Mrs. Bellamy took her leave of the stage May 24, 1785.  On this occasion Mrs. Yates sustained the part of the “duchess of Braganza,” and Miss Farren spoke the address.—­F.  Reynolds.

BRAGELA, daughter of Sorglan, and wife of Cuthullin (general of the Irish army and regent during the minority of king Cormac).—­Ossian, Fingal.

BRAGGADOCIO, personification of the intemperance of the tongue.  For a time his boasting serves him with some profit, but being found out, he is stripped of his borrowed plumes.  His shield is claimed by Marinel; his horse by Guyon; Talus shaves off his beard; and his lady is shown to be a sham Florimel.—­Spenser, Faery Queen, iii. 8 and 10, with v. 3.

It is thought that Philip of Spain was the academy figure of “Braggadocio.”

Braggadocio’s Sword, Sanglamore (3 syl).

BRAGMARDO (Janotus de), the sophister sent by the Parisians to Gargantua, to remonstrate with him for carrying off the bells of Notre-Dame to suspend round the neck of his mare for jingles.—­Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel, ii. (1533).

BRAHMIN CASTE OF NEW ENGLAND, term used by Oliver Wendell Holmes in Elsie Venner to describe an intellectual aristocracy:  “Our scholars come chiefly from a privileged order just as our best fruits come from well-known grafts.”—­Elsie Venner (1863).

BRAIN’WORM, the servant of Knowell, a man of infinite shifts, and a regular Proteus in his metamorphoses.  He appears first as Brainworm; after as Fitz-Sword; then as a reformed soldier whom Knowell takes into his service; then as justice Clement’s man; and lastly as valet to the courts of law, by which devices he plays upon the same clique of some half-dozen men of average intelligence.—­Ben Jonson, Every Man in His Humour (1598).

BRAKEL (Adrian), the gipsy mountebank, formerly master of Fenella, the deaf and dumb girl.—­Sir W. Scott, Peveril of the Peak (time, Charles II.).

BRAMBLE (Matthew), an “odd kind of humorist,” “always on the fret,” dyspeptic, and afflicted with gout, but benevolent, generous, and kind-hearted.

Miss Tabitha Bramble, an old maiden sister of Matthew Bramble, of some forty-five years of age, noted for her bad spelling.  She is starched, vain, prim, and ridiculous; soured in temper, proud, imperious, prying, mean, malicious, and uncharitable.  She contrives at last to marry captain Lismaha’go, who is content to take “the maiden” for the sake of her L4000.

Bramble (Sir Robert), a baronet living at Blackberry Hall, Kent.  Blunt and testy, but kind-hearted; “charitable as a Christian, and rich as a Jew;” fond of argument and contradiction, but detesting flattery; very proud, but most considerate to his poorer neighbors.  In his first interview with lieutenant Worthington, “the poor gentleman,” the lieutenant mistook him for a bailiff come to arrest him, but sir Roflert nobly paid the bill for L500 when it was presented to him for signature as sheriff of the county.