[45]. Liddell and Scott; Jameson; Butler; Michaelis; O'Donovan.
Section XI.—Barbara.
Of the four great virgin saints, revered with almost passionate affection in the Roman Catholic Church, each has been made the representative of an idea. Probably Agnes, Barbara, Katharine, and Margaret were veritable maidens who perished in the early persecutions, and whose lives, save for some horrible incident in their tortures, were unknown; but around them crystallized the floating allegories of the Church, until Agnes became the representative of the triumph of innocence, Margaret of the victory through faith, Katharine of intellectual, and Barbara of artistic devotion. There was a speedy lapse from the allegory to the legend, just as of old, from the figure to the myth; and the virgins' popularity in all countries depended, not on their shadowy names in the calendar, but on the implicitly credited tales of wonder connected with them.
Barbara was said to be a maiden of Heliopolis, whose Christianity was revealed by her insisting that a bath-chamber should be built with three windows instead of two, in honour of the chief mystery of the Creed. Her cruel father beheaded her with his own hands, and was immediately destroyed by thunder and lightning. Here, of course, was symbolized the consecration of architecture and the fine arts to express religious ideas, and St. Barbara became the patroness of architects, and thence of engineers, and the protectress from thunder and its mimic, artillery. The powder room in a French ship is still known as la sainte Barbe. Her name has thus been widely spread, though chiefly among the daughters of artificers and soldiers, seldom rising to princely rank. Barbara is the feminine of βάρβαρος (a stranger), the term applied by the Greeks to all who did not speak their own tongue. Horne Tooke derives it from the root bar (strong), and thinks it a repetition of the savage people’s own reduplicated bar-bar (very strong); but it is far more probably an imitation of the incomprehensible speech of the strangers; as, in fact, the Greeks seem rather to have applied it first to the polished Asiatic, who would have given them less the idea of strength than the Scyth or the Goth, to whose language bar belonged in the sense of force or opposition. It is curious to observe how, in modern languages, the progeny of the Latin barbarus vary between the sense of wild cruelty and mere rude ignorance, or ill-adapted splendour.
| English. | Scotch. | French. | Italian. |
| Barbara | Babie | Barbe | Barbara |
| Bab | |||
| Barbary | |||
| Danish. | German. | Swiss. | Russian. |
| Barbraa | Barbara | Baba | Varvara |
| Barbeli | Babali | Varinka | |
| Barbechen | Babeli | ||
| Slavonic. | Illyrian. | Bohemian. | Lusatian. |
| Barbara | Barbara | Barbora | Baba |
| Barba | Varvara | Babuscha | |
| Barbica | Bara | ||
| Vara | |||
| Barica | |||
| Lett. | Lithuanian. | Hungarian. | |
| Barbule | Barbe | Borbola | |
| Barbe | Barbutte | Boris | |
| Babbe |
The true old English form is Barbary. It appears thus in all the unlatinized pedigrees and registers; and the peasantry still call it so, though unluckily it is generally turned into Barbara in writing.[[46]]
[46]. Jameson; Horne Tooke; Michaelis.