BELLENDEN, WILLIAM

This article appears in Volume V03, Page 698 of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

Encyclopedia Britannica - Main :: BEC-BER

BELLENDEN, WILLIAM , Scottish classical scholar. Hardly anything is known of him. He lived in the reign of James I. (VI. of

Scotland

) ,who appointed him magister libellorum sup plicum or master of requests. King James is also said to have provided Bellenden with the means of living independently at Paris, where he became professor at the university, and advocate in the

parliament

PARLIAMENT (Anglo-Lat. parliamentum, Fr. parlement, from parler, to speak)

. The date of his

birth

BIRTH (a word common in various forms to Teutonic languages from the root of the verb " to bear ")

cannot be fixed, and it can only be said that he died later than 1625. The first of the works by which he is known was published anonymously in 16o8, with the title Ciceronis Princeps, a laborious compilation of all Cicero's remarks on the origin and principles of regal government, digested and systematically arranged. In 1612 there appeared a similar

work

WORK

, devoted to the consideration of consular authority and the Roman senate, Ciceronis

Consul

, Senator, Senatusque Romanus. His third

work

WORK

, De Statu Prisci Orbis, 1615, is a good outline of general history. All three works were combined in a single large volume, entitled De Statu Libri Tres, 1615, which was first brought into due notice by Dr Samuel Parr, who, in 1787, published an edition with a

preface

PREFACE (Med. Lat. prefatia, for classical praefatio, praefari, to speak beforehand)

, famous for the elegance of its Latinity, in which he eulogized

Burke

, Fox and Lord North as the " three English luminaries." The greatest of Bellenden's works is the extensive treatise De Tribus Luminibus Romanorum, printed and published posthumously at Paris in 1633. The book is unfinished, and treats only of the first luminary, Cicero; the others intended were apparently

Seneca

SENECA

and Pliny. It contains a most elaborate history of Rome and its institutions,

drawn

DRAWN

from Cicero, and thus forms a storehouse of all the historical notices contained in that voluminous author. It is said that nearly all the copies were lost on the passage to England. One of the few that survived was placed in the university library at

Cambridge

, and freely

drawn

DRAWN

upon by Conyers Middieton, the librarian, in his History of the Life of Cicero. Both Joseph Warton and Dr Parr accused Middleton of deliberate plagiarism, which was the more likely to have escaped detection owing to the small number of existing copies of Bellenden's work.

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