Chapter Beauty and the Beast to Bees of B by Brewer's Readers Handbook

Beauty and the Beast to Bees

Beauty and the Beast (La Belle et la Bête), from Les Contes Marines of Mde. Villeneuvre (1740), the most beautiful of all nursery tales. A young and lovely woman saved her father by putting herself in the power of a frightful but kind-hearted monster, whose respectful affection and melancholy overcame her aversion to his ugliness, and she consented to become his bride. Being thus freed from enchantment, the monster assumed his proper form and became a young and handsome prince. Well known in Italy. Modernized by Miss. Thackeray, in her Two Old Friends, etc. (1868).

The moral is that love gives beauty to the eyes of the lover.

Beauty of Buttermere, Mary Robinson, who married John Hat-field, a heartless impostor executed for forgery at Carlisle, in 1803.

Beaux’ Stratagem (The), by Geo. 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 marriages forms no part of the play; all we are told is that she returns to the roof of her brother, sir Charles Freeman (1707).

Bed of Ware, a large bed, capable of holding twelve persons. Tradition assigns it to Warwick, the “king- maker.” It was 12 feet square; but in 1895 it was shortened 3 feet. It is now (1897) at Rye House, where it is exhibited at 2d. a head. Alluded to by Shakespeare in Twelfth Night, act iii. sc. 2.

The bed of Og, king of Bashan, was 9 cubits by 4. If a cubit was 18 inches, it was 131/2 feet by 6. It was made of iron.

It seems incredible that the cubit was 22 inches. (See under GIANTS (Goliath).)

In the Great Exhibition of 1851 (London), a state bed from Vienna was exhibited, 11 feet by 9. It was 13 feet high, and made of zebra wood.

There is a huge bed the White Hard inn, Scole, Norfolk. (See Notes and Queries, August 8, 1896, p. 113.)

Bede (Adam), an excellent novel by George Eliot (Mrs. T. W. Cross, née Evans) (1859).

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

Bedegrain (Castle of), in Sherwood. It was a royal castle, belonging to king Arthur.

Beder [“the full moon”], son of Gulnarê, the young king of P ersia. 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, who fell in love with Giauharê. (For the rest of the tale, see Giauhare.)—Arabian Nights (“Beder and Giauharê”).

Beder or Bedr, a valley noted for the victory gained by Mahomet, in which “he was assisted by 3000 angels led by Gabriel mounted on his horse Haïzum.”—Sale: Al Koran.

Bedivere (Sir) or Bediver, 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.