Stirling, and there is also a bust of him by Sir F. L. Chantrey at Handsworth Church, where he was buried. His “Account of the Application of Gas from Coal to Economical Purposes” appeared in the Phil. Trans. for 1808.
MURE, SIR WILLIAM (1594–1657), Scottish writer, son of Sir William Mure of Rowallan, was born in 1594. His mother was Elizabeth, sister of the poet Alexander Montgomerie (q.v.). He was a member of the Scottish parliament in 1643, and took part in the English campaign of 1644. He was wounded at Marston Moor, but a month later was commanding a regiment at Newcastle. He died in 1657. He wrote Dido and Aeneas; a translation (1628) of Boyd of Trochrig’s Latin Hecatombe Christiana; The True Crucifixe for True Catholikes (1629); a paraphrase of the Psalms; the Historie and Descent of the House of Rowallane; A Counter-buff to Lysimachus Nicanor; The Cry of Blood and of a Broken Covenant (1650); besides much miscellaneous verse and many sonnets.
A complete edition of his works was edited by William Tough for the Scottish Text Society (2 vols., 1898). Mure’s Lute-Book, a musical document of considerable interest, is preserved in the Laing collection of MSS. in the library of the university of Edinburgh.
MURE, WILLIAM (1799–1860), Scottish classical scholar, was born at Caldwell, Ayrshire, on the 9th of July 1799. He was educated at Westminster School and the universities of Edinburgh and Bonn. From 1846 to 1855 he represented the county of Renfrew in parliament in the Conservative interest, and was lord rector of Glasgow University in 1847–1848. For many years he devoted his leisure to Greek studies, and in 1850–1857 he published five volumes of a Critical History of the Language and Literature of Ancient Greece, which, though uncompleted and somewhat antiquated, is still useful. He died in London on the first of April 1860.
MURENA, the name of a Roman plebeian family from
Lanuvium, belonging to the Licinian gens, said to be derived
from the fondness of one of the family for lampreys (murenae).
The principal members of the family were Lucius Licinius
Murena, who was defeated by Mithradates in Asia in 81 B.C., and
his son Lucius Licinius Murena, who was defended by Cicero
in 62 B.C. against a charge of bribery (Cic. Pro Murena). The
son was for several years legate of Lucius Licinius Lucullus
in the third Mithradatic War. In 65 he was praetor and made
himself popular by the magnificence of the games provided by
him. As administrator of Transalpine Gaul after his praetorship
he gained the goodwill of both provincials and Romans by his
impartiality. In 62 he was elected consul, but before entering
upon office he was accused of bribery by Servius Sulpicius, an
unsuccessful competitor, supported by Marcus Porcius Cato
the younger and Servius Sulpicius Rufus, a famous jurist and
son of the accuser. Murena was defended by Marcus Licinius
Crassus (afterwards triumvir), Quintus Hortensius and Cicero,
and acquitted, although it seems probable that he was guilty.
During his consulship he passed a law (lex Junia Licinia) which
enforced more strictly the provision of the lex Caecilia Didia—that
laws should be promulgated three nundinae before they
were proposed to the comitia, and further enacted that, in order
to prevent forgery, a copy of every proposed statute should be
deposited before witnesses in the aerarium.
MURETUS, the Latinized name of Marc Antoine Muret (1526–1585), French humanist, who was born at Muret near Limoges on the 12th of April 1526. At the age of eighteen he attracted the notice of the elder Scaliger, and was invited to lecture in the archiepiscopal college at Auch. He afterwards taught Latin at Villeneuve, and then at Bordeaux. Some time before 1552 he delivered a course of lectures in the college of Cardinal Lemoine at Paris, which was largely attended, Henry II. and his queen being among his hearers. His success made him many enemies, and he was thrown into prison on a disgraceful charge, but released by the intervention of powerful friends. The same accusation was brought against him at Toulouse, and
he only saved his life by timely flight. The records of the town show that he was burned in effigy as a Huguenot and as shamefully immoral (1554). After a wandering and insecure life of some years in Italy, he received and accepted the invitation of the Cardinal Ippolyte d’Este to settle in Rome in 1559. In 1561 he revisited France as a member of the cardinal’s suite at the conference between Roman Catholics and Protestants held at Poissy. He returned to Rome in 1563. His lectures gained
him a European reputation, and in 1578 he received a tempting offer from the king of Poland to become teacher of jurisprudence in his new college at Cracow. Muretus, however, who about 1576 had taken holy orders, was induced by the liberality of Gregory XIII. to remain in Rome, where he died on the 4th of June 1585.
