Crescent Route) railways. It is the seat of the East Mississippi Insane Hospital, of the state Masonic Widows and Orphans Home and of the Meridian Women’s College (non-sectarian, opened in 1903), the Meridian Male College (opened in 1901), and, for negroes, the Lincoln School (Congregational) and Meridian Academy (Methodist Episcopal). The city is an important market for cotton grown in the surrounding country, and is the principal manufacturing city in the state. Its factory products, chiefly railway supplies and cotton products, increased in value from $1,924,465 in 1900 to $3,267,600 in 1905, or 69·8% in five years. Mineral waters (especially lithia) are bottled in and near the city. Meridian was laid out in 1854 at a proposed railway crossing, and was chartered as a city in 1860. In February 1864 General William Tecumseh Sherman, with an army of about 20,000, made an expedition from Vicksburg to Meridian, then an important railway centre and dépôt for Confederate supplies, chiefly for the purpose of making inoperative the Mobile & Ohio and the Jackson & Selma railways; on the 14th of the month his army entered Meridian, and within a week destroyed nearly everything in the city except the private houses, and tore up over 110 m. of track. In the “Meridian riot” of 1871—a prominent episode of reconstruction—when one of several negroes on trial for urging mob violence had shot the presiding judge, the whites, especially a party from Alabama interested in the trial, killed a number of negroes and burned a negro school. On the 2nd of March 1906 a cyclone caused great loss of life and property.
MERIDIAN (from the Lat. meridianus, pertaining to the south or mid-day), in general a direction toward the south or toward the position of the sun at mid-day. The terrestrial meridian of a place is the great circle drawn on the earth’s surface from either pole through the place. As determined astronomically the celestial meridian is the great circle passing through the celestial pole and the zenith. The terrestrial meridian as practically determined is the circle on the earth’s surface in which the plane of the celestial meridian cuts that surface. Owing to local deviations of the plumb-line the meridian thus determined does not strictly coincide with the terrestrial meridian as ordinarily defined, but the deviation, though perceptible in mountainous regions, is so minute that it is generally ignored.
MÉRIMÉE, PROSPER (1803–1870), French novelist, archaeologist, essayist, and in all these capacities one of the greatest masters of French style during the 19th century, was born at Paris on the 28th of September 1803. His grandfather, of Norman abstraction, had been a lawyer and steward to the maréchal de Broglie. His father, Jean François Léonor Mérimée (1757–1836), was a painter of repute. Mérimée had English blood in his veins on the mother’s side, and had English proclivities in many ways. He was educated for the bar, but entered the public service instead. A young man at the time of the Romantic movement, he felt its influence strongly, though his peculiar temperament prevented him from joining any of the côteries of the period. Nothing was more prominent among the romantics than the fancy, as Mérimée himself puts it, for “local colour,” the more unfamiliar the better. He exhibited this in an unusual way. In 1825 he published what purported to be the dramatic works of a Spanish lady, Clara Gazul, with a preface stating circumstantially how the supposed translator, one Joseph L’Estrange, had met the gifted poetess at Gibraltar. This was followed by a still more audacious and still more successful supercherie. In 1827 appeared a small book entitled la Guzla (the anagram of Gazul), and giving itself out as translated from the Illyrian of a certain Hyacinthe Maglanovich. This book, which has greater formal merit than Clara Gazul, is said to have taken in Sir John Bowring, a competent Slav scholar, the Russian poet Poushkin, and some German authorities, although not only had it no original, but, as Mérimée declares, a few words of Illyrian and a book or two of travels and topography were the author’s only materials. In the next year appeared a short dramatic romance, La Jacquerie, in which are visible Mérimée’s extraordinary faculty of local and historical colour, his command of language, his grim irony, and a certain predilection for tragic and terrible subjects, which was one of his numerous points of contact with the men of the Renaissance. This in its turn was followed by a still better piece, the Chronique de Charles IX. (1829), which stands towards the 16th century much as the Jacquerie does towards the middle ages. All these works were to a certain extent second-hand. But they exhibited all the future literary qualities of the author save the two chiefest, his wonderfully severe and almost classical style, and his equally classical solidity and statuesqueness of construction.
He had already obtained a considerable position in the civil service, and after the revolution of July he was chef de cabinet to two different ministers. He was then appointed to the more congenial post of inspector-general of historical monuments. Mérimée was a born archaeologist, combining linguistic faculty of a very unusual kind with accurate scholarship, with remarkable historical appreciation, and with a sincere love for the arts of design and construction, in the former of which he had some practical skill. In his official capacity he published numerous reports, some of which, with other similar pieces, have been republished in his works. He also devoted himself to history proper during the latter years of the July monarchy, and published numerous essays and works of no great length, chiefly on Spanish, Russian and ancient Roman history. He did not, however, neglect novel writing during this period, and numerous short tales, almost without exception masterpieces, appeared, chiefly in the Revue de Paris. The best of all, Colomba, a Corsican story of extraordinary power, appeared in 1840. He travelled a good deal; and in one of his journeys to Spain, about the middle of Louis Philippe’s reign, he made an acquaintance destined to influence his future life not a little—that of Mme de Montijo, mother of the future empress Eugénie. Mérimée, though in manner and language the most cynical of men, was a devoted friend, and shortly before the accession of Napoleon III. he had occasion to show this. His friend, Libri Carucci dalla Sommaja, was accused of having stolen valuable manuscripts and books from French libraries, and Mérimée took his part so warmly that he was actually sentenced to and underwent fine and imprisonment. He had been elected of the Academy in 1844, and also of the Academy of Inscriptions, of which he was a prominent member. Between 1840 and 1850 he wrote more tales, the chief of which were Arsène Guillot and Carmen (1847), this last, on a Spanish subject, hardly ranking below Colomba.
The empire made a considerable difference in Mérimée’s life. His sympathies were against democracy, and his habitual cynicism and his irreligious prejudices made legitimism distasteful to him. But the marriage of Napoleon III. with the daughter of Mme de Montijo at once enlisted what was always strongest with Mérimée—the sympathy of personal friendship—on the emperor’s side. He was made a senator, but his most important rôle was that of a constant and valued private friend of both the “master and mistress of the house,” as he calls the emperor and empress in his letters. He was occasionally charged with a kind of irregular diplomacy, and once, in the matter of the emperor’s Caesar, he had to give literary assistance to Napoleon. But for the most part he was strictly the ami de la maison. At the Tuileries, at Compiègne, at Biarritz, he was a constant though not always a very willing guest, and his influence over the empress was very considerable and was fearlessly exerted, though he used to call himself, in imitation of Scarron, “le bouffon de sa majesté.” He found, however, time for not a few more tales, of which more will be said presently, and for correspondences, which are not the least of his literary achievements, while they have an extraordinary interest of matter. One of these consists of the letters which have been published as Lettres à une inconnue, another of the letters addressed to Sir Anthony Panizzi, librarian of the British Museum. After various conjectures it seems that the inconnue just mentioned was a certain Mlle Jenny Daqin of Boulogne. The acquaintance extended over many
