withstanding that one of his tenets was that the time was at hand when there should be but one sheepfold on the earth, whereof the pope should be the only shepherd, his general doctrine was considered so dangerous by the inquisition at Rome, that proceedings were taken against him, which obliged him to retreat to Milan. Here he organized a formidable confederacy, which might have even served his purpose of usurping the government of the city, if its existence had not been prematurely betrayed to the authorities. On the failure of this audacious scheme, of which the Roman inquisition exhibited its detestation by burning him in effigy, Borri declaring, it is said, that he never felt so cold as on the occasion of his being burnt, fled to Strasburg, afterwards to Amsterdam, and then to Hamburg. His subsequent career was partly that of a vulgar thief, and partly that of an alchemist of the Cagliostro school. He was at length delivered to the Austrian emperor, who made a gift of him to the pope. He was sentenced to perpetual confinement. His death occurred in the castle of St. Angelo in 1695. Some letters and medical tracts are attributed to his pen.
BORRICH or BORCH, Olaf, more generally known under the Latin name of Olaus Borrichius, the founder of the college of medicine in Copenhagen which bears his name, was born at Borch, in Jutland, 7th April, 1626. He was professor of chemistry and botany at Copenhagen, where he also acquired for himself great celebrity as a physician. From 1661 to 1667 he spent in travelling through Italy, France, Holland, and England, and thus became acquainted with the most distinguished men, to whom his great learning made him welcome. In 1681 he was elected royal physician and librarian of the university, besides which, other public offices of trust and honour were held by him. He died in 1696. According to the custom of the age, he also occupied himself with alchemy, and as he became, from a poor student, a very rich man, many believed he had solved the mystery of the philosopher's stone. According to another story, he cured a princess of the house of Medici, whilst in Italy, of a dangerous sickness, and hence obtained wealth; nay, even, it was said that the princess would have married him, could he have been induced to join the catholic church. He left his great wealth for the founding of the college which bears his name. His works are very numerous, but antiquated.—M. H.
BORROMEO, Antonio Maria.—This nobleman was born at Padua in 1724. Having studied under the direction of the most eminent men of the time, such as Lazzarini, Somaschi, Colza, and Volpi, he began early to appreciate the classic writers of Italy, and successfully imitated them. He was considered both a good poet and an excellent prose writer, although, perhaps, his language to an impartial critic might appear at once redundant and too fastidious Tuscan. He is the author of many novels still unedited, except some which he published with notes in his "Novellieri." This publication met with such general approbation, that eleven years after he republished it, with a large addition of novels and biographical notices, under the title of "Catalogo de' Novellieri." After a life spent in continual literary pursuits, this veteran writer died on the 23d of January, 1813.—A. C. M.
BORROMEO, Carlo, saint and cardinal, one of the most illustrious names in the history of the Romish church. The father of this distinguished ecclesiastic, Count Gilbert Borromeo, possessed the castle of Arona in the Milanese. There Carlo was born in 1538. His mother was a sister of Pope Pius IV., who, on his accession to the pontificate in 1559, called his nephew to Rome, and invested him with the dignities of cardinal, archbishop of Milan, grand penitentiary, legate of Bologna, Romagna, and the March of Ancona, and protector of three crowns and several religious orders. In return for these honours. Carlo supplied the vigour which the distracted circumstances of the church demanded from the papal throne, and which its occupant was too old to exhibit. To his hands were committed the most important affairs, both ecclesiastical and civil. At the age of twenty-two he was virtually pope. His zeal for the interests of the church, his discretion in the management of affairs, his generosity, piety, and learning, were the qualities of a good pope, and he was esteemed accordingly. As at Milan and Pavia, where he passed the period of his studies, he exhibited in the Vatican a magnificence in his tastes which, in the eye of the Romans, contrasted admirably with the humility and courtesy of his demeanour. His dress was costly, and his retinue that of a prince. But a general council was demanded, to settle the affairs of the church; the council of Trent, after vexatious