BURSAR (Med. Lat. bursarius), literally a keeper of the bursa or purse. The word is now chiefly used of the official, usually one of the fellows, who administers the finances of a college at a university, or of the treasurer of a school or other institution. The term is also applied to the holder of "a bursary," an exhibition at Scottish schools or universities, and also in England a scholarship or exhibition enabling a pupil of an elementary school to continue his education at a secondary school. The term "burse" (Lat. bursa, Gr. βόρσα, bag of skin) is particularly used of the embroidered purse which is one of the insignia of office of the lord high chancellor of England, and of the pouch which in the Roman Church contains the "corporal" in the service of the Mass. The "bursa" is a square case opening at one side only and covered and lined with silk or linen; one side should be of the colour of the vestments of the day.

BURSCHENSCHAFT, an association of students at the German universities. It was formed as a result of the German national sentiment awakened by the War of Liberation, its object being to foster patriotism and Christian conduct, as opposed to the particularism and low moral standard of the old Landsmannschaften. It originated at Jena, under the patronage of the grand-duke of Saxe-Weimar, and rapidly spread, the Allgemeine deutsche Burschenschaft being established in 1818. The loud political idealism of the Burschen excited the fears of the reactionary powers, which culminated after the murder of Kotzebue (q.v.) by Karl Sand in 1819, a crime inspired by a secret society among the Burschen known as the Blacks (Schwarzen). The repressive policy embodied in the Carlsbad Decrees (q.v.) was therefore directed mainly against the Burschenschaft, which none the less survived to take part in the revolutions of 1830. After the émeute at Frankfort in 1833, the association was again suppressed, but it lived on until, in 1848, all laws against it were abrogated. The Burschenschaften are now purely social and non-political societies. The Reformburschenschaften, formed since 1883 on the principle of excluding duelling, are united in the Allgemeiner deutscher Burschenbund.

BURSIAN, CONRAD (1830-1883), German philologist and archaeologist, was born at Mutzschen in Saxony, on the 14th of November 1830. On the removal of his parents to Leipzig, he received his early education at the Thomas school, and entered the university in 1847. Here he studied under Moritz Haupt and Otto Jahn until 1851, spent six months in Berlin (chiefly to attend Böckh's lectures), and completed his university studies at Leipzig (1852). The next three years were devoted to travelling in Belgium, France, Italy and Greece. In 1856 he became a Privat-docent, and in 1858 extraordinary professor at Leipzig; in 1861 professor of philology and archaeology at Tübingen; in 1864 professor of classical antiquities at Zurich; in 1869 at Jena, where he was also director of the archaeological museum; in 1874 at Munich, where he remained until his death on the 21st of September 1883. His most important works are: Geographie von Griechenland (1862-1872); Beiträge zur Geschichte der klassischen Studien im Mittelalter (1873); Geschichte der klassischen Philologie in Deutschland (1883); editions of Julius Firmicus Maternus' De Errore Profanarum Religionum (1856) and of Seneca's Suasoriae (1857). The article on Greek Art in Ersch and Gruber's Encyclopaedia is by him. Probably the work in connexion with which he is best known is the Jahresbericht über die Fortschritte der klassischen Altertumswissenschaft (1873, &c.), of which he was the founder and editor; from 1879 a Biographisches Jahrbuch für Altertumskunde was published by way of supplement, an obituary notice of Bursian, with a complete list of his writings, being in the volume for 1884.

BURSLEM, a market town of Staffordshire, England, in the Potteries district, 150 m. N.W. from London, on the North Staffordshire railway and the Grand Trunk Canal. Pop. (1891) 31,999; (1901) 38,766. In the 17th century the town was already famous for its manufacture of pottery. Here Josiah Wedgwood was born in 1730, his family having practised the manufacture in this locality for several generations, while he himself began work independently at the Ivy House pottery in 1759. He is commemorated by the Wedgwood Institute, founded in 1863. It comprises a school of art, free library, museum, picture-gallery and the free school founded in 1794. The exterior is richly and peculiarly ornamented, to show the progress of fictile art. The neighbouring towns of Stoke, Hanley and Longton are connected with Burslem by tramways. Burslem is mentioned in Domesday. Previously to 1885 it formed part of the parliamentary borough of Stoke, but it is now included in that of Hanley. It was included in the municipal borough of Stoke-on-Trent under an act of 1908.

BURTON, SIR FREDERICK WILLIAM (1816-1900), British painter and art connoisseur, the third son of Samuel Burton of Mungret, Co. Limerick, was born in Ireland in 1816. He was educated in Dublin, where his artistic studies were carried on with marked success under the direction of Mr Brocas, an able teacher, who foretold for the lad a distinguished career. That this estimate was not exaggerated was proved by Burton's immediate success in his profession. He was elected an associate of the Royal Hibernian Academy at the age of twenty-one and an academician two years later; and in 1842 he began to exhibit at the Royal Academy. A visit to Germany and Bavaria in 1851 was the first of a long series of wanderings in various parts of Europe, which gave him a profound and intimate knowledge of the works of the Old Masters, and prepared him admirably for the duties that he undertook in 1874 when he was appointed director of the British National Gallery in succession to Sir W. Boxall, R.A. During the twenty years that he held this post he was responsible for many important purchases, among them Leonardo da Vinci's "Virgin of the Rocks," Raphael's "Ansidei Madonna," Holbein's "Ambassadors," Van Dyck's equestrian portrait of Charles I., and the "Admiral Pulido Pareja," by Velasquez; and he added largely to the noted series of Early Italian pictures in the gallery. The number of acquisitions made to the collection during his period of office amounts to not fewer than 500. His own painting, most of which was in water-colour, had more attraction for experts than for the general public. He was elected an associate of the Royal Society of Painters in Water-Colours in 1855, and a full member in the following year. He resigned in 1870, and was re-elected as an honorary member in 1886. A knighthood was conferred on him in 1884, and the degree of LL.D. of Dublin in 1889. In his youth he had strong sympathy with the "Young Ireland Party," and was a close associate with some of its members. He died in Kensington on the 16th of March 1900.

