BARNES, JOSHUA (1654-1712), English scholar, was born in London on the 10th of January 1654. Educated at Christ's Hospital and at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, he was in 1695 chosen regius professor of Greek, a language which he wrote and spoke with the utmost facility. One of his first publications was entitled Gerania; a New Discovery of a Little Sort of People, anciently discoursed of, called Pygmies (1675), a whimsical sketch to which Swift's Voyage to Lilliput possibly owes something. Among his other works are a History of that Most Victorious Monarch Edward III. (1688), in which he introduces long and elaborate speeches into the narrative; editions of Euripides (1694) and of Homer (1711), also one of Anacreon (1705) which contains titles of Greek verses of his own which he hoped to publish. He died on the 3rd of August 1712, at Hemingford, near St Ives, Hunts.
BARNES, ROBERT (1495-1540), English reformer and martyr, born about 1495, was educated at Cambridge, where he was a member, and afterwards prior of the convent of Austin Friars, and graduated D.D. in 1523. He was apparently one of the Cambridge men who were wont to gather at the White Horse Tavern for Bible-reading and theological discussion early in the third decade of the 16th century. In 1526, he was brought before the vice-chancellor for preaching a heterodox sermon, and was subsequently examined by Wolsey and four other bishops. He was condemned to abjure or be burnt; and preferring the former alternative, was committed to the Fleet prison and afterwards to the Austin Friars in London. He escaped thence to Antwerp in 1528, and also visited Wittenberg, where he made Luther's acquaintance. He also came across Stephen Vaughan, an agent of Thomas Cromwell and an advanced reformer, who recommended him to Cromwell: "Look well," he wrote, "upon Dr Barnes' book. It is such a piece of work as I have not yet seen any like it. I think he shall seal it with his blood" (Letters and Papers of Henry VIII. v. 593). In 1531 Barnes returned to England, and became one of the chief intermediaries between the English government and Lutheran Germany. In 1535 he was sent to Germany, in the hope of inducing Lutheran divines to approve of Henry's divorce from Catherine of Aragon, and four years later he was employed in negotiations connected with Anne of Cleves's marriage. The policy was Cromwell's, but Henry VIII. had already in 1538 refused to adopt Lutheran theology, and the statute of Six Articles (1539), followed by the king's disgust with Anne of Cleves (1540), brought the agents of that policy to ruin. An attack upon Bishop Gardiner by Barnes in a sermon at St Paul's Cross was the signal for a bitter struggle between the Protestant and reactionary parties in Henry's council, which raged during the spring of 1540. Barnes was forced to apologize and recant; and Gardiner delivered a series of sermons at St Paul's Cross to counteract Barnes' invective. But a month or so later Cromwell was made earl of Essex, Gardiner's friend, Bishop Sampson, was sent to the Tower, and Barnes reverted to Lutheranism. It was a delusive victory. In July, Cromwell was attainted, Anne of Cleves was divorced and Barnes was burnt (30th July 1540). He also had an act of attainder passed against him, a somewhat novel distinction for a heretic, which illustrates the way in which Henry VIII. employed secular machinery for ecclesiastical purposes, and regarded heresy as an offence against the state rather than against the church. Barnes was one of six executed on the same day: two, William Jerome and Thomas Gerrard, were, like himself, burnt for heresy under the Six Articles; three, Thomas Abel, Richard Fetherstone and Edward Powell, were hanged for treason in denying the royal supremacy. Both Lutherans and Catholics on the continent were shocked. Luther published Barnes' confession with a preface of his own as Bekenntnis des Glaubens (1540), which is included in Walch's edition of Luther's Werke xxi. 186.
See Letters and Papers of Henry VIII. vols. iv.-xv. passim; Wriothesley's Chronicle; Foxe's Acts and Monuments, ed. G. Townsend Burnet's Hist. of the Ref., ed. Pocock; Dixon's Hist. of the Church; Gairdner's Church in the XVIth Century; Pollard's Henry VIII. and Cranmer; Herzog-Hauck, Realencyklopadie, 3rd ed.
(A. F. P.)
BARNES, THOMAS (1785-1841), British journalist, was born about 1785. Educated at Christ's Hospital and Pembroke College, Cambridge, he came to London and soon joined the famous literary circle of which Hunt, Lamb and Hazlitt were prominent members. Upon the retirement of Dr Stoddart in 1817 he was appointed editor of The Times, a position which he held until his death, when he was succeeded by Delane. Lord Lyndhurst gave expression to a very widely-held opinion when he described him as "the most powerful man in the country." He died on the 7th of May 1841.
