BASHABA, sachem in J. G.L.  Whittier’s poem, The Bridal of Pennacock.  His beautiful daughter, scorned by the chief to whom Bashaba gave her in marriage, and detained against her will by her angry father, steals away by night in a canoe and IS drowned in a vain attempt

  To seek the wigwam of her chief once more.

BASHFUL MAN (The), a comic drama by

W. T. Moncrieff.  Edward Blushington, a young man just come into a large fortune, is so bashful and shy that life is a misery to him.  He dines at Friendly Hall, and makes all sorts of ridiculous blunders.  His college chum, Frank Friendly, sends word to say that he and his sister Dinah, with sir Thomas and lady Friendly, will dine with him at Blushington House.  After a few glasses of wine, Edward loses his shyness, makes a long speech, and becomes the accepted suitor of Dinah Friendly.

BASIL, the blacksmith of Grand Pre, in Acadia (now Nova Scotia), and father of Gabriel the betrothed of Evangeline.  When, the colony was driven into exile in 1713 by George II., Basil settled in Louisiana, and greatly prospered; but his son led a wandering life, looking for Evangeline, and died in Pennsylvania of the plague.—­Longfellow, Evangeline (1849).

BASIL MARCH, a clever, cynical, and altogether charming man of letters who takes one of the leading parts in William Dean Howells’s Their Wedding Journey.  A Chance Acquaintance, and A Hazard of New Fortunes.

BA’SILE (2 syl.), a calumniating, niggardly bigot in Le Mariage de Figaro, and again in Le Barbier de Seville, both by Beaumarchais.  Basile and Tartuffe are the two French incarnations of religious hypocrisy.  The former is the clerical humbug, and the latter the lay religious hypocrite.  Both deal largely in calumny, and trade in slander.

BASILIS’CO, a bully and a braggart, in Solyman and Perseda (1592).  Shakespeare has made Pistol the counterpart of Basilisco.

  Knight, knight, good mother, Basilisco-like.

  Shakespeare, King John, act i. sc. 1 (1596).

(That is, “my boasting like Basilisco has made me a knight, good mother.”)

BASILISK, supposed to kill with its gaze the person who looked on it.  Thus Henry VI. says to Suffolk, “Come, basilisk, and kill the innocent gazer with thy sight.”

  Natus in ardente Lydiae basiliscus arena,
  Vulnerat aspectu, luminibusque nocet.

  Mantuanus.

BASILIUS, a neighbor of Quiteria, whom he loved from childhood, but when grown up the father of the lady forbade him the house, and promised Quiteria in marriage to Camacho, the richest man of the vicinity.  On their way to church they passed Basilius, who had fallen on his sword, and all thought he was at the point of death.  He prayed Quiteria to marry him, “for his soul’s peace,” and as it was deemed a mere ceremony, they were married in due form.  Up then started the wounded man, and showed that the stabbing was only a ruse, and the blood that of a sheep from the slaughter-house.  Camacho gracefully accepted the defeat, and allowed the preparations for the general feast to proceed.