BANTAM (Angela Cyrus), grand-master of the ceremonies at “Ba-ath,” and a very mighty personage in the opinion of the elite of Bath.—­C.  Dickens, The Pickwick Papers (1836).

BAP, a contraction of Bap’liomet, i.e. Mahomet.  An imaginary idol or symbol which the Templars were accused of employing in their mysterious religious rites.  It was a small human figure cut in stone, with two heads, one male and the other female, but all the rest of the figure was female.  Specimens still exist.

BAP’TES (2 syl.), priests of the goddess Cotytto, whose midnight orgies were so obscene as to disgust even the very goddess of obscenity. (Greek, bapto, “to baptize,” because these priests bathed themselves in the most effeminate manner.)

BAPTIS’TA, a rich gentleman of Padua, father of Kathari’na “the shrew,” and Bianca.—­Shakespeare, Taming of the Shrew (1594).

BAPTISTI DAMIOTTI, a Paduan quack, who shows in the enchanted mirror a picture representing the clandestine marriage and infidelity of sir Philip Forester.—­Sir W. Scott, Aunt Margaret’s Mirror (time, William III.).

BAR’ABAS, the faithful servant of Ealph Lascours, captain of the Uran’ia. His favorite expression is “I am afraid;” but he always acts most bravely when he is afraid. (See BARRABAS.)—­E.  Stirling, The Orphan of the Frozen Sea (1856).

BAR’ADAS (Count), the king’s favorite, first gentleman of the chamber, and one of the conspirators to dethrone Louis XIII., kill Richelieu, and place the duc d’Orleans on the throne of France.  Baradas loved Julie, but Julie married the chevalier Adrien de Mauprat.  When Richelieu fell into disgrace, the king made count Baradas his chief minister, but scarcely had he so done when a despatch was put into his hand revealing the conspiracy, and Richelieu ordered Baradas’ instant arrest.—­Lord Lytton, Richelieu (1839).

BARAK EL HADGI, the fakir, an emissary from the court of Hyder Ali.—­Sir W. Scott, The Surgeon’s Daughter (time, George II.).

BARBARA, the widowed heroine whose vacillations of devotion to her buried husband and the living cousin who might be his twin, furnish the motif for Amelie Rives’s story, The Quick or the Dead? (1888).

BARBARA FLOYD, lonely-hearted wife in George Fleming’s (Julia C. Fletcher) novel, The Head of Medusa.  The scene of the story is laid in modern Rome; Barbara, married to an Italian nobleman, has an inner and purer life with which the corruptions of the gay capital meddle not.—­(1880.)

BARBARA FRIETCHIE, heroic old woman of Frederick, Maryland, who took up the flag the men had hauled down at the command of Stonewall Jackson.—­John Greenleaf Whittier, Barbara Frietchie (1864).

  Barbara Frietchie’s work is o’er
  And the Rebel rides on his raids no more.

  Honor to her! and let a tear
  Fall, for her sake, on Stonewall’s bier.