a newe name unto one of their Pavans, made long since by Master Thomas Morley, then Organist of Paules Church.” This statement, however, lacks corroboration, and if Morley ever held the post he must have done so for a very short time. On the 5th of July 1588 he was admitted Mus. Bac. at Oxford. Four years later (July 24, 1592) he entered the Chapel Royal, Where he successively filled the offices of epistler and gospeller. From the dedication to his first book of canzonets it seems that in 1595 Morley was married. His wife’s Christian name was Margaret, and before her marriage she apparently held some post in the household of Lady Periam, wife of the lord chief baron of the exchequer. On the 11th of September 1598 Morley received a licence for twenty-one years to print ruled music-paper and song-books in English, Latin, French or Italian. His rights under this grant were assigned by him to various publishers. In Burgon’s Life of Gresham it is stated (ii. 465) that the registers of St Helen’s, Bishopsgate, show that Morley lived in that parish. This is inaccurate, and there is no proof that the family of the same name residing in St Helen’s between 1594 and 1600 was related to the composer. In the preface to his Plaine and Easie Introduction to Practicall Musicke (1597), Morley gives as one of his reasons for undertaking that work that he led a solitary life, “being compelled to keepe at home,” presumably owing to ill health. On the 7th of October 1602 his place in the Chapel Royal was filled up, and on the 25th of October 1603 administration of his goods was granted to his widow. This document (Act Book, 1603, fol. 171) describes him as “late parishioner of St Botolph’s near Billingsgate,” but the registers of that parish contain no entries relating to him. Morley was incontestably one of the greatest of the secular Elizabethan composers. His madrigals, canzonets and ballets are as remarkable for their beauty as they are for their admirable workmanship, and his Introduction to Practicall Musicke, in spite of its frequent obscurity, is an invaluable source of information as to the state of musical science in England at the end of the 16th century. His works are: (1) Canzonets to Three Voices (1593; 2nd ed., 1606; 3rd ed., 1631; Ger. trans.: Cassel, 1612, and Rostock, 1624); (2) Madrigals to Four Voices (1594; 2nd ed., 1600); (3) First Book of Ballets to Five Voices (1595; an Ital. ed. appeared in London in the same year; 2nd ed., 1600; Ger. ed., Nuremberg, 1609); (4) First Book of Canzonets to Two Voices (1595; 2nd ed., 1619); (5) Canzonets or Short Little Songs to Four Voices, selected out of Italian Authors (1597); (6) Canzonets to Five and Six Voices (1597); (7) A Plaine and Easie Introduction to Practicall Musicke (1597; 2nd ed., 1608; 3rd ed., 1771); (7) Madrigals to Five Voices, selected out of Italian Authors (1598); (8) The First Book of Consort Lessons, made by divers authors, &c. (1599; 2nd ed., 1611); (9) The First Book of Airs to Sing and Play to the Lute with the Base Viol (1600); (10) The Triumphs of Oriana to Five and Six Voices, composed by divers several authors (1601). Besides the above, services, anthems, motets and virginal pieces by Morley are to be found in various collections, both printed and manuscript. (W. B. S.*)
MORLEY, a municipal borough in the Morley parliamentary
division of the West Riding of Yorkshire, England, 4 m. S.S.W.
of Leeds, on the Great Northern and London & North-Western
railways. Pop. (1901), 23,636. The town-hall was opened in
1895; and a park, for which the ground was presented by
Lord Dartmouth, in 1890. The chief industries are connected
with woollen cloth, machinery for the treatment of wool,
coal and stone. The borough, incorporated in 1885, is under
a mayor, 7 aldermen and 21 councillors. Area, 3385 acres.
In the neighbourhood are ruins of a mansion, Howley
Hall, dating from 1590, which, garrisoned for the parliament,
sustained a heavy siege from the royalists during the Civil
War.
MORMAOR, or Mormaer (from two Gaelic words mor, great, and maor, a steward or bailiff), a title used to designate the rulers of the seven provinces into which Celtic Scotland, i.e. the part of the country north of the Forth and the Clyde, was divided. These seven mormaorships, or original “earldoms” of Scotland, as they were afterwards called, were: Angus, Athole with Gowry, Caithness with Sutherland, Fife, Mar with Buchan, Moray with Ross, and Stratherne with Menteith.
