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numerous small islands, sand banks, rocks and cliffs called skoers, which make navigation difficult. It has, however, many good harbors, and timber is exported from several ports. A large number of rivers pour their waters into the gulf, and the alluvial deposit from these is causing the land in the upper part to extend, while that in the lower part is slowly sinking. The dwellers along the shore are engaged in the herring trade. In winter the gulf is usually frozen so hard that it can be crossed by sledges. The water is but slightly salt.
Bothwell. See MARY, QUEEN OF SCOTS, and STUART.
Botticelli, (bot'te-chel'le) Alessandro Fili-pepi, known as Sandro Botticelli, the latter name being added by his companions after his oldest brother, was born at Florence, 1447, the youngest of five sons of Mariano Fili-pepi, a tanner. He loathed the drudgery of schools and gave little attention to his studies except those in which he was heartily interested. Learning this, his father apprenticed him to a goldsmith. In that day the goldsmiths were artists and closely associated with the painters. Young Sandro longed to paint and soon abandoned his trade, after the usual struggle with his parents, who desired a trade in preference to an art, and entered the atelier or studio of Fra Filippo Lippi.
Botticelli being a very sensitive youth was easily influenced and in his early work we find the influence of his first master. Being of a serious nature, he soon lost sympathy with Lippi's way of working and his painting shows the bolder style of Verrochio. When he was called upon to make one of a set of six panels whose subject was the virtues, for the Mercanzia in Florence, he easily adapted himself to the style of the brothers Pol-laiuolo, who painted the other five. This was his famous Fortitude, his first important work. But Botticelli soon developed an individual style which is most evident in his Madonnas. In these he asserts his greater self, and we have all the charm and sympathetic feeling of the real Botticelli. He painted the spirit and not the material; his work was never personal but general; never the individual but the type and the type always the ideal.
In 1481 he was commissioned by Sixtus IV to assist in the decoration of the Sistine Chapel at Rome. Here he painted three magnificent frescoes of glorious conception. He rarely signed his paintings, which makes it difficult to place them in chronological order, but his style makes it easy to distinguish his work, though some of his students in copying it did it so well that their paintings have passed for his.
Lorenzo dei Medici, the great patron of art, invited Botticelli to join the circle of artists that formed his court, a great honor to be bestowed upon a painter, for Lorenzo was a competent judge. It was under his patronage that Botticelli painted most of his great canvases of mythological and historical ^ subjects. Among them are Pallas Subduing a Centaur, Venus among the Graces and the Birth of Venus. The Coronation of the Virgin at the Florentine Academy and the Adoration of the Magi are two of his largest and best works, in which appear the portraits of the Medici princes and their retinues. But Savonarola and his wave of religious reform swept the country, and Sandro fell under his influence, after which he painted little, but these paintings were masterpieces with a deeper religious significance. He illustrated Boccaccio and made eighty-eight drawings for Dante's Divine Comedy and eight for the Inferno. The latter were engraved by Baccio Baldini and printed in Florence in 1481.6 otticelli died in May 1510, alone and in poverty. His great influence on modern painting is shown in the work of the Pre-Raphaelites. See Jameson: Italian Painters.
Boucicault (boo1'se-ko'), Dion, British actor and playwright, was born at Dublin, Dec. 26, 1822, and died at New York, Sept. 18. 1890. He was educated at London University, and in 1841 he brought out, with the assistance of an actor, John Brougham, the play entitled London Assurance. In 1853 he came to the United States, and for the next seven years followed the stage as a profession, making a hit especially by his Irish play, Colleen Bawnt which had great success on the English as well as on the Irish stage. His other favorite productions include The Corsican Brothers, The Shaugh-raun, The Octoroon, Arrah-na-Pogue and a dramatic version of Charles Reade's story Foul Play. As an actor he excelled in the delineation of Irish character.
Boudinot (boo'de-not), Elias, American statesman and philanthropist, and a patriot of the War of the Revolution, was born at Philadelphia, May 2, 1740, and died at Burlington, N. J., Oct. 24, 1821. In 1777 he became a member of the continental Congress, and in 1782 was its president, in which capacity, in the following year, he signed the treaty of peace with Britain. From 1795 to 1805 he was director of the United States mint at Philadelphia. In 1813 he was one of the founders of the American Bible Society, and from 1816 to 1821 was its president. He gave much of his means to charity, and wrote a reply to Thomas Paine's Age of Reason, entitled The Age of Revelation.
Bouguereau (boogrd'}, Adolphe Win., a distinguished French painter and member of the French Institute, was bora at L«a
