system, and Burns remained a hard-worked plough-boy."

Through a series of migrations from one unfortunate farm to another ; from Alloway (where he was taught to read), to Mt. Oliphant, and then (1777) to Lochlea in Tarbolton (where he learnt the rudiments of geometry), the poet re mained in the same condition of straitened circumstances. At the age of thirteen he thrashed the corn with his own hands, at fifteen he was the principal labourer. The family kept no servant, and for several years butchers meat was a thing unknown in the house. " This kind of life," he writes, " the cheerless gloom of a hermit and the unceasing toil of a galley-slave, brought me to my sixteenth year." His naturally robust frame was overtasked, and his nervous con stitution received a fatal strain. His shoulders were bowed, he became liable to headaches, palpitations, and fits of de pressing melancholy. From these hard tasks and his fiery temperament, craving in vain for sympathy in a frigid air grew the strong temptations on which Burns was largely wrecked, the thirst for stimulants and the revolt against restraint which soon made headway and passed all bars. In the earlier portions of his career, a buoyant humour bore him up ; and amid thick-coming shapes of ill he bated no jot of heart or hope. He was cheered by vague stirrings of ambi tion, which he pathetically compares to the " blind groping of Homer s Cyclops round the walls of his cave." Sent to school at Kirkoswald, he became, for his scant leisure, a great reader eating at meal-times with a spoon in one hand and a book in the other, and carrying a few small volumes in his pocket to study in spare moments in the fields. " The collection of songs," he tells us, " was my vade mecum. I pored over them driving my cart or walking to labour, song by song, verse by verse, carefully noting the true, tender, sublime, or fustian." He lingered over the ballads in his cold room by night ; by day, whilst whistling at the plough, he invented new forms and was inspired by fresh ideas, " gathering round him the memories and the tradi tions of his country till they became a mantle and a crown." It was among the furrows of his father s fields that he was inspired with the perpetually quoted wish

" That I for poor auld Scotland s sake Some useful plan or book could make, Or sing a sang at least."

An equally striking illustration of the same feeling is to be found in his summer Sunday s ramble to the Lcglcu