Part 298 (2/2)
of Antwerp; has lost its old commercial activity, and is now the quiet ecclesiastical capital; masterpieces of Van Dyck and Rubens adorn its churches.
MALINGERING, a name given in the army to the crime of feigning illness to evade duty or obtain a discharge.
MALLET, DAVID, originally MALLOCH, Scottish litterateur, born in Crieff; wrote several plays, and is remembered for his ballad ent.i.tled ”William and Margaret”; he was a friend of Thomson, and divided with him the honour of the authors.h.i.+p of ”Rule Britannia,” the merit of which, however, is more in the music than in the poetry, about which they contested (1702-1765).
MALLOCK, WILLIAM HURRELL, author, born in Devons.h.i.+re, educated at Oxford; published ”The New Republic,” 1876, a masterly satire on prominent contemporaries, which none of his subsequent work has excelled; _b_. 1849.
MALMAISON, a historical chateau 10 m. W. of Paris; belonged originally to Richelieu; saw the last days of Josephine, whose favourite residence it was, and was the scene of the repulse of Ducrot's sortie in October 1870.
MALMESBURY, WILLIAM OF, an English chronicler of the 12th century; his chief work ”Gesta Regum Anglorum” and ”Gesta Pontific.u.m Anglorum,”
followed by his ”Historia Novella.”
MALMo (50), important seaport and third town of Sweden, opposite Copenhagen; s.h.i.+ps farm produce, cement, and timber; imports machinery, textile fabrics, and coffee; has cigar and sugar factories, and some s.h.i.+pbuilding.
MALONE, EDMUND, a Shakespearian critic and editor, born in Dublin, was a stickler for literary accuracy and honesty (1741-1812).
MALORY, SIR THOMAS, flourished in the 15th century; was the author of ”Morte d'Arthur,” being a translation in prose of a labyrinthine selection of Arthurian legends, which was finished in the ninth year of Edward IV., and printed fifteen years after by Caxton ”with all care.”
MALPIGHI, MARCELLO, Italian anatomist and professor of Medicine; noted for his discovery of the corpuscles of the kidney and the spleen, named after him (1628-1694).
MALSTRoM, or MAELSTRoM, a dangerous whirlpool off the coast of Norway, caused by the rus.h.i.+ng of the currents of the ocean in a channel between two of the Loffoden Islands, and intensified at times by contrary winds, to the destruction often of particularly small craft caught in the eddies of it, and sometimes of whales attempting to pa.s.s through it.
MALTA (with Gozo) (177), a small British island in the Mediterranean, 80 m. S. of Sicily; is a strongly fortified and a most important naval station, head-quarters of the British Mediterranean fleet, and coaling-station for naval and mercantile marine; with a history of great interest, Malta was annexed to Britain in 1814. The island is treeless, and with few streams, but fertile, and has many wells. Wheat, potatoes, and fruit are largely cultivated, and filigree work and cotton manufactured. The people are industrious and thrifty; population is the densest in Europe. The Roman Catholic Church is very powerful. There is a university at Valetta, and since 1887 Malta has been self-governing.
MALTEBRUN, CONRAD, geographer, born in Denmark; studied in Copenhagen, but banished for his revolutionary sympathies; settled in Paris; was the author of several geographical works, his ”Geographic Universelle” the chief (1775-1826).
MALTHUS, THOMAS R., an English economist, born near Dorking, in Surrey; is famous as the author of an ”Essay on the Principle of Population,” of which the first edition appeared in 1798, and the final, greatly enlarged, in 1803; the publication provoked much hostile criticism, as it propounded a doctrine which was disastrous to the accepted theory of perfectibility, and which aimed at showing how the progress of the race was held in check by the limited supply of the means of subsistence, a doctrine that admittedly antic.i.p.ated that struggle for life on a larger scale which the Darwinian hypothesis requires for its ”survival of the fittest” (1766-1834).
MALVERN, GREAT (6), a watering-place in Worcesters.h.i.+re, on the side of the Malvern Hills, with a clear and bracing air, a plentiful supply of water, and much frequented by invalids.
MAMBRINO, a Moorish king, celebrated in the romances of chivalry, who possessed a helmet of pure gold which rendered the wearer of it invulnerable, the possession of which was the ambition of all the paladins of Charlemagne, and which was carried off by Rinaldo, who slew the original owner; Cervantes makes his hero persuade himself that he has found it in a barber's bra.s.s basin.
MAMELUKES, originally slaves from the regions of the Caucasus, captured in war or bought in the market-place, who became the bodyguard of the Sultan in Egypt, and by-and-by his master to the extent of ruling the country and supplying a long line of Sultans of their own election from themselves, many of them enlightened rulers, governing the country well, but their supremacy was crushed by the Sultan of Turkey in 1517; after this, however, they retained much of their power, and they offered a brilliant resistance to Bonaparte at the battle of the Pyramids in 1798, who defeated them; but recovering their power after his withdrawal and proving troublesome, they were by two treacherous ma.s.sacres annihilated in 1811 by Mehemet Ali, who became Viceroy of Egypt under the Porte.
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