BURTON, JOHN HILL (1809-1881), Scottish historical writer, the son of an officer in the army, was born at Aberdeen on the 22nd of August 1809. After studying at the university of his native city, he removed to Edinburgh, where he qualified for

the Scottish bar and practised as an advocate; but his progress was slow, and he eked out his narrow means by miscellaneous literary work. His Manual of the Law of Scotland (1839) brought him into notice; he joined Sir John Bowring in editing the works of Jeremy Bentham, and for a short time was editor of the Scotsman, which he committed to the cause of free trade. In 1846 he achieved high reputation by his Life of David Hume, based upon extensive and unused MS. material. In 1847 he wrote his biographies of Simon, Lord Lovat, and of Duncan Forbes, and in 1849 prepared for Chambers's Series manuals of political and social economy and of emigration. In the same year he lost his wife, whom he had married in 1844, and never again mixed freely with society, though in 1855 he married again. He devoted himself mainly to literature, contributing largely to the Scotsman and Blackwood, writing Narratives from Criminal Trials in Scotland (1852), Treatise on the Law of Bankruptcy in Scotland (1853), and publishing in the latter year the first volume of his History of Scotland, which was completed in 1870. A new and improved edition of the work appeared in 1873. Some of the more important of his contributions to Blackwood were embodied in two delightful volumes, The Book Hunter (1862) and The Scot Abroad (1864). He had in 1854 been appointed secretary to the prison board, an office which gave him entire pecuniary independence, and the duties of which he discharged most assiduously, notwithstanding his literary pursuits and the pressure of another important task assigned to him after the completion of his history, the editorship of the National Scottish Registers. Two volumes were published under his supervision. His last work, The History of the Reign of Queen Anne (1880), is very inferior to his History of Scotland. He died on the 10th of August 1881. Burton was pre-eminently a jurist and economist, and may be said to have been guided by accident into the path which led him to celebrity. It was his great good fortune to find abundant unused material for his Life of Hume, and to be the first to introduce the principles of historical research into the history of Scotland. All previous attempts had been far below the modern standard in these particulars, and Burton's history will always be memorable as marking an epoch. His chief defects as a historian are want of imagination and an undignified familiarity of style, which, however, at least preserves his history from the dulness by which lack of imagination is usually accompanied. His dryness is associated with a fund of dry humour exceedingly effective in its proper place, as in The Book Hunter. As a man he was loyal, affectionate, philanthropic and entirely estimable.

A memoir of Hill Burton by his wife was prefaced to an edition of The Book Hunter, which like his other works was published at Edinburgh (1882).

(R. G.)

BURTON, SIR RICHARD FRANCIS (1821-1890), British consul, explorer and Orientalist, was born at Barham House, Hertfordshire, on the 19th of March 1821. He came of the Westmorland Burtons of Shap, but his grandfather, the Rev. Edward Burton, settled in Ireland as rector of Tuam, and his father, Lieutenant-Colonel Joseph Netterville Burton, of the 36th Regiment, was an Irishman by birth and character. His mother was descended from the MacGregors, and he was proud of a remote drop of Bourbon blood piously believed to be derived from a morganatic union of the Grand Monarque. There were even those, including some of the Romany themselves, who saw gipsy written in his peculiar eyes as in his character, wild and resentful, essentially vagabond, intolerant of convention and restraint. His irregular education strengthened the inherited bias. A childhood spent in France and Italy, under scarcely any control, fostered the love of untrammelled wandering and a marvellous fluency in continental vernaculars. Such an education so little prepared him for academic proprieties, that when he entered Trinity College, Oxford, in October 1840, a criticism of his military moustache by a fellow-undergraduate was resented by a challenge to a duel, and Burton in various ways distinguished himself by such eccentric behaviour that rustication inevitably ensued. Nor was he much more in his element as a subaltern in the 18th Regiment of Bombay Native Infantry, which he joined at Baroda in October 1842. Discipline of any sort he abhorred, and the one recommendation of the East India Company's service in his eyes was that it offered opportunities for studying Oriental life and languages. He had begun Arabic without a master at Oxford, and worked in London at Hindustani under Forbes before he went out; in India he laboured indefatigably at the vernaculars, and his reward was an astonishingly rapid proficiency in Gujarati, Marathi, Hindustani, as well as Persian and Arabic. His appointment as an assistant in the Sind survey enabled him to mix with the people, and he frequently passed as a native in the bazaars and deceived his own munshi, to say nothing of his colonel and messmates. His wanderings in Sind were the apprenticeship for the pilgrimage to Mecca, and his seven years in India laid the foundations of his unparalleled familiarity with Eastern life and customs, especially among the lower classes. Besides government reports and contributions to the Asiatic Society, his Indian period produced four books, published after his return home: Scinde, or the Unhappy Valley (1851), Sindh and the Races that Inhabit the Valley of the Indus (1851), Goa and the Blue Mountains (1851), and Falconry in the Valley of the Indus (1852). None of these achieved popularity, but the account of Sind is remarkably vivid and faithful.