BEAUX’ STRATAGEM (The), by George Farquhar.  Thomas viscount Aimwell and his friend Archer (the two beaux), having run through all their money, set out fortune-hunting, and come to Lichfield as “master and man.”  Aimwell pretends to be very unwell, and as lady Bountiful’s hobby is tending the sick and playing the leech, she orders him to be removed to her mansion.  Here he and Dorinda (daughter of lady Bountiful) fall in love with each other, and finally marry.  Archer falls in love with Mrs. Sullen, the wife of squire Sullen, who had been married fourteen months but agreed to a divorce on the score of incompatibility of tastes and temper.  This marriage forms no part of the play; all we are told is that she returns to the roof of her brother, sir Charles Freeman (1707).

BEDE (Adam and Seth), brothers, carpenters.  Seth loves the fair gospeller Dinah Morris, but she marries Adam.—­George Eliot, Adam Bede.

Bede (Cuthbert), the Rev. Edward Bradley, author of The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green, an Oxford Freshman (1857).

BED’ER ("the full moon"), son of Gulna’re (3 syl.), the young king of Persia.  As his mother was an under-sea princess, he was enabled to live under water as well as on land.  Beder was a young man of handsome person, quick parts, agreeable manners, and amiable disposition.  He fell in love with Giauha’re, daughter of the king of Samandal, the most powerful of the under-sea empires, but Giauhare changed him into a white bird with red beak and red legs.  After various adventures, Beder resumed his human form and married Giauhare.—­Arabian Nights ("Beder and Giauhare").

BED’IVERE (Sir) or BED’IVER, king Arthur’s butler and a knight of the Round Table.  He was the last of Arthur’s knights, and was sent by the dying king to throw his sword Excalibur into the mere.  Being cast in, it was caught by an arm “clothed in white samite,” and drawn into the stream.—­Tennyson, Morte d’Arthur.

Tennyson’s Morte d’Arthur is a very close and in many parts a verbal rendering of the same tale in sir Thomas Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, iii. 168 (1470).

BEDLOE (Augustus), an eccentric Virginian, an opium-eater, and easily hypnotized, in Edgar Allan Poe’s Tale of the Ragged Mountains (1846).

BEDOTT (Widow). (See HEZEKIAH BEDOTT.)

BED’OUINS [Bed’.winz], nomadic tribes of Arabia.  In common parlance, “the homeless street poor.”  Thus gutter-children are called “Bedouins.”

BED’REDEEN’ HAS’SAN of Baso’ra, son of Nour’edeen’ Ali grand vizier of Basora, and nephew to Schems’edeen’ Mohammed vizier of Egypt.  His beauty was transcendent and his talents of the first order.  When twenty years old his father died, and the sultan, angry with him for keeping from court, confiscated all his goods, and would have seized Bedredeen if he had not made