farmer of Grand Pre, in Acadia, father of Evangeline ("the pride of the village").  He was a stalwart man of seventy, hale as an oak, but his hair was white as snow.  Colonel Winslow in 1713 informed the villagers of Grand Pre that the French had formally ceded their village to the English, that George II. now confiscated all their lands, houses, and cattle, and that the people, amounting to nearly 2000, were to be “exiled into other lands without delay.”  The people assembled on the sea-shore; old Benedict Bellefontaine sat to rest himself, and fell dead in a fit.  The old priest buried him in the sand, and the exiles left their village homes forever.—­Longfellow, Evangeline (1849).

BEN’ENGEL’I (Cid Hamet), the hypothetical Moorish chronicler from whom Cervantes pretends he derived the account of the adventures of don Quixote.

The Spanish commentators ... have discovered that cid Hamet Benengeli is after all no more than an Arabic version of the name of Cervantes himself. Hamet is a Moorish prefix, and Benengeli signifies “son of a stag,” in Spanish Cervanteno.—­Lockhart.

Benengeli (Cid Hamet), Thomas Babington lord Macaulay.  His signature in his Fragment of an Ancient Romance (1826). (See Cid, etc.)

BENEV’OLUS, in Cowper’s Task, is John Courtney Throckmorton, of Weston Underwood.

BENJAMIN PENGUILLAN. The Pioneers, by J. F. Cooper.  A servant in the family of Judge Temple.  His sobriquet is “Ben Pump.” (1823.)

BENJIE (Little), or Benjamin Colthred, a spy employed by Cristal Nixon, the agent of Redgauntlet.—­Sir W. Scott, Redgauntlet (time, George III.).

BEN’NET (Brother), a monk at St. Mary’s convent.—­Sir W. Scott, The Monastery (time, Elizabeth).

Ben’net (Mrs.), a demure, intriguing woman in Amelia, a novel by Fielding (1751).

BEN’OITON (Madame), a woman who has been the ruin of the family by neglect.  In the “famille Benoiton” the constant question was “Ou est Madame?” and the invariable answer “Elle est sortie” At the denouement the question was asked again, and the answer was varied thus, “Madam has been at home, but is gone out again.”—­La Famille Benoiton.

BEN’SHEE, the domestic spirit or demon of certain Irish families.  The benshee takes an interest in the prosperity of the family to which it is attached, and intimates to it approaching disaster or death by wailings or shrieks.  The Scotch Bodach Glay or “grey spectre” is a similar spirit.  Same as Banshee (which see).

  How oft has the Benshee cried! 
  How oft has death untied
  Bright links that glory wove,
  Sweet bonds entwined by love!

  T. Moore, Irish Melodies, ii.

BENVO’LIO, nephew to Montague, and Romeo’s friend.  A testy, litigious fellow, who would quarrel about goat’s wool or pigeon’s milk.  Mercutio says to him, “Thou hast quarrelled with a man for coughing in the street, because he hath wakened thy dog that hath lain asleep in the sun” (act iii. sc. 1),—­Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet (1598).