MORMONS, the common name given to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, a religious sect founded by Joseph Smith, jun., at Manchester, New York, in 1830, and since 1848 largely concentrated about Salt Lake City, Utah. Smith was born on the 23rd of December 1805 at Sharon, Windsor county, Vermont, from which place in 1815 or 1816 his parents, who like his grandparents were superstitious, neurotic, seers of visions, and believers in miraculous cures and in heavenly voices and direct revelation, removed to New York, where they settled on a small farm near Palmyra, Wayne county (then Ontario). In 1819 they removed to Manchester, in what is still Ontario county, about 6 m. from Palmyra. In Manchester Joseph, a good-natured, lazy boy, suffering from a bad heredity physically and psychically, began to have visions which seem to have accompanied epileptoid seizures (his mother’s father had falling fits), from which he recovered apparently before he became of age. The boy’s father was a digger for hidden treasure and used a divining rod to find proper places to dig wells, and about this time the son became a crystal gazer and by the use of a “peepstone” discovered the whereabouts of pretended hidden treasure. He said (in 1838) that on the night of the 21st of September 1823 the angel Moroni appeared to him three times, and told him that the Bible of the western continent, the supplement to the New Testament, was buried on a hill called Cumorah, now commonly known as Mormon Hill. It seems almost certain that he told other and earlier stories of how he came to find the gold plates, and it is possible that before this time there was a story current in Canada of the recovery of a “Gold Bible.” It was not until the 22nd of September 1827 that (as he said) he dug up, on the hill near Manchester, a stone box, in which was a volume, 6 in. thick, made of thin gold plates 8 in. by 7 in., and fastened together by three gold rings. The plates were covered with small writing in characters which, it was said, Professor Charles Anthon[1] declared were in the “reformed Egyptian tongue”; with the golden book Smith claimed that he found a breastplate of gold and a pair of supernatural spectacles, consisting of two crystals set in a silver bow, and called “Urim and Thummim”; by aid of these the mystic characters could be read. Being himself unable to read or write fluently, Smith employed as amanuenses: first Martin Harris (1793–1875); then his own wife, Emma; after the middle of April 1829, Oliver Cowdery, a blacksmith and school teacher; and David Whitmer (1805–1888); to them, from behind a curtain, he dictated a translation, for the printing and publishing of which Martin Harris paid, in spite of the continued opposition of his wife to the scheme. An edition of 5000 copies of The Book of Mormon[2] was printed early in 1830 in the printing office of the Wayne Sentinel at Palmyra. It was accompanied by “The Testimony of the Three Witnesses,” a sworn statement of Oliver Cowdery, David Whitmer and Martin Harris that an angel of God had shown them the plates of which the book was a translation, and by “The Testimony of the Eight Witnesses,” four of them Whitmers and three of them Smiths (Joseph’s father and his brothers Hyrum and Samuel). Soon afterwards, according to Smith, the plates disappeared, being taken away by the angel Moroni.
The Book of Mormon, in which Joseph Smith was declared to be God’s “prophet,” with all power and entitled to all obedience,
- ↑ Martin Harris took a copy in Smith’s hand of certain “caractors” (so Smith spelled it) to Dr Anthon, who at first thought it “a hoax upon the learned,” but, after hearing the story of the diamond spectacles and that Harris had been asked to pay for the publication of the book, said that it was a fraud on Harris. He recognized the miscellaneous and haphazard nature of the “caractors,” of which facsimiles are given by Riley, p. 81, and Linn, p. 40. Riley thinks that the “caractors” were automatic writing, and that “unconscious cerebration played a large part in the evolving of the gold plate scheme.”
- ↑ More than a dozen years afterwards Smith, when asked if “Mormon” was not connected with the Greek word for “hobgoblin” (“Mormo” is thus used in 17th-century English), explained that it meant “more good,” from the “Egyptian mon,” “with the addition of more, or the contraction mor.”