Complete editions of his works: editio princeps, Verona (1727–1730); by D. Ruhnken (1789), by C. H. Frotscher (1834–1841); two volumes of Scripta selecta, by J. Frey (1871); Variae lectiones, by F. A. Wolf and J. H. Fäsi (1791–1828). Muretus edited a number of classical authors with learned and scholarly notes. His other works include Juvenilia et poemata varia, orationes and epistolae.
See monograph by C. Dejob (Paris, 1881); E. Sandys, Hist. Class. Schol., (2nd ed., 1908), ii. 148–152.
MUREXIDE (NH4·C8H4N5O6,H2O), the ammonium salt of
purpuric acid. It may be prepared by heating alloxantin in ammonia gas to 100° C., or by boiling uramil with mercuric oxide (J. v. Liebig, F. Wöhler, Ann., 1838, 26, 319), 2C4H5N3O3+O＝NH4·C8H4N5O6+H2O. W. N. Hartley (Jour. Chem. Soc., 1905,
87, 1791) found considerable difficulty in obtaining specimens
of murexide sufficiently pure to give concordant results when
examined by means of their absorption spectra, and consequently
devised a new method of preparation for murexide. In
this process alloxantin is dissolved in a large excess of boiling
absolute alcohol, and dry ammonia gas is passed into the solution
for about three hours. The solution is then filtered from the
precipitated murexide, which is washed with absolute alcohol
and dried. The salt obtained in this way is in the anhydrous
state. It may also be prepared by digesting alloxan with
alcoholic ammonia at about 78° C.; the purple solid so formed
is easily soluble in water, and the solution produced is
indistinguishable from one of murexide,
On the constitution of murexide see also O. Piloty (Ann., 1904, 333, 30); R. Mohlau (Ber., 1904, 37, 2686); and M. Slimmer and J. Stieglitz (Amer. Chem. Jour., 1904, 31, 661).
MURFREESBORO, a city and the county-seat of Rutherford county, Tennessee, U.S.A., near the Stone River, 32 m. S.E. of Nashville. Pop. (1890), 3739; (1900), 3999 (2248 negroes); (1910), 4679. It is served by the Nashville Chattanooga & St Louis railway. It is in an agricultural region where cotton is an important crop, and has a considerable trade in red cedar, hardwood, cotton, livestock and grain; it has also various manufactures. At Murfreesboro are Soule College for girls (Methodist Episcopal South; 1852), Tennessee College for girls (Baptist, 1906), Mooney School for boys (1901), and Bradley Academy for negroes. Murfreesboro was settled in 1811; was incorporated in 1817, and from 1819 to 1825 was the capital of the state. It was named in honour of Colonel Hardy Murfree (1752–1809), a native of North Carolina, who served as an officer of North Carolina troops in the War of Independence, and after 1807 lived in Tennessee. About 2 m. west of the city the battle of Murfreesboro, or Stone River (q.v.), was fought on the 31st of December 1862 and the 2nd of January 1863.
MURGER, HENRY (1822–1861), French man of letters, was born in Paris on the 24th of March 1822. His father was a German concierge and a tailor. At the age of fifteen Murger was sent into a lawyer’s office, but the occupation was uncongenial and his father’s trade still more so; and he became secretary to Count Alexei Tolstoi. He published in 1843 a poem entitled Via dolorosa, but it made no mark. He also tried journalism, and the paper Le Castor, which figures in his Vie de Bohême as having combined devotion to the interests of the hat trade with recondite philosophy and elegant literature, is said to have existed, though short lived. In 1848 appeared the collected sketches called Scènes de la vie de Bohême. This book describes the fortunes and misfortunes, the loves, studies, amusements and sufferings of a group of impecunious students, artists and
