462 



B EATON BE AUCA1UE. 



of a saint. No person can be beatified till fifty years 

 after his or her death. All certificates or attestations of 

 virtues and miracles, the necessary qualifications for 

 siintship, are examined by the congregation of rites. 

 Tliis examination often continues for several years; 

 after which his holiness derives the beatification. 

 The corpse and relics of the future saint are from 

 thenceforth exposed to the veneration of all good 

 Christians ; his imnge is crowned \viih rays, and a 

 particular office is set apart for him; but his body 

 and relics are not carried in procession. Indulgen- 

 ce s, likewise, and remissions of sins, are granted on 

 i. it- day of his beatification ; which, though not so 

 pompous, as tliat of canonization, is, however, very 

 splendid. Beatification differs from canonization in 

 tills, that the pope does not act as a judge in determin- 

 ing the suite of the beatified, but only grants a privi- 

 lege to certain persons to honour him by a particular 

 NUgiOQI worship, without incurring the penalty of 

 superstitious worshippers ; but, in canonization, the 

 pope speaks as a judge, and determines, ex cathedra, 

 upon ilie state of the canonized. Beatification was 

 introduced when it was thought proper to delay the 

 canonization of saints, for the greater assurance of 

 the truth of the steps taken in the procedure. Some 

 particular orders of monks have assumed to them- 

 selves the power of beatification. Thus Octavia 

 Melchiorica was beatified by the Dominicans. See 

 Canonization. 



BEATON, David, archbishop of St Andrews, and 

 cardinal, was born in 1494. Pope Paul III. raised 

 him to the rank of cardinal in December, 1538; and, 

 being employed by James V. in negotiating his mar- 

 riage at the court of France, he was there consecrat- 

 ed bishop of Mirepoix. Soon after his instalment 

 as archbishop, he promoted a furious persecution of 

 the reformers in Scotland ; but the king's death put 

 a stop, for a time, to his arbitrary proceedings, he 

 being then excluded from affairs of government, and 

 confined. He raised, however, so strong a party, 

 that, upon the coronation of the young queen Mary, 

 he was admitted into the council, made chancellor, 

 and received a commission as legate a latere from 

 Rome. He now began to renew his persecution of 

 heretics, and among the rest, of the famous Protes- 

 tant preacher George Wishart, whose sufferings at 

 the stake he vieweo from his window, with apparent 

 exultation. At length a conspiracy was formed 

 against him, and he was assassinated at his own 

 castle of St Andrews, on the 29th May, 1546. He 

 united with great talents equally great vices, and left 

 several children, the fruit of open concubinage. 



BEATSON, Robert, a laborious miscellaneous writer, 

 born at Dysart, in Scotland, 1742 ; died at Edin- 

 burgh, 1818. He followed the military profession, 

 and served as lieutenant in the attack on Martinique, 

 and the taking of Guadaloupe. He afterwards, in 

 his latter years, held the situation of barrack-mas- 

 ter at Aberdeen. His publications were, " A Politi- 

 cal Index to the Histories of Great Britain and Ire- 

 land;" "Naval and Military Memoirs of Great 

 Britain," 1790, 3 vols., 8vo, 2d edit. 1804, 6 vols. ; 

 " View of the Memorable Action of the 27th July, 

 1778," 1791, 8vo ; " Essay on the comparative ad- 

 vantages of vertical and horizontal Windmills," 1798, 

 8vo ; " Chronological Register of both Houses of Par- 

 liament, from 1706 to 1807," 1807,3 vols., Svo. 



BEATTIE, James, LL. D., a pleasing poet and miscel- 

 laneous writer, was born at Lawrencekirk, in the coun- 

 ty of Kincardine, in 1735. He lost his father when he 

 was only seven years of age, but was placed early at 

 the only school his birth-place afforded, whence he 

 was removed to Marischal college, Aberdeen. He 

 there studied Greek under the principal, T. Blackwell, 

 and made a general proficiency in every branch of edu- 



cation, except mathematics. In 1753, he obtained 

 the degree of A. M., and accepted the office of 

 schoolmaster and parish clerk to the parish of For- 

 doun, looking forward to the church of Scotland as 

 his principal prospect, for which rcaso'n he still at- 

 tenoed, (luring winter, the divinity lectures at Ma- 

 ri>elial college. In June, 1758, these views were 

 somewhat changed, by the attainment of the situation 

 of one of the masters of the grammar-school ot 

 Aberdeen. In 1761, he published a volume of 

 poems, which were received favourably, but which 

 lie subsequently thought very little of, and endea- 

 voured to buy up. They nevertheless procured him 

 some powerful friends, whose patronage obtained 

 him the appointment of professor of montFphtlotophy 

 and logic at Marischal college. In 17(>;>, lie pub- 

 lished a poem, the Judgment of Paris, (Ho,) which 

 proved a failure, although it was afterwards added 

 to a new edition of his poems, in 176(3. 



The work which procured him the greatest fame 

 was his Essay on Truth, which first appeared in 177O. 

 It was so popular, that, in four years, five large edi- 

 tions were sold; and it was translated into several 

 foreign languages. Among other marks of respect, 

 the university of Oxford conferred on the author the 

 degree of LL. D. ; and George III. honoured him, 

 on his visit to London, with a private conference and 

 a pension. He was also solicited to enter the church 

 of England by flattering proposals from the arch- 

 bishop' of York and the bishop of London; which 

 proposals he declined, lest his opponents should 

 attribute the change to self-interest. The popularity 

 of this celebrated essay, which WAS written in oppo- 

 sition to the prevalent scepticism of Hume and 

 others, was principally owing to its easiness of style, 

 and to a mode of treating the subject, calculated for 

 the meridian of slight scholarship and medium intel- 

 lect. This is often a great source of immediate cele- 

 brity ; but, thus produced, it is usually as transitory 

 as spontaneous, which has proved the case in the, 

 present instance. 



A few months after the appearance of the Essay 

 on Truth, he published the first book of the Minstrel 

 (4to), and, in 1774, the second ; which pleasing poem 

 is, indisputably, the work by which he will be the 

 longest remembered. To a splendid edition of his 

 Essay on Truth, published, by subscription, in 1776, 

 he added some miscellaneous dissertations on Poe.ry 

 and Music, Laughter and Ludicrous Composition, &c. 

 In 1783, he published Dissertations, Moral and Cri- 

 tical (4to) ; and in 1786, appeared his Evidences of 

 the Christian Religion (2 vols. 12mo). In 1790, he 

 published the first volume of his Elements of Moral 

 Science, the second of which followed in 1793 ; nnd 

 to the latter was appended a dissertation against the 

 slave-trade. His last publication was an Account of 

 the Life, Character, and Writings of his eldest son, 

 James Henry Beattie, an amiable and promising 

 young man, who died at the age of twenty-two, in 

 1790. This great affliction was followed, in 1796, 

 by the equally premature death of his youngest and 

 only surviving son, in his eighteenth year; which 

 losses, added to the melancholy loss of reason by his 

 wife, wholly subdued his constitution; and, after 

 two paralytic strokes, he died at Aberdeen, in August, 

 1803. Beattie was a religious and an amiable man, 

 but constitutionally more calculated for a poet than 

 a philosopher, and for a pleader than a controver- 

 sialist. He was, however, a respectable, if not a 

 strong writer, and might have been thought more of 

 at present, had he been thought less oC heretofore. 



BEAUCAJRE ; a small, well-built, commercial city 

 of France, with 8000 inhabitants (Ion. 4 43' E. ; 

 lat. 43 48' N.), in Lower Languedoc, now in the 

 department of the Card, on the right bank of the 