delays, met, and pronounced the rich dresses of the dignitaries of the church a reproach and a scandal. On this point Carlo was the first to defer to the authority of the council; he discarded his habiliments of silk, and with these his retinue. By talent and scholarly renown, no less than by birth and station, he was a patron of letters. He assembled frequently at the Vatican the learned men of Rome, laymen as well as ecclesiastics. Their intercourse he directed to profitable ends, by engaging them in literary discussion. In 1565, after the death of his uncle, he retired to Milan. The affairs of this diocese, in consequence of the neglect of his predecessors and of his own absence, had fallen into the utmost confusion. His clergy, for the most part, were ignorant and dissolute. The diocese boasted but few schools—teachers and catechists had been degraded or starved out. Discipline was a thing unknown in the churches. Carlo began the laborious work of reformation by providing for the education of the clergy, and the enforcement of discipline. He converted his palace into a seminary for bishops. In every district he founded a school and an hospital; he remodelled the monasteries; and, by the operation of provincial councils, everywhere restored decency and order. During the ravages of the plague he dispensed his charities with his own hand in the houses of the sick. Like his predecessor, Ambrose, he preached constantly to the people, and visited every corner of his diocese. Worn out by labours and austerities, he died at the age of forty-seven, in 1584. Pope Paul V. canonized him in 1610. His works were printed at Milan in 1747, in 5 vols., folio.—J. S., G.
BORRON, BOIRON, BOURON, BERON, BOSRON, or BURONS, Robert and Helis, two English writers of the twelfth century, probably brothers, who were employed by Henry II. to execute prose versions of several of the romances known as the Collection of the Round Table. Their works no longer exist, except in a modernized shape; hardly a word of the Saint Graal, the Lancelot, and the Histoire de Merlin, as they appear in the editions of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, being in use in the times of these two writers.—J. S., G.
BORRONI, Giovanni Angelo, a painter, born at Cremona in 1684. He was a pupil of Massarotti and Le Longe, and then became painter to the Crivelli family, painting occasionally in the Milan and Cremona churches. The duke of Milan knighted him. He died in 1772. His best picture is that of "St. Benedict interceding for Milan."—W. T.
* BORROW, George, whose works and adventures are unique in the British literature and biography of the nineteenth century, was born about 1804 at East Dereham in Norfolk, the burial-town of the poet Cowper. His father, a cadet of a Cornish family, was a militia officer, of note enough to attract the attention of the duke of York; his mother was a Norwich lady of French protestant extraction. The young Borrow's earlier years, like many of his later, were years of constant migration. Captain Borrow's circumstances did not admit of two establishments, so his wife and their two sons, of whom George was the younger, accompanied him as he marched with his regiment from town to town. The perpetual change of residence was not favourable to a solid education, and the only systematic teaching which the young Borrow received was during his parents' stay in or near Edinburgh, where he became for a brief period an alumnus of its celebrated High School. But the very change of scene contributed to the variety of his information: thus, when quite a child, and when his father was stationed at Clonmel, he acquired, at the school to which he was sent, a colloquial knowledge of Irish, the first-fruits of his native turn for philology. He has described himself as a shy boy, of rather tardy intellectual development, first roused by the perusal of Robinson Crusoe, and delighting in lonely rambles. Shyness among equals is very frequently accompanied by forwardness with inferiors; and his parents did not suspect that, during his frequent absences from home, their bashful little recluse of a son was consorting familiarly with gipsies, and other social nomads, picking up the jargon, and curiously eyeing the ways of the singular vagrants, of whom he was afterwards to be the interpreter to the civilized world. These tendencies were fostered when, at the peace, his father settled down in Norwich, where the elder Borrow is still remembered as a man of cultivated mind and social habits. The neighbourhood of Norwich abounded in gipsies, and Borrow was their frequent and familial-visitor. He did not neglect, however, more useful, or at least more intellectual pursuits. Articled to the leading attorney of Norwich, the remarkably tall young man was
