Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 15.djvu/356

M A L M A L concerned, and there are grounds for thinking that it was not a fair duel) brought to justice. But he died before the suit was decided (it is said in consequence of disease caught at the carnp of La Rochelle, whither he had gone to petition the king), at Paris, on the 16th of October 1628, at the age of seventy-three. The personal character of Malherbe was far from amiable. He was an obstinate solicitor of favours from the great, a morose and. bearish companion to his equals, a loose liver at a time of life when loose living is especially unbecoming if not especially blameable, a jealous and unfair critic ; but he exercised a great and enduring effect upon French literature, though by no means a wholly beneficial one. The lines of Boileau beginning Enfin Malherbe vint are rendered only partially applicable by the extraordinary ignorance of older French poetry which distinguished that peremptory critic. But the good as well as bad side of Malherbe s theory and practice is excellently described by his cjnternporary and superior Regnier, who was animated against him, not merely by reason of his own devotion to Ronsard, but because of a brutal act of discourtesy of which Malherbe had been guilty towards Regnier s uncle Desportes. These are the lines : " Cependant leur savoir ne s eteud nullenient Qu a regratter un mot douteuse au jugement, Prendre garde qu un qui ne heurte une diplithongue, Epier si des vers la rime est breve ou longue, Ou. bien si la voyelle a 1 autre s unissant Ne rend point a 1 oreille un vers trop languissant. C est proser de la rime et rimer de la prose." This is perfectly true, and from the time of Malherbe dates that great and deplorable falling off of French poetry in its more poetic qualities, which was not made good till 1830. Nevertheless the critical and restraining tendency of Malherbe was not ill in place after the luxuriant importation and innovation of the Pleiade ; and if he had confined himself to preaching greater technical perfection, instead of superciliously striking his pen through the great works of his predecessors, he would have deserved wholly well. As it was his reforms helped to elaborate the kind of verse necessary for the classical tragedy, and that is the most that can be said for him. His own poetical work is scanty in amount, and for the most part frigid and devoid of inspiration. The beautiful Consola tion ct Du Perrier, in which occurs the famous line Et, rose, elle a vecu ce que vivent les roses the odes to Marie de Medici and to Louis XIII., and a few other pieces comprise all that is really worth remembering of him. His prose work is much more abundant, not less remarkable for care as to style and expression, and of greater positive, value. It consists of some translations of Livy and Seneca, and of a very large number of interesting and admirably written letters, many of which are addressed to Peiresc, the man of science of whom Gassendi has left a delightful Latin life. It contains also a most curious commentary on Desportes, in which Malherbe s minute and carping style of verbal criticism is displayed on the great scale. The chief authorities for the biography of Malherbe are the Vie de Malherbe of his friend and pupil Racan, and the long Historietie which Tallemant des lli aux has devoted to him. The standard edition is the admirable one of M. Ludovic Lalanne, 5 vols. , Paris, 1862-69. Of the poems only, there is an excellent and handsome little issue in the Nouvelle Collection Jannet, Paris, 1874. (G. SA.) MALINES. ^See MECHLIN. MALL AN WAN, a town in Hardoi district, Oudh, India, situated on the Hardoi and Unas road, in 27 2 10" N. lat. and 80 11 30" E. long., with a population in 1869 of 11,670. Under native rule the town possessed considerable political importance, and upon the British annexation of Oudh it was selected as the civil head quarters of the district, but was abandoned in favour of Hardoi town on the reoccupation of the province after the mutiny. The town has now but little trade, and a deserted indigo factory occupies the site of the old fort. Saltpetre and brass utensils are manufactured. MALLEMUCK, from the German rendering of the Dutch Mallemugge (which originally meant small flies or midges that madly whirl round a light), a name given by the early Dutch Arctic voyagers to the FULMAR (vol. ix. p. 81 7 *), of which the English form is nowadays most commonly applied by our sailors to the smaller Albatroses, of about the size of a Goose, met with in the Southern Ocean corrupted into "Molly Mawk," or otherwise modified. There is some difference of opinion as to the number of species of small Albatroses, and it is unfortunate that the results of the voyage of the " Challenger " do not clear up the doubts that have been expressed. Three species have been described and figured, the Diomedea melanophrys and D. chtororhynckus for a long while, while the third, D. culminate, was discriminated by Gould (Proc. Zool. Society, 1843, p. 107), who has stated that the dif ference between it and the second is so apparent that he had no difficulty in distinguishing them on the wing. Captain Hutton, on the other hand (His, 1865, p. 283), considers all three to be specifically identical. Others, as appears by the Report on the Birds of the "Challenger" voyage (pp, 148, 149), while regarding D. melanophrys as distinct, would seem to unite D. culminata with D. chlororhynchus. The first of these birds, says Gould, is the commonest species of Albatros inhabiting the Southern Ocean, and its gregarious habits and familiar disposition make it well known to every voyager to or from Australia, for it is equally common in the Atlantic as well as the Pacific. The back, wings, and tail are of a blackish-grey, but all the rest of the plumage is white, except a dusky superciliary streak, whence its name of Black-browed Albatros, as also its scientific epithet, are taken. The bill of the adult is of an ochreous-yellow, while that of the young is dark. This species (supposing it to be one) is said to breed on the Falkland Islands and on Tristan da Cunha, but the latter locality seems questionable, for, according to Carmichael (Trans. Linn. Soc., xii. p. 490), D. chlororhynchus is the bird of this group there found ; while Professor Moseley (Notes of a Naturalist, p. 130) calls it D. culminata? Whatever it may be, the excellent observer just named describes it as making a cylindrical nest of grass, sedge, and clay, with a shallow basin atop and an overhanging rim the whole being about 14 inches in diameter and 10 in height. The bird lays a single white egg, which is held in a sort of pouch formed by the skin of the abdomen, while she is incubating. A few other details are given by him, but his visit was too hurried to enable him to ascertain the more important and interesting points in the economy of this Albatros which were neglected by his predecessor, Carmichael, during his four months sojourn in 1816-17. D. culminata is said by Gould to be more plentiful in the Australian seas than elsewhere, numbers coming under his notice between Launceston and 1 It was there erroneously stated that Mallemuck was a Dutch word, which it is not ; and the correct German form, as given by Friderich Martens (Spitzbergische oder Groenlandische Reise Beschrcibung, Hamburg, 1675, 4to, p. 68), is Mallemucke. The anonymous transla tion of this voyage, under the title of An Account of several late Voyages and Discoveries to the South and North, published in London iu 1694 (p. 93), was probably the means of the name becoming known to Ray, in whose Synopsis methodica Avium, published in 1713, it appears (p. 130) as Mallemuck, and thereafter kept its place in English ornithological works. 2 Mr Sclater with commendable caution assigns no specific name to the eggs of the Diomedea found breeding on this island and its

neighbour (Report, &c., ui supra, p. 151).