BEN LOMOND, a mountain in the north-west of Stirlingshire, Scotland. It is situated near the eastern bank of Loch Lomond, about 9 m. from the head and about 15 from the foot. It is 3192 ft. high, and the prevailing rocks are granite, mica schist, diorite, porphyry and quartzite, the last, where it crops out on the surface, gleaming in the distance like snow. Duchray Water, a head-stream of the Forth, rises in the north-east shoulder. The hill, which is covered with grass to the top, is a favourite climb, being ascended from Rowardennan (the easiest) or Inversnaid on the lake, or Aberfoyle 10 m. inland due east. The view from the summit extends northward as far as the Grampians, with occasional glimpses of Ben Nevis; westward to Jura in the Atlantic; south-westward to Arran in the Firth of Clyde; southward to Tinto Hill, the Lowthers and Cairnsmore; and eastward to Edinburgh Castle and Arthur’s Seat.
BENLOWES, EDWARD (1603?-1676), English poet, son of Andrew Benlowes of Brent Hall, Essex, was born about 1603. He matriculated at St John’s College, Cambridge, in 1620, and on leaving the university he made a prolonged tour on the continent of Europe. He was a Roman Catholic in middle life, but became a convert to Protestantism in his later years. He dissipated his fortune by openhanded generosity to his friends and relations, and possibly by serving in the Civil War; so that he was in great poverty at the time of his death, which occurred on the 18th of December 1676. The last eight years of his life were passed at Oxford. Many of his writings are in Latin. His most important work is Theophila, or Love’s Sacrifice, a Divine Poem (1652). The poem deals with mystical religion, telling how the soul, represented by Theophila, ascends by humility, zeal and contemplation, and triumphs over the sins of the senses. It is written in a curious stanza of three lines of unequal length rhyming together. Until recent times justice has hardly been done to Benlowes’ poetical merits and indisputable piety. Samuel Butler, who satirized him in his “Character of a Small Poet,” found abundant matter for ridicule in his eccentricities; and Pope and Warburton noted him as a patron of bad poets.
His Theophila was reprinted by S.W. Singer; and in Minor Poets of the Caroline Period, vol. i. (1905), Mr Saintsbury reprints Theophila and two other poems by Benlowes, “The Summary of Wisedome,” and “A Poetic Descant upon a Private Music-Meeting.”
BEN MACDHUI, more correctly Ben Muichdhui (Gaelic for “the mountain of the black pig,” in allusion to its shape), the second highest mountain (4296 ft.) in Great Britain, one of the Cairngorm group, on the confines of south-western Aberdeenshire and south-western Banffshire, not far from the eastern boundary of Inverness-shire. It is about 11 m. from Castleton of Braemar and about 10 from Aviemore. The ascent is usually made from Castleton of Braemar, by way of the Linn of Dee, Glen Lui and Glen Derry. From the head of Glen Derry, with its blasted trees, the picture of desolation, it becomes more toilsome, but is partly repaid by the view of the remarkable columnar cliffs of Corrie Etchachan. The summit is flat and quite bare of vegetation, but the panorama in every direction is extremely grand. At the foot of a vast gully, 2500 ft. above the sea, lies Loch Avon (or A’an), a narrow lake about 1½ m. long, with water of the deepest blue and a margin of bright yellow sand. At the western end of the lake is the Shelter Stone, an enormous block of granite resting upon two other blocks, which can accommodate a dozen persons. Beautiful rock crystals occur in veins in the corries. The summit of Cairngorm, 3½ m. north of that of Ben Macdhui, may be reached from the latter with scarcely any descent, by following the rugged ridge flanking the western side of Loch Avon. The other great peaks of the group are Braeriach (4248 ft.) and Cairntoul (4241 ft.), and 6 m. to the east are the twin masses of Ben a Bourd, the northern top of which is 3924 ft. and the southern 3860 ft. high. Ben A’an, an adjoining hill, is 3843 ft. high.
BENNETT, CHARLES EDWIN (1858- ), American classical scholar, was born on the 6th of April 1858, in Providence, Rhode Island. He graduated from Brown University in 1878 and also studied at Harvard (1881-1882) and in Germany (1882-1884). He taught in secondary schools in Florida (1878-1879), New York (1879-1881), and Nebraska (1885-1889), and became professor of Latin in the University of Wisconsin in 1889, of classical philology at Brown University in 1891, and of Latin at Cornell University in 1892. His syntactical studies, notably various papers on the subjunctive, are based on a statistical examination of Latin texts and are marked by a fresh system of nomenclature; he ranks as one of the leaders of the “New American School” of syntacticians, who insist on a preliminary re-examination of all available data. Of great importance are his advocacy of “quantitative” reading of Latin verse and his Critique of Some Recent Subjunctive Theories in vol. ix. (1898) of Cornell Studies in Classical Philology, of which he was an editor. Bennett’s Latin Grammar (1895) is the first successful attempt in America to adopt the method of the brief, scholarly Schulgrammatik. Besides the Latin classics commonly read in secondary courses and other text-books in “Bennett’s Latin Series,” he edited Tacitus’s Dialogus de Oratoribus (1894), and Cicero’s De Senectute (1897) and De Amicitia (1897). He wrote, with George P. Bristol, The Teaching of Greek and Latin in Secondary Schools (1900), and The Latin Language, (1907), and with William Alexander Hammond translated The Characters of Theophrastus (1902).
BENNETT, JAMES GORDON (1794-1872), American journalist, founder and editor of the New York Herald, was born at Newmills in Banffshire, Scotland, in 1794 (not in 1800, as has been stated). He was educated for the Roman Catholic priesthood in a seminary at Aberdeen, but in the spring of 1819, giving up the career which had been chosen for him, he emigrated to America. Landing at Halifax, Nova Scotia, he earned a poor living there for a short time by giving lessons in French, Spanish and bookkeeping; he passed next to Boston, where starvation threatened him until he got employment in a printing-office; and in 1822 he went to New York. An engagement as translator of Spanish for the Courier of Charleston, South Carolina, took him there for a few months in 1823. On his return to New York he projected a school, gave lectures on political economy and did subordinate work for the journals. During the next ten years he was employed on various papers, was the Washington correspondent first of the New York Enquirer, and later of the Courier and Enquirer in 1827-1832, his letters attracting much attention; he founded the short-lived Globe in New York in 1832; and in 1833-1834 was the chief editor and one of the proprietors of the Pennsylvanian at Philadelphia. On the 6th of May 1835 he published the first number of a small one-cent paper, bearing the title of New York Herald, and issuing from a cellar, in which the proprietor and editor played also the part of salesman. “He started with a disclaimer of all principle, as it is called, all party, all politics”; and to this he consistently adhered. By his industry, sagacity and unscrupulousness, and by the variety of his news, the “spicy” correspondence, and the supply of personal gossip and scandal, he made the paper a great commercial success. He devoted his attention particularly to the gathering of news, and was the first to introduce many of the methods of the modern American reporter. He published on the 13th of June 1835, the first Wall Street financial article to appear in any American newspaper; printed a vivid and detailed account of the great fire of December 1835, in New York; was the first, in 1846, to obtain the report in full by telegraph of a long political speech; and during the Civil War maintained a staff of sixty-three war correspondents. Bennett continued to edit the Herald almost till his death, at New York, on the 1st of June 1872.