BLEEDING-HEART YARD (London).  So called because it was the place where the devil cast the bleeding heart of lady Hatton (wife of the dancing chancellor), after he had torn it out of her body with his claws.—­Dr. Mackay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions.

BLEISE (1 syl.) of Northumberland, historian of king Arthur’s period.

BLEMMYES (3 syl.), a people of Africa, fabled to have no head, but having eyes and mouth in the breast. (See GAOKA.)

  Blemmyis traduntur capita abesse, ore et oculis
  pectori affixis.—­Pliny.

Ctesias speaks of a people of India near the Ganges, sine cervice, oculos in humeris habentes.  Mela also refers to a people quibus capita et vultus in pectore sunt.

BLENHEIM SPANIELS.  The Oxford electors are so called, because for many years they obediently supported any candidate which the duke of Marlborough commanded them to return.  Lockhart broke through this custom by telling the people the fable of the Dog and the Wolf.  The dog, it will be remembered, had on his neck the marks of his collar, and the wolf said he preferred liberty.

(The race of the little dog called the Blenheim spaniel, has been preserved ever since Blenheim House was built for the duke of Marlborough in 1704.)

BLETSON (Master Joshua), one of the three parliamentary commissioners sent by Cromwell with a warrant to leave the royal lodge to the Lee family.—­Sir W. Scott, Woodstock (time, Commonwealth).

BLIFIL, a noted character in Fielding’s novel entitled The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (1750).

Blifil is the original of Sheridan’s “Joseph Surface” in the School for Scandal (1777).

BLIGH (William), captain of the Bounty, so well known for the mutiny, headed by Fletcher Christian, the mate (1790).

BLIMBER (Dr.), head of a school for the sons of gentlemen, at Brighton.  It was a select school for ten pupils only; but there was learning enough for ten times ten.  “Mental green peas were produced at Christmas, and intellectual asparagus all the year round.”  The doctor was really a ripe scholar, and truly kind-hearted; but his great fault was over-tasking his boys, and not seeing when the bow was too much stretched.  Paul Dombey, a delicate lad, succumbed to this strong mental pressure.

Mrs. Blimber, wife of the doctor, not learned, but wished to be thought so.  Her pride was to see the boys in the largest possible collars and stiffest possible cravats, which she deemed highly classical.

Cornelia Blimber, the doctor’s daughter, a slim young lady, who kept her hair short and wore spectacles.  Miss Blimber “had no nonsense about her,” but had grown “dry and sandy with working in the graves of dead languages.”  She married Mr. Feeder, B.A., Dr. Blimber’s usher.—­C.  Dickens, Dombey and Son (1846).