study. He belonged to the school of Kean rather than of Kemble; but, if his tastes were better disciplined and in some respects more refined than those of Kean, his natural temperament did not permit him to give proper effect to the great tragic parts of Shakespeare, King Lear perhaps excepted, which afforded scope for his pathos and tenderness, the qualities in which he specially excelled. With the exception of a voice of good compass and capable of very varied expression, Macready had no especial physical gifts for acting, but the defects of his face and figure cannot be said to have materially affected his success.
See Macready’s Reminiscences, edited by Sir Frederick Pollock, 2 vols. (1875); William Charles Macready, by William Archer (1890).
MACROBIUS, AMBROSIUS THEODOSIUS, Roman grammarian
and philosopher, flourished during the reigns of Honorius
and Arcadius (395–423). He himself states that he was not a
Roman, but there is no certain evidence whether he was of Greek
or perhaps African descent. He is generally supposed to have
been praetorian praefect in Spain (399), proconsul of Africa
(410), and lord chamberlain (422). But the tenure of high
office at that date was limited to Christians, and there is no evidence
in the writings of Macrobius that he was a Christian.
Hence the identification is more than doubtful, unless it be
assumed that his conversion to Christianity was subsequent to
the composition of his books. It is possible, but by no means
certain, that he was the Theodosius to whom Avianus dedicates
his fables.
The most important of his works is the Saturnalia, containing an account of the discussions held at the house of Vettius Praetextatus (c. 325–385) during the holiday of the Saturnalia. It was written by the author for the benefit of his son Eustathius (or Eustachius), and contains a great variety of curious historical, mythological, critical and grammatical disquisitions. There is but little attempt to give any dramatic character to the dialogue; in each book some one of the personages takes the leading part, and the remarks of the others serve only as occasions for calling forth fresh displays of erudition. The first book is devoted to an inquiry as to the origin of the Saturnalia and the festivals of Janus, which leads to a history and discussion of the Roman calendar, and to an attempt to derive all forms of worship from that of the sun. The second book begins with a collection of bons mots, to which all present make their contributions, many of them being ascribed to Cicero and Augustus; a discussion of various pleasures, especially of the senses, then seems to have taken place, but almost the whole of this is lost. The third, fourth, fifth and sixth books are devoted to Virgil, dwelling respectively on his learning in religious matters, his rhetorical skill, his debt to Homer (with a comparison of the art of the two) and to other Greek writers, and the nature and extent of his borrowings from the earlier Latin poets. The latter part of the third book is taken up with a dissertation upon luxury and the sumptuary laws intended to check it, which is probably a dislocated portion of the second book. The seventh book consists largely of the discussion of various physiological questions. The value of the work consists solely in the facts and opinions quoted from earlier writers, for it is purely a compilation, and has little in its literary form to recommend it. The form of the Saturnalia is copied from Plato’s Symposium and Gellius’s Noctes atticae; the chief authorities (whose names, however, are not quoted) are Gellius, Seneca the philosopher, Plutarch (Quaestiones conviviales), Athenaeus and the commentaries of Servius (excluded by some) and others on Virgil. We have also two books of a commentary on the Somnium Scipionis narrated by Cicero in his De republica. The nature of the dream, in which the elder Scipio appears to his (adopted) grandson, and describes the life of the good after death and the constitution of the universe from the Stoic point of view, gives occasion for Macrobius to discourse upon many points of physics in a series of essays interesting as showing the astronomical notions then current. The moral elevation of the fragment of Cicero thus preserved to us gave the work a popularity in the middle ages to which its own merits have little claim. Of a third work, De differentiis et societatibus graeci latinique verbi, we only possess an abstract by a certain Johannes, identified with Johannes Scotus Erigena (9th century).
See editions by L. von Jan (1848–1852, with bibliog. of previous editions, and commentary) and F. Eyssenhardt (1893, Teubner text); on the sources of the Saturnalia see H. Linke (1880) and G. Wissowa (1880). The grammatical treatise will be found in Jan’s edition and H. Keil’s Grammatici latini, v.; see also G. F. Schömann, Commentatio macrobiana (1871).
MACROOM, a market town in the western part of county Cork,
Ireland, on the river Sullane, an affluent of the Lee, 2412 m. W.
of Cork by the Cork & Macroom railway, of which it is the terminus.
Pop. (1901), 3016. Besides a fine Roman Catholic church,
a court house and barracks, Macroom possesses a modernized
castle, which is said to have been founded by King John, though
it is more probably attributable to Norman invaders. It was
besieged more than once in the 17th century, and is said to have
been the birthplace of Admiral Sir William Penn, whose more
famous son founded Pennsylvania. Here some rebels of 1798
were executed and their heads exhibited on the spikes of the
castle gate. Macroom has trade in corn-milling, leather-work
and dairy produce, and is a good centre for salmon and trout
fishing. It is governed by an urban district council.
MACUGNAGA, a village of Piedmont, Italy, in the province of
Novara, 20 m. W.S.W. of Piedimulera, which is 7 m. S. of Domodossola
by rail. Pop. (1901), 798. It is situated 4047 ft. above
sea-level, and is 10 m. N.E. of the highest summit of Monte
Rosa. It is frequented as a summer resort.
MacVEAGH, WAYNE (1833–), American lawyer and diplomatist, was born near Phoenixville, Chester county, Pa., on the 19th of April 1833. He graduated at Yale in 1853, was admitted to the bar in 1856, and was district attorney of Chester county in 1859–1864. He held commands in militia forces raised to meet threatened Confederate invasions of Pennsylvania (1862–63). He became a leader in the Republican party, and was a prominent opponent of his father-in-law, Simon Cameron, in the fight within the party in 1871. MacVeagh was minister to Turkey in 1870–1871; was a member of the state constitutional convention of 1872–1873; was chairman of the “MacVeagh Commission,” sent in 1877 by President Hayes to Louisiana, which secured the settlement of the contest between the two existing state governments and thus made possible the withdrawal of Federal troops from the state; and was attorney-general of the United States in 1881 under President Garfield, but resigned immediately after Garfield’s death. In 1892 he supported Grover Cleveland, the Democratic nominee for the presidency, and from 1893 to 1897 was ambassador to Italy. He returned to the Republican party in 1896. In 1903 he was chief counsel of the United States before the Hague tribunal in the case regarding the claims of Germany, Great Britain and Italy against the republic of Venezuela.
MADÁCH, IMRE (1829–1864), Hungarian dramatist, was born at Alsó-Sztregova. He took part in the great revolution of 1848–49 and was imprisoned; on his return to his small estate in the county of Nógrád, he found that his family life had meanwhile been completely wrecked. This only increased his natural tendency to melancholy, and he withdrew from public life till 1861, devoting his time mainly to the composition of his chief work, Az ember tragoediája (“The Tragedy of Man”). John Arany, then at the height of his fame as a poet, at once recognized the great merits of that peculiar drama, and Madách enjoyed a short spell of fame before his untimely death of heart-disease in 1864. In The Tragedy of Man Madách takes us
from the hour when Adam and Eve were innocently walking
in the Garden of Eden to the times of the Pharaohs; then to the Athens of Miltiades; to declining Rome; to the period of the crusades; into the study of the astronomer Kepler; thence into the horrors of the French Revolution; into greed-eaten and commerce-ridden modern London; nay, into the ultra-Socialist state of the future, when all the former ideals of man will by scientific formulae be shown up in their hollowness; still further, the poet shows the future of ice-clad earth, when man will be reduced to a degraded brute dragging on the
