The Bearded Master.  Soc’rates was so called by Persius (B.C. 468-399).

Handsome Beard, Baldwin IV. earl of Flanders (1160-1186).

John the Bearded, John Mayo, the German painter, whose beard touched the ground when he stood upright.

BEARNAIS (Le), Henri IV. of France, so called from his native province, Le Bearr. (1553-1610).

BEATON, the artist of Every Other Week, the story of which periodical is told in W. D. Howells’s A Hazard of New Fortunes (1889).

His name was Beaton—­Angus Beaton.  His father was a Scotchman, but Beaton was born in Syracuse, New York, and it had taken only three years to obliterate many traces of native and ancestral manner in him.  He wore his thick beard cut shorter than his moustache, and a little pointed; he stood with his shoulders well thrown back, and with a lateral curve of his person when he talked about art which would alone have carried conviction, even if he had not had a thick, dark bang coming almost to the brows of his mobile gray eyes, and had not spoken English with quick, staccato impulses, so as to give it the effect of epigrammatic and sententious French.

BE’ATRICE (3 syl.), a child eight years old, to whom Dante at the age of nine was ardently attached.  She was the daughter of Folco Portina’ri, a rich citizen of Florence.  Beatrice married Simoni de Bardi, and died before she was twenty-four years old (1266-1290).  Dante married Gemma Donati, and his marriage was a most unhappy one.  His love for Beatrice remained after her decease.  She was the fountain of his poetic inspiration, and in his Divina Commedia he makes her his guide through paradise.

Dante’s Beatrice and Milton’s Eve Were not drawn from their spouses you conceive.  Byron, Don Juan, iii. 10 (1820).

(Milton, who married Mary Powell, of Oxfordshire, was as unfortunate in his choice as Dante.)

Beatrice, wife of Ludov’ico Sforza.

Beatrice, daughter of Ferdinando king of Naples, sister of Leonora duchess of Ferrara, and wife of Mathias Corvi’nus of Hungary.

Beatrice, niece of Leonato governor of Messina, lively and light-hearted, affectionate and impulsive.  Though wilful she is not wayward, though volatile she is not unfeeling, though teeming with wit and gaiety she is affectionate and energetic.  At first she dislikes Benedick, and thinks him a flippant conceited coxcomb; but overhearing a conversation between her cousin Hero and her gentlewoman, in which Hero bewails that Beatrice should trifle with such deep love as that of Benedick, and should scorn so true and good a gentleman, she cries, “Sits the wind thus? then, farewell, contempt.  Benedick, love on; I will requite you.”  This conversation of Hero’s was a mere ruse, but Benedick had been caught by a similar trick played by Claudio, don Pedro, and Leonato.  The result was they sincerely loved each other, and were married.—­Shakespeare, Much Ado about Nothing (1600).