Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 17.djvu/66

54 M U R M U R university in 1847-48. For many years he devoted his leisure to Greek studies, and in 1850-57 he published five volumes of a Critical History of the Language and Litera ture of Ancient Greece, which, however, he did not live to complete. While C. O. Miiller s work, as translated and continued by Donaldson, is the best general history of Greek literature in English, Mure s treatment of the Homeric poems, of the lyric poets, and of the historians of the Attic period is the fullest in our language, and is everywhere marked by thorough knowledge, at first hand, of the Greek authors. Of the unity of the authorship of the Iliad and Odyssey he is a strenuous defender, attribut ing both to the one person, Homer. Colonel Mure was for many years commandant of the Renfrewshire militia. He died at London on 1st April 1860. His other works are Re.marks on the Chronology of the Egyptian Dynasties, 1829 ; Dissertation on the Calendar of the Zodiac of Ancient Egypt, Edinburgh, 1832 ; Journal of a Tour in Greece and the Ionian Islands in 1838, Edinburgh, 1842. He also edited the Caldwell Papers, 3 vols., for the Maitland Club. MURET, or MURETUS, MARC ANTOINE (1526-1585), French humanist, was born of respectable parentage at Muret near Limoges on 12th April 1526. Nothing is recorded of his early education, but at the age of eighteen he was already sufficiently accomplished to attract the notice of the elder Scaliger, and to be invited to prelect upon Cicero and Terence in the archiepiscopal college at Auch. He afterwards taught Latin at Villeneuve, and then at Bordeaux, where the youthful Montaigne was one of his pupils and played some of the principal parts in his Latin tragedies. Some time before 1552 he received a regency in the college of Cardinal Lemoine at Paris, and his brilliant lectures were largely attended, Henry II. and his queen being occasionally, it is recorded, among his hearers. His success seems to have excited more than the usual amount of envy ; and in consequence of a dis graceful charge which, however, was never established he was thrown into prison. Here he had begun to carry out a resolution to starve himself to death, when the exer tions of powerful friends procured his release. Hardly had he resumed lecturing at Toulouse when his career was again cut short by a new charge similar to that which had proved so disastrous at Paris ; he saved his life by timely flight, but the records of the town bear 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 d Este to settle in Rome in 1559. Henceforward his life was one of unclouded prosperity. He was even able to revisit France in 1561 as a member of the cardinal s suite at the colloquy of Poissy. The interest shown in his lec tures on the Ethics of Aristotle, and on the Pandects, almost recalled his early successes in Paris, and in 1578 his services as a teacher of jurisprudence were sought by the " natio Germanorum" studying law at Padua, and also by the king of Poland for his new college at Cracow. Muretus, however, who about 1576 had taken holy orders, was induced by the liberality of the pope to remain in Rome, where he died on 4th June 1585. The first collected edition of the works of Muretus appeared at Verona in 1727-1730 (5 vols. 8vo) ; a more complete edition was published by Ruhnken at Leyden in 1789 (4 vols. 8vo) ; there is also an edition by Frotscher and Koch (3 vols., Leipsic, 1834-41), and two volumes of Scripta selecta have been edited by Frey (Leipsic, 1871- 73). He annotated wholly or partially, in a learned and scholarly way that has proved more or less serviceable to subsequent editors, Terence, Horace, Catullus, Tibullus, Propertius, Tacitus, Sallust, Cicero, Aristotle, Xenophon. His other works include Juvenilia ct poemata varia, Orationes, and Ejnstolse. His merits as a stylist at one time secured for his Orationes a place among Latin school-books, but, although, according to his pupil Montaigne, he was recog nized alike by France and Italy to be " the best orator of his time," the modern judgment must rather be in substance that of a later critic, that, if he "appears to have had a more delicate ear than almost any of the moderns and his Latinity surpasses in elegance that of any of the Romans themselves, excepting Cicero and Csesar, " he at the same time was "conceited, fantastical, and weakly- minded" (Landor, Im. Conv., " Chesterfield and Chatham "). MURGER, HENRY (1822-1861), French man-of-letters, was born in February 1822 at Paris. His father was a concierge, with which employment he combined the trade of tailoring. At the age of fifteen Murger was sent into a lawyer s office, but the occupation was very uncongenial to him, and his father s trade still more so. He thus incurred the paternal displeasure, and in his devotion to literature and liberty began to meet with not a few of the hardships which he afterwards described. He was, however, for a time saved from actual want by the employment of secretary to the Russian Count Tolstoy, which was procured for him by M. de Jouy (an old academician of the classical faction, but a very kind friend to youthful literary aspirants) in the year 1838. For the next ten years little positive is known of Murger s life except that it probably provided the experi ences, and certainly supplied him with the ideas, of his most famous book. He made his first independent appear ance as an author in 1843 with a book entitled Via Dolorosa, but it made no mark. He also tried journalism, and the paper Le Castor, which figures in the Vie de Boheme, and which combined devotion to the interests of the hat trade with recondite philosophy and elegant litera ture, is said to have been a fact, though a shortlived one. At length he was introduced to better work, either in the Corsaire, then a favourite organ of the second romantic generation, or in the Artiste; for both stories are told. In 1848 appeared the collected sketches called the Vie de Boheme. This book, which is of its kind famous, describes the fortunes and misfortunes, the loves, studies, amuse ments, and sufferings, