BURKE, SIR JOHN BERNARD (1814-1892), British genealogist, was born in London, on the 5th of January 1814, and was educated in London and in France. His father, John Burke (1787-1848), was also a genealogist, and in 1826 issued a Genealogical and Heraldic Dictionary of the Peerage and Baronetage of the United Kingdom. This work, generally known as Burke's Peerage, has been issued annually since 1847. While practising as a barrister Bernard Burke assisted his father in his genealogical work, and in 1848 took control of his publications. In 1853 he was appointed Ulster king-at-arms; in 1854 he was knighted; and in 1855 he became keeper of the state papers in Ireland. After having devoted his life to genealogical studies he died in Dublin on the 12th of December 1892. In addition to editing Burke's Peerage from 1847 to his death, Burke brought out several editions of a companion volume, Burke's Landed Gentry, which was first published between 1833 and 1838. In 1866 and 1883 he published editions of his father's Dictionary of the Peerages of England, Scotland and Ireland, extinct, dormant and in abeyance (earlier editions, 1831, 1840, 1846); in 1855 and 1876 editions of his Royal Families of England, Scotland and Wales (1st edition, 1847-1851); and in 1878 and 1883 enlarged editions of his Encyclopaedia of Heraldry, or General Armoury of England, Scotland and Ireland. Burke's own works include The Roll of Battle Abbey (1848); The Romance of the Aristocracy (1855); Vicissitudes of Families (1883 and several earlier editions); and The Rise of Great Families (1882). He was succeeded as editor of Burke's Peerage and Landed Gentry by his fourth son, Ashworth Peter Burke.
BURKE, ROBERT O'HARA (1820-1861), Australian explorer, was born at St Cleram, Co. Galway, Ireland, in 1820. Descended from a branch of the family of Clanricarde, he was educated in Belgium, and at twenty years of age entered the Austrian army, in which he attained the rank of captain. In 1848 he left the Austrian service, and became a member of the Royal Irish Constabulary. Five years later he emigrated to Tasmania, and shortly afterwards crossed to Melbourne, where he became an inspector of police. When the Crimean War broke out he went to England in the hope of securing a commission in the army, but peace had meanwhile been signed, and he returned to Victoria and resumed his police duties. At the end of 1857 the Philosophical Institute of Victoria took up the question of the exploration of the interior of the Australian continent, and appointed a committee to inquire into and report upon the subject. In September 1858, when it became known that John McDouall Stuart had succeeded in penetrating as far as the centre of Australia, the sum of £1000 was anonymously offered for the promotion of an expedition to cross the continent from south to north, on condition that a further sum of £2000 should be subscribed within a twelvemonth. The amount having been raised within the time specified, the Victorian parliament supplemented it by a vote of £6000, and an expedition was organized under the leadership of Burke, with W.J. Wills as surveyor and astronomical observer. The story of this expedition, which left Melbourne on the 21st of August 1860, furnishes perhaps the most painful episode in Australian annals. Ten Europeans and three Sepoys accompanied the expedition, which was soon torn by internal dissensions. Near Menindie on the Darling, Landells, Burke's second in command, became insubordinate and resigned, his example being followed by the doctor—a German. On the 11th of November Burke, with Wills and five assistants, fifteen horses and sixteen camels, reached Cooper's Creek in Queensland, where a depot was formed near good grass and abundance of water. Here Burke proposed waiting the arrival of his third officer, Wright, whom he had sent back from Torowoto to Menindie to fetch some camels and supplies. Wright, however, delayed his departure until the 26th of January 1861. Meantime, weary of waiting, Burke, with Wills, King and Gray as companions, determined on the 16th of December to push on across the continent, leaving an assistant named Brahe to take care of the depot until Wright's arrival. On the 4th of February 1861 Burke and his party, worn down by famine, reached the estuary of the Flinders river, not far from the present site of Normantown on the Gulf of Carpentaria. On the 26th of February began their return journey. The party suffered greatly from famine and exposure, and but for the rainy season, thirst would have speedily ended their miseries. In vain they looked for the relief which Wright was to bring them. On the 16th of April Gray died, and the emaciated survivors halted a day to bury his body. That day's delay, as it turned out, cost Burke and Wills their lives; they arrived at Cooper's Creek to find the depot deserted. But a few hours before Brahe, unrelieved by Wright, and thinking that Burke had died or changed his plans, had taken his departure for the Darling. With such assistance as they could get from the natives, Burke, and his two companions struggled on, until death overtook Burke and Wills at the end of June. King sought the natives, who cared for him until his relief by a search party in September. No one can deny the heroism of the men whose lives were sacrificed in this ill-starred expedition. But it is admitted that the leaders were not bushmen and had had no experience in exploration. Disunion and disobedience to orders, from the highest to the lowest, brought about the worst results, and all that now remains to tell the story of the failure of this vast undertaking is a monument to the memory of the foolhardy heroes, from the chisel of Charles Summers, erected on a prominent site in Melbourne.
BURKE, WILLIAM (1792-1829), Irish criminal, was born in Ireland in 1792. After trying his hand at a variety of trades there, he went to Scotland about 1817 as a navvy, and in 1827 was living in a lodging-house in Edinburgh kept by William Hare, another Irish labourer. Towards the end of that year one of Hare's lodgers, an old army pensioner, died. This was the period of the body-snatchers or Resurrectionists, and Hare and Burke, aware that money could always be obtained for a corpse, sold the body to Dr Robert Knox, a leading Edinburgh anatomist, for £7, 10s. The price obtained and the simplicity of the transaction suggested to Hare an easy method of making a
profitable livelihood, and Burke at once fell in with the plan. The two men inveigled obscure travellers to Hare's or some other lodging-house, made them drunk and then suffocated them, taking care to leave no marks of violence. The bodies were sold to Dr Knox for prices averaging from £8 to £14. At least fifteen victims had been disposed of in this way when the suspicions of the police were aroused, and Burke and Hare were arrested. The latter turned king's evidence, and Burke was found guilty and hanged at Edinburgh on the 28th of January 1829. Hare found it impossible, in view of the strong popular feeling, to remain in Scotland. He is believed to have died in England under an assumed name. From Burke's method of killing his victims has come the verb "to burke," meaning to suffocate, strangle or suppress secretly, or to kill with the object of selling the body for the purposes of dissection.
See George Macgregor, History of Burke and Hare and of the Resurrectionist Times (Glasgow, 1884).
BURLAMAQUI, JEAN JACQUES (1694-1748), Swiss publicist, was born at Geneva on the 24th of June 1694. At the age of twenty-five he was designated honorary professor of ethics and the law of nature at the university of Geneva. Before taking up the appointment he travelled through France and England, and made the acquaintance of the most eminent writers of the period. On his return he began his lectures, and soon gained a wide reputation, from the simplicity of his style and the precision of his views. He continued to lecture for fifteen years, when he was compelled on account of ill-health to resign. His fellow-citizens at once elected him a member of the council of state, and he gained as high a reputation for his practical sagacity as he had for his theoretical knowledge. He died at Geneva on the 3rd of April 1748. His works were Principes du droit naturel (1747), and Principes du droit politique (1751). These have passed through many editions, and were very extensively used as text-books. Burlamaqui's style is simple and clear, and his arrangement of the material good. His fundamental principle may be described as rational utilitarianism, and in many ways it resembles that of Cumberland.
BURLESQUE (Ital. burlesco, from burla, a joke, fun, playful trick), a form of the comic in art, consisting broadly in an imitation of a work of art with the object of exciting laughter, by distortion or exaggeration, by turning, for example, the highly rhetorical into bombast, the pathetic into the mock-sentimental, and especially by a ludicrous contrast between the subject and the style, making gods speak like common men and common men like gods. While parody (q.v.), also based on imitation, relies for its effect more on the close following of the style of its counterpart, burlesque depends on broader and coarser effects. Burlesque may be applied to any form of art, and unconsciously, no doubt, may be found even in architecture. In the graphic arts it takes the form better known as "caricature" (q.v.). Its particular sphere is, however, in literature, and especially in drama. The Batrachomachia, or Battle of the Frogs and Mice, is the earliest example in classical literature, being a travesty of the Homeric epic. There are many true burlesque parts in the comedies of Aristophanes, e.g. the appearance of Socrates in the Clouds. The Italian word first appears in the Opere Burlesche of Francesco Berni (1497-1535). In France during part of the reign of Louis XIV., the burlesque attained to great popularity; burlesque Aeneids, Iliads and Odysseys were composed, and even the most sacred subjects were not left untravestied. Of the numerous writers of these, P. Scarron is most prominent, and his Virgile Travesti (1648-1653) was followed by numerous imitators. In English literature Chaucer's Rime of Sir Thopas is a burlesque of the long-winded medieval romances. Among the best-known true burlesques in English dramatic literature may be mentioned the 2nd duke of Buckingham's The Rehearsal, a burlesque of the heroic drama; Gay's Beggar's Opera, of the Italian opera; and Sheridan's The Critic. In the later 19th century the name "burlesque" was given to a form of musical dramatic composition in which the true element of burlesque found little or no place. These musical burlesques, with which the Gaiety theatre, London, and the names of Edward Terry, Fred Leslie and Nellie Farren are particularly connected, developed from the earlier extravaganzas of J.R. Planché, written frequently round fairy tales. The Gaiety type of burlesque has since given place to the "musical comedy," and its only survival is to be found in the modern pantomime.
BURLINGAME, ANSON (1820-1870), American legislator and diplomat, was born in New Berlin, Chenango county, New York, on the 14th of November 1820. In 1823 his parents took him to Ohio, and about ten years afterwards to Michigan. In 1838-1841 he studied in one of the "branches" of the university of Michigan, and in 1846 graduated at the Harvard law school. He practised law in Boston, and won a wide reputation by his speeches for the Free Soil party in 1848. He was a member of the Massachusetts constitutional convention in 1853, of the state senate in 1853-1854, and of the national House of Representatives from 1855 to 1861, being elected for the first term as a "Know Nothing" and afterwards as a member of the new Republican party, which he helped to organize in Massachusetts. He was an effective debater in the House, and for his impassioned denunciation (June 21, 1856) of Preston S. Brooks (1819-1857), for his assault upon Senator Charles Sumner, was challenged by Brooks. Burlingame accepted the challenge and specified rifles as the weapons to be used; his second chose Navy Island, above the Niagara Falls, and in Canada, as the place for the meeting. Brooks, however, refused these conditions, saying that he could not reach the place designated "without running the gauntlet of mobs and assassins, prisons and penitentiaries, bailiffs and constables." To Burlingame's appointment as minister to Austria (March 22, 1861) the Austrian authorities objected because in Congress he had advocated the recognition of Sardinia as a first-class power and had championed Hungarian independence. President Lincoln thereupon appointed him (June 14, 1861) minister to China. This office he held until November 1867, when he resigned and was immediately appointed (November 26) envoy extraordinary and minister plenipotentiary to head a Chinese diplomatic mission to the United States and the principal European nations. The embassy, which included two Chinese ministers, an English and a French secretary, six students from the Tung-wan Kwang at Peking, and a considerable retinue, arrived in the United States in March 1868, and concluded at Washington (28th of July 1868) a series of articles, supplementary to the Reed Treaty of 1858, and later known as "The Burlingame Treaty." Ratifications of the treaty were not exchanged at Peking until November 23, 1869. The "Burlingame Treaty" recognizes China's right of eminent domain over all her territory, gives China the right to appoint at ports in the United States consuls, "who shall enjoy the same privileges and immunities as those enjoyed by the consuls of Great Britain and Russia"; provides that "citizens of the United States in China of every religious persuasion and Chinese subjects in the United States shall enjoy entire liberty of conscience and shall be exempt from all disability or persecution on account of their religious faith or worship in either country"; and grants certain privileges to citizens of either country residing in the other, the privilege of naturalization, however, being specifically withheld. After leaving the United States, the embassy visited several continental capitals, but made no definite treaties. Burlingame's speeches did much to awaken interest in, and a more intelligent appreciation of, China's attitude toward the outside world. He died suddenly at St Petersburg, on the 23rd of February 1870.
His son Edward Livermore Burlingame (b. 1848) was educated at Harvard and at Heidelberg, was a member of the editorial staff of the New York Tribune in 1871-1872 and of the American Cyclopaedia in 1872-1876, and in 1886 became the editor of Scribner's Magazine.
BURLINGTON, a city and the county-seat of Des Moines county, Iowa, U.S.A., on the Mississippi river, in the S.E. part of the state. Pop. (1890) 22,565; (1900) 23,201; (1905, state census) 25,318 (4492 foreign-born); (1910) 24,324. It is served by the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy (which has extensive