BARNES, WILLIAM (1800-1886), the Dorsetshire poet, was born on the 22nd of February 1800, at Rushay, near Pentridge in Dorset, the son of John Barnes and Grace Scott, of the farmer class. He was a delicate child, in direct contrast to a strong race of forebears, and inherited from his mother a refined, retiring disposition and a love for books. He went to school at Sturminster Newton, where he was considered the clever boy of the school; and when a solicitor named Dashwood applied to the master for a quick-witted boy to join him as pupil, Barnes was selected for the post. He worked with the village parson in his spare hours at classics and studied music under the organist. In 1818 he left Sturminster for the office of one Coombs at Dorchester, where he continued his evening education with another kindly clergyman. He also made great progress in the art of wood-engraving, and with the money he received for a series of blocks for a work called Walks about Dorchester, he printed and published his first book, Orra, a Lapland Tale, in 1822. In the same year he became engaged to Julia Miles, the daughter of an excise officer. In 1823 he took a school at Mere in Wiltshire, and four years later married and settled in Chantry House, a fine old Tudor mansion in that town. The school grew in numbers, and Barnes occupied all his spare time in assiduous study, reading during these years authors so diverse in character as Herodotus, Sallust, Ovid, Petrarch, Buffon and Burns. He also began to write poetry, and printed many of his verses in the Dorset County Chronicle. His chief studies, however, were philological; and in 1829 he published An Etymological Glossary of English Words of Foreign Derivation. In 1832 a strolling company of actors visited Mere, and Barnes wrote a farce, The Honest Thief, which they produced, and a comedy which was played at Wincanton. Barnes also wrote a number of educational books, such as Elements of Perspective, Outlines of Geography, and in 1833 first began his poems in the Dorsetshire dialect, among them the two eclogues "The 'Lotments" and "A Bit o' Sly Coorten," in the pages of the local paper. In 1835 he left Mere, and returned to Dorchester, where he started another school, removing in 1837 into larger quarters. In 1844 he published Poems of Rural Life in the Dorset Dialect. Three years later Barnes took holy orders, and was appointed to the cure of Whitcombe, 3 m. from Dorchester. He had been for some years upon the books of St John's College, Cambridge, and took the degree of B.D. in 1850. He resigned Whitcombe in 1852, finding the work too hard in connexion with his mastership; and in June of that year he sustained a severe bereavement by the death of his wife. Continuing his studies in the science of language, he published his Philological Grammar in 1854, drawing examples from more than sixty languages. For the copyright of this erudite work he received £5. The second series of dialect poems, Hwomely Rhymes, appeared in 1859 (2nd ed. 1863). Hwomely Rhymes contained some of his best-known pieces, and in the year of its publication he first began to give readings from his works. As their reputation grew he travelled all over the country, delighting large audiences with his quaint humour and natural pathos. In 1861 he was awarded a civil list pension of £70 a year, and in the next year published Tiw, the most striking of his philological studies, in which the Teutonic roots in the English language are discussed. Barnes had a horror of Latin forms in English, and would have substituted English compounds for many Latin forms in common use. In 1862 he broke up his school, and
removed to the rectory of Winterborne Came, to which he was presented by his old friend, Captain Seymour Dawson Damer. Here he worked continuously at verse and prose, contributing largely to the magazines. A new series of Poems of Rural Life in the Dorset Dialect appeared in 1862, and he was persuaded in 1868 to publish a series of Poems of Rural Life in Common English, which was less successful than his dialect poems. These latter were collected into a single volume in 1879, and on the 7th of October 1886 Barnes died at Winterborne Came. His poetry is essentially English in character; no other writer has given quite so simple and sincere a picture of the homely life and labour of rural England. His work is full of humour and the clean, manly joy of life; and its rusticity is singularly allied to a literary sense and to high technical finish. He is indeed the Victorian Theocritus; and, as English country life is slowly swept away before the advance of the railway and the telegraph, he will be more and more read for his warm-hearted and fragrant record of rustic love and piety. His original and suggestive books on the English language, which are valuable in spite of their eccentricities, include:—Se Gefylsta: an Anglo-Saxon Delectus (1849); A Grammar and Glossary of the Dorset Dialect (1864); An Outline of English Speech-Craft (1878); and A Glossary of the Dorset Dialect (Dorchester, 1886).
See The Life of William Barnes, Poet and Philologist (1887), by his daughter, Lucy E. Baxter, who is known as a writer on art by the pseudonym of Leader Scott; and a notice by Thomas Hardy in the Athenaeum (16th of October 1886).
BARNET, a residential district in the mid or St Albans parliamentary division of Hertfordshire, England; 10 m. N. of London, served by the main line and branches of the Great Northern railway. The three chief divisions are as follows:—(1) Chipping or High Barnet, a market town and urban district (Barnet), pop. (1901) 7876. The second epithet designates its position on a hill, but the first is given it from the market granted to the abbots of St Albans to be kept there, by Henry II. Near the town, round a point marked by an obelisk, was fought in 1471 the decisive battle between the houses of York and Lancaster, in which the earl of Warwick fell and the Lancastrians were totally defeated. The town is on the Great North Road, on which it was formerly an important coaching station. A large annual horse and cattle fair is held. (2) East Barnet, 2 m. S.E. of Chipping Barnet, has an ancient parish church retaining Norman portions, though enlarged in modern times. Pop. of East Barnet Valley urban district, 10,094. (3) New Barnet lies 1 m. E. by S. from Chipping Barnet.
Friern Barnet, in the Enfield parliamentary division of Middlesex, lies 3 m. S. of Chipping Barnet. Pop. of urban district, 11,566. The prefix recalls the former lordship of the manor possessed by the friary of St John of Jerusalem in Clerkenwell, London. Friern Barnet adjoins Finchley on the north and Whetstone on the south, the whole district being residential.