BRYANT, WILLIAM CULLEN (1794-1878).—­Poet, was b. at Cummington, Massachusetts, the s. of a doctor.  His ancestors on both sides came over in the Mayflower.  His first poem was Thanatopsis (1817), which was greeted as the best poem produced in America up to that time.  After being a lawyer for some time he was induced to exchange law for journalism, and acted as ed. of various periodicals.  Among his best known poems are Lines to a Water-fowl, The Rivulet, The West Wind, The Forest Hymn, The Fringed Gentian, etc.  His muse is tender and graceful, pervaded by a contemplative melancholy, and a love of solitude and the silence of the woods.  Though he was brought up to admire Pope, and in his early youth imitated him, he was one of the first American poets to throw off his influence.  He had a high sense of duty, was a prominent and patriotic citizen, and enjoyed the esteem and even the reverence of his fellow-countrymen.  B. also produced a blank-verse translation of the Iliad and the Odyssey.

BRYDGES, SIR SAMUEL EGERTON (1762-1837).—­Bibliographer and genealogist, ed. at Camb., was called to the Bar in 1787.  He wrote some novels and poems, now forgotten, but rendered valuable service by his bibliographical publications, Censura Literaria, Titles and Opinions of Old English Books (10 vols. 1805-9), his editions of E. Phillips’s Theatrum Poetarum Anglicanorum (1800) Collin’s Peerage of England (1812), and of many rare Elizabethan authors.  He was made a baronet in 1814.  He d. at Geneva.

BUCHANAN, GEORGE (1506-1582).—­Historian and scholar b. at Killearn, Stirlingshire, of poor parents, was sent in 1519, with the help of an uncle, to the Univ. of Paris, where he first came in contact with the two great influences of the age, the Renaissance and the Reformation.  His uncle having died, he had to leave Paris, and after seeing some military service, returned to Scotland, and in 1524 went to St. Andrews, where he studied under John Major (q.v.).  Two years later he found means to return to Paris, where he graduated at the Scots Coll. in 1528, and taught grammar in the Coll. of St. Barbe.  Returning to Scotland in 1536 with a great reputation for learning he was made by James V. tutor to one of his illegitimate sons, and incited by him to satirise the vices of the clergy, which he did in two Latin poems, Somnium and Franciscanus.  This stirred the wrath of the ecclesiastical powers to such a heat that, the King withholding his protection, he was obliged in 1539 to save himself by flight first to England and then to France, where he remained until 1547 teaching Latin at Bordeaux and Paris.  In the latter year he was invited to become a prof. at Coimbra, where he was imprisoned by the Inquisition as a heretic from 1549-51, and wrote the greater part of his magnificent translation of the Psalms into