81 



BENEFIT SOCIETIES. 



BENGALI LANGUAGE. 



before the bishop or his deputy ; there was a jury of twelve persons 

 who gave their verdict on oath ; witnesses were examined on oath 

 the prisoner answered on oath ; and twelve compurgators swore tha 

 they believed him. On this occasion, though the prisoner had beei 

 convicted at common law by the clearest evidence, or had even con 

 fessed his guilt, he was almost invariably acquitted. The whole pro 

 ceeding before the ordinary is characterised by Chief Justice Hobart a 

 the beginning of the 17th century, "as turning the solemn trial o 

 truth by oath into a ceremonious and formal lye." (Hobart's ' Reports, 

 p. 291.) To remove this discreditable abuse of the forms of justice 

 the statute 18 Eliz. c. 7, enacted, that in all cases after an offender liar 

 been allowed his clergy, he should not be delivered to the ordinary, birl 

 be at once discharged by the court, with a provision that he might be 

 detained in prison for any time not exceeding a year, at the discretion 

 of the judge before whom he was tried. 



By various statutes passed in the course of the last century, the 

 court before which an offender was tried and admitted to his clergy 

 were empowered to commute the burning in the hand for transporta- 

 tion, imprisonment, or whipping ; and subsequently to the passing oi 

 these statutes it is believed that no instance has occurred of a convict 

 being burned in the hand. 



The practice of calling upon a convicted person to read in order to prove 

 to the court his title to the benefit of clergy continued until a compara- 

 tively late period. A case is mentioned in Kelynge's ' Reports,' p. 51, 

 which occurred in 1666, where the bishop's commissary had deceived the 

 court by reporting, contrary to the fact, that a prisoner could read ; 

 upon which Chief Justice Kelynge rebuked him severely, telling him 

 " that he had unpreached more that day than he could preach up 

 again in many days," and fined him five marks. At length the statute 

 of the 5th of Anne, c. 6, enacted that the benefit of clergy should be 

 granted to all those who are entitled to it without requiring them to 

 read ; and thus the " idle ceremony of reading," as Mr. Justice Foster 

 justly terms it, was finally abolished. Till comparatively recently, 

 every felon on conviction for a capital offence was accordingly told to 

 go down on his knees and " pray his clergy," in the absence of which 

 ceremony, it was supposed that the judge could not avoid passing 

 sentence of death. 



The absurd and perplexing distinctions which the continuance of 

 this antiquated and worn-out clerical privilege had introduced, having 

 become extremely detrimental to the due administration of justice, it 

 was abolished by statute 7 & 8 Geo. IV., c. 28. Doubts having been 

 raised, whether the provision of 1 Edw. IV., c. 2, retaining the benefit 

 <f clergy to lords of parliament and peers of the realm, might not still 

 )'! in force, a subsequent statute put its entire abolition beyond 

 question, 4 & 5 Viet. c. 22. The subject is now of no practical import- 

 ance; but those who may be inch'ned to pursue it as a matter of 

 historical curiosity may find the following references useful : Black- 

 stone's * Commentaries,' vol. iv. chap. 28 ; Hale's ' Pleas of the Crown,' 

 part ii. c. 45 ; Barrington's ' Observations on Ancient Statutes;' Hobart's 

 ' Reports,' p. 288. 



BENF.FIT SOCIETIES. [FRIENDLY SOCIETIES.] 

 BENEVOLENCE, a species of forced loan or gratuity, and one of 

 the various arbitrary modes of obtaining supplies of money, which, in 

 violation of Magna Charta, were formerly resorted to by the kings of 

 England. The name implies a free contribution, with or without the 

 condition of repayment ; but so early as the reign of Edward IV. the 

 practice had grown into an intolerable grievance. That king's lavish 

 liberality and extravagance induced him to levy benevolences very 

 frequently ; and one of the wisest and most popular acts of his 

 successor, Richard III., was to procure the passing of a statute (cap. 2) 

 in the only parliament assembled during his reign, by which benevo- 

 lences were declared to be illegal ; they were denounced as " new and 

 unlawful inventions," and as " the cause of great penury and wretched- 

 hut this statute did not clearly forbid the solicitation of volun- 

 tary gifts, and Richard himself afterwards violated its provisions. 

 Henry VII. exacted benevolences, which were enforced in a very 

 "-.-live way. Archbishop Morton, who solicited merchants and 

 others to contribute, employed a piece of logic which obtained the 

 name of " Morton's fork." He told those who lived handsomely, that 

 their opulence was manifested by their expenditure ; and those who 

 lived economically, that their f rugali ty must have made them rich ; 

 so that no class could evade him. Cardinal Wolsey, among some other 

 daring projects to raise money for Henry VIII., proposed a benevo- 

 lence, which the citizens of London objected to, alleging the statute of 

 Richard III. ; but the answer was, that the act of a usurper could not 

 oblige a lawful sovereign. Elizabeth also " sent out her privy seals," 

 for so the circulars demanding a benevolence were termed ; but though 

 individuals wrm committed to prison for refusing to contribute, she 

 repaid the sums exacted. Lotd Coke, in the reign of James I., is said 

 to have at first declared that the king could not solicit a benevolence, 

 and then to have retracted his opinion, and pronounced upon its 

 legality. 



The subject underwent a searching investigation during the reign of 

 Charles I., as connected with the limitation of the king's prerogative. 

