[Battle of the Spurs], (a) an engagement at Courtrai in 1302 where the burghers of the town beat the knighthood of France, and the spurs of 4000 knights were collected after the battle; (b) an engagement at Guinegate, 1513, in which Henry VIII. made the French forces take to their spurs; of the Barriers (see [Barriers]); of the Books, a satire by Swift on a literary controversy of the time; of the Standard, a battle in 1138, in which the English, with a high-mounted crucifix for a standard, beat the Scots at Northallerton.
[Battue], method of killing game after crowding them by cries and beating them towards the sportsmen.
[Baucis]. See [Philemon].
[Baudelaire, Charles], French poet of the romantic school, born in Paris; distinguished among his contemporaries for his originality, and his influence on others of his class; was a charming writer of prose as well as verse, as his "Petits Poèmes" in prose bear witness. Victor Hugo once congratulated him on having "created a new shudder"; and as has been said, "this side of his genius attracted most popular attention, which, however, is but one side, and not really the most remarkable, of a singular combination of morbid but delicate analysis and reproduction of the remotest phases and moods of human thought and passion" (1821-1867).
[Baudricourt], a French courtier whom Joan of Arc pressed to conduct her into the presence of Charles VII.
[Baudry, Paul], French painter, decorated the foyer of the Grand Opera in Paris; is best known as the author of the "Punishment of a Vestal Virgin" and the "Assassination of Marat" (1828-1886).
[Bauer, Bruno], a daring Biblical critic, and violent polemic on political as well as theological subjects; born at Saxe-Altenburg; regarded the Christian religion as overlaid and obscured by accretions foreign to it; denied the historical truth of the Gospels, and, like a true disciple of Hegel, ascribed the troubles of the 19th century to the overmastering influence of the "[Enlightenment]" or the "[Aufklärung]" (q. v.) that characterised the 18th. His last work was entitled "Disraeli's Romantic and Bismarck's Socialistic Imperialism" (1809-1882).
[Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb], professor of Philosophy at Frankfort-on-the-Oder; disciple of Wolf; born at Berlin; the founder of Æsthetics as a department of philosophy, and inventor of the name (1714-1762).
[Baumgarten-Crusius], a German theologian of the school of Schleiermacher; professor of Theology at Jena; born at Merseburg; an authority on the history of dogma, on which he wrote (1788-1843).
[Baur, Ferdinand Christian], head of the Tübingen school of rationalist divines, born near Stuttgart; distinguished by his scholarship and his labours in Biblical criticism and dogmatic theology; his dogmatic treatises were on the Christian Gnosis, the Atonement, the Trinity, and the Incarnation, while his Biblical were on certain epistles of Paul and the canonical Gospels, which he regarded as the product of the 2nd century; regarded Christianity of the Church as Judaic in its origin, and Paul as distinctively the first apostle of pure Christianity (1792-1861).