and the allowances were reduced, this policy led to an outbreak. Burnes was murdered on the 2nd of November 1841; and owing to the incapacity of the aged General Elphinstone the British army in Kabul degenerated into a leaderless mob. Macnaghten tried to save the situation by negotiating with the Afghan chiefs and, independently of them, with Dost Mahommed’s son, Akbar Khan, by whom he was assassinated on the 23rd of December 1841; the disastrous retreat from Kabul and the massacre of the British army in the Kurd Kabul pass followed. These events threw doubt on Macnaghten’s capacity for dealing with the problems of Indian diplomacy, though his fearlessness and integrity were unquestioned. He had been created a baronet in 1840, and four months before his death was nominated to the governorship of Bombay.
MacNALLY, LEONARD (1752–1820), Irish informer, was born
in Dublin, the son of a merchant. In 1776 he was called to the
Irish, and in 1783 to the English bar. He supported himself for
some time in London by writing plays and editing the Public
Ledger. Returning to Dublin, he entered upon a systematic
course of informing against the members of the revolutionary
party, for whom his house had become the resort. He also
betrayed to the government prosecutors political clients whom
he defended eloquently in the courts. He made a fine defence
for Robert Emmet and cheered him in his last hours, although
before appearing in court he had sold, for £200, the contents
of his brief to the lawyers for the Crown. After living a professed
Protestant all his life, he received absolution on his deathbed
from a Roman Catholic priest. He died on the 13th of February
1820.
MACNEE, SIR DANIEL (1806–1882), Scottish portrait painter,
was born at Fintry in Stirlingshire. At the age of thirteen he was
apprenticed, along with Horatio Macculloch and Leitch the
water-colour painter, to John Knox, a landscapist of some repute.
He afterwards worked for a year as a lithographer, was
employed by the Smiths of Cumnock to paint the ornamental
lids of their planewood snuff-boxes, and, having studied in
Edinburgh at the “Trustees’ Academy,” supporting himself
meanwhile by designing and colouring book illustrations for
Lizars the engraver, he established himself as an artist in
Glasgow, where he became a fashionable portrait painter. He
was in 1829 admitted a member of the Royal Scottish Academy;
and on the death of Sir George Harvey in 1876 he was elected
president, and received the honour of knighthood. From this
period till his death, on the 18th of January 1882, he resided
in Edinburgh, where his genial social qualities and his
inimitable powers as a teller of humorous Scottish anecdote
rendered him popular.
MACNEIL, HERMON ATKINS (1866– ), American sculptor,
was born at Chelsea, Massachusetts. He was an instructor in
industrial art at Cornell University in 1886–1889, and was then
a pupil of Henri M. Chapu and Falguière in Paris. Returning to
America, he aided Philip Martiny in the preparation of sketch
models for the Columbian exposition, and in 1896 he won the
Rinehart scholarship, passing four years (1896–1900) in Rome.
In 1906 he became a National Academician. His first important
work was “The Moqui Runner,” which was followed by “A
Primitive Chant,” and “The Sun Vow,” all figures of the North-American
Indian. A “Fountain of Liberty,” for the St Louis
exposition, and other Indian themes came later; his “Agnese”
and his “Beatrice,” two fine busts of women, also deserve
mention. His principal work is the sculpture for a large
memorial arch, at Columbus, Ohio, in honour of President
McKinley. In 1909 he won in competition a commission for
a large soldiers’ and sailors’ monument in Albany, New York.
His wife, Carol Brooks MacNeil, also a sculptor of distinction,
was a pupil of F. W. MacMonnies.
McNEILE, HUGH (1795–1879), Anglican divine, younger son
of Alexander McNeile (or McNeill), was born at Ballycastle, Co.
Antrim, on the 15th of July 1795. He graduated at Trinity
College, Dublin, in 1810. His handsome presence, and his
promise of exceptional gifts of oratory, led a wealthy uncle,
Major-General Daniel McNeill, to adopt him as his heir; and he
was destined for a parliamentary career. During a stay at
Florence, Hugh McNeile became temporarily intimate with Lord
Byron and Madame de Staël. On returning home, he determined
to abandon the prospect of political distinction for the clerical
profession, and was disinherited. In 1820 he was ordained, and
after holding the curacy of Stranorlar, Co. Donegal, for two
years, was appointed to the living of Albury, Surrey, by Henry
Drummond.
Edward Irving endeavoured, not without success at first, to draw McNeile into agreement with his doctrine and aims. Irving’s increasing extravagance, however, soon alienated McNeile. His preaching now attracted much attention; in London he frequently was heard by large congregations. In 1834 he accepted the incumbency of St Jude’s, Liverpool, where for the next thirty years he wielded great political as well as ecclesiastical influence. He repudiated the notion that a clergyman should be debarred from politics, maintaining at a public meeting that “God when He made the minister did not unmake the citizen.” In 1835 McNeile entered upon a long contest, in which he was eventually successful, with the Liverpool corporation, which had been captured by the Whigs, after the passing of the Municipal Reform Act. A proposal was carried that the elementary schools under the control of the corporation should be secularized by the introduction of what was known as the Irish National System. The threatened withdrawal of the Bible as the basis of denominational religious teaching was met by a fierce agitation led by McNeile, who so successfully enlisted public support that before the new system could be introduced every child was provided for in new Church of England schools established by public subscriptions. At the same time he conducted a campaign which gradually reduced the Whig element in the council, till in 1841 it almost entirely disappeared. To his influence was also attributed the defeat of the Liberal parliamentary candidates in the general election of 1837, followed by a long period of Conservative predominance in Liverpool politics. McNeile had the Irish Protestant’s horror of Romanism, which he constantly denounced in the pulpit and on the platform; and Macaulay, speaking in the House of Commons on the Maynooth endowment in April 1845, singled him out for attack as the most powerful representative of uncompromising Protestant opinion in the country. As the Tractarian movement in the Church of England developed, he became one of its most zealous opponents and the most conspicuous leader of the evangelical party. In 1840 he published a volume of Lectures on the Church of England, and in 1846 (the year after Newman’s secession to Rome) The Church and the Churches, in which he maintained with much dialectical skill the evangelical doctrine of the “invisible Church” in opposition to the teaching of Newman and Pusey. Hugh McNeile was in close sympathy with the philanthropic work as well as the religious views of the 7th earl of Shaftesbury, who more than once tried to persuade Lord Palmerston to raise him to the episcopal bench. But although Palmerston usually followed the advice of Shaftesbury in the appointment of bishops, he would not consent to the elevation to the House of Lords of so powerful a political opponent as McNeile, whom Lord John Russell had accused of frustrating for thirty years the education policy of the Liberal party. In 1860 he was appointed a canon of Chester; and in 1868 Disraeli appointed him dean of Ripon. This preferment he resigned in 1875, and he lived in retirement at Bournemouth till his death on the 28th of January 1879. McNeile married, in 1822, Anne, daughter of William Magee, archbishop of Dublin, and aunt of William Connor Magee, archbishop of York, by whom he had a large family.
Although a vehement controversialist, Hugh McNeile was a man of simple and sincere piety of character. Sir Edward Russell, an opponent alike of his religious and his political opinions, bears witness to the deep spirituality of his teaching, and describes him as an absolutely unique personality. “He made himself leader of the Liverpool people, and always led with calm and majesty in the most excited times. His eloquence was grave, flowing, emphatic—had a dignity in delivery, a perfection of elocution, that only John Bright equalled in the latter half of the