 Writs were issued under the privy seal for the collection of a general 

 loan from every individual, and the collectors had private instructions 

 to require not lens than a certain proportion of each man's property in 

 land or goods, and had extraordinary powers given them, one being to 

 ARTS AND SCI. DIV. VOL. II. 



remove any person of station and local authority from the commission 

 of the peace, if he enjoyed that dignity. The name of loan given to 

 this tax was a fiction which the most ignorant could not but detect. 

 Many of the common people were impressed to serve in the navy for 

 refusing to pay : and a number of the gentry were imprisoned. The 

 detention of five knights, who sued the Court of King's Bench for their 

 writ of Habeas Corpus, gave rise to a most important question respect- 

 ing the freedom of English subjects from arbitrary arrest ; and out of 

 the discussion which then arose, and the contests respecting the levy- 

 ing of ship-money, &c., came the distinct assertion, and ultimate 

 establishment of the great principle of English liberty. The 13 Car. 

 II. stat. 1, c. 4, provides for a voluntary present to his majesty, with a 

 proviso, however, that no aids of that nature can be but by authority 

 of parliament. The Bill of Rights, in 1688, repeats what Magna 

 Charta declared in 1215, that levying of money for, or to the use of 

 the crown, by pretence of prerogative, without grant of parliament, 

 for longer time, or in any other manner than the same is or shall be 

 granted, is illegal. 



(Hallam's Constitutional History of England, and Knight's Popular 

 History of England.) 



BENGALI LANGUAGE. Among the numerous vernacular dialects 

 now spoken in northern India, and apparently descended for the most 

 part from the ancient classical language of the country, the Sanscrit, 

 few possess stronger claims upon the attention of the linguist as well 

 as the politician than the Bengali, the colloquial medium of a popula- 

 tion of more than twenty millions, spread over a territory of about 

 100,000 square miles. The alphabet employed by the natives in 

 writing, and adopted by Europeans in printing books in the Bengali 

 language, is evidently borrowed from the Devanagari, the character 

 peculiarly appropriated to fix the Sanscrit language : both comprise 

 sixteen vowels and diphthongs, and thirty-three consonants. The 

 resemblance in form which the Bengali bears to the Devanagari 

 character is nearly the same as that of the current English hand- 

 writing to the form of letters employed in printing. The ground-work 

 of the Bengali language is Sanscrit, with a small addition of words 

 which cannot be traced to that source. But the refined system of 

 grammatical inflexions, which constitute so prominent a characteristic 

 of the Sanscrit language, has in Bengali entirely disappeared ; and the 

 want of terminations marking the eases and numbers of the noun, or 

 the persons and tenses of the verb, is supplied by particles and other 

 auxiliary words, often rather clumsily subjoined (hardly ever prefixed) 

 to the mutilated stems of Sanscrit words, and these particles to some 

 extent supply the place of articles ; placed after a noun or adjective it 

 is definite, before either it marks it as indefinite. The Bengali has, 

 however, preserved to a very considerable extent the faculty, so con- 

 spicuous in Sanscrit, of forming compound words, and recent writers 

 have largely availed themselves of this advantage, especially in treatises 

 on Hindoo law and on philosophical subjects : we allude especially to 

 the Bengali/ translation of the second book of the ' Mitaksharfl, ' (a 

 Sanscrit law-book of high authority), published by Lakshmi Ndrayana 

 Nyayalankara (in 1824, 8vo.), and to that of the ' Nyayadarsana," by 

 Kasinatha Tarkopanchanana. 



It does not appear that the Bengali language \va ever employed for 

 literary purposes prior to the 16th century. The earliest Bengal! work 

 extant is the ' Chaitanya-Charitamrita," by Krishnadasa, a disciple of 

 the Vaishnava fanatic Chaitanya, the founder of a new mode of the 

 worship of Krishna, who lived towards the close of the 15th century. 

 This work, which is almost as much Sanscrit as Bengali, was till within 

 very recent times followed by only a few compositions, the most im- 

 portant of which were the poetical versions, from Sanscrit into Bengali, of 

 the ' Mahabharata,' by Kasidasa, and of the ' Ramayana,' by KritivSsa; 

 these works are very popular in Bengal, and are frequently recited at 

 the houses of Hindoos during several days, before assemblies of two or 

 three hundred auditors. Khemananda is named as the author of a 

 tiymn called ' Manasd-mangala,' which is still recited at the festivals in 

 aonour of the goddess Manasft, in the western provinces of Bengal. A 

 ;reatise on arithmetic, written in verse, is ascribed to Subhaucara : 

 ;his work, and a treatise called ' Gurudakshina,' appear to have been 

 ;he only elementary books composed by natives of Bengal for the 

 purposes of education. A new epoch in Bengali literature was begun 

 ,vith the foundation of the college of Fort William near Calcutta, and 

 with the labours of Dr. Carey and his colleagues the Serampore mis- 

 ionaries, to whom, according to the expression of a native author, may 

 ascribed " the revival of the Bengali language, its improvement, and 

 u fact its establishment as a language." The Bible and various 

 works of modern literature were translated into Bengali, and printed : 



Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. At the same time various elementary 

 works were printed, partly by the mission press at Serampore, and 

 >artly under the superintendence of the Calcutta School-Book Society. 

 An impulse was thus given to the cultivation of the language among 

 Europeans as well as among the natives, and the taste of the latter for 

 reading is attested by the fact that several newspapers in the Bengali 

 anguage are circulated in Calcutta and its vicinity ; the extension of 

 he means of education have been mentioned under BENGAL, in GKOG. 

 )IV. A Dictionary in English and Bengali, translated from Todd'a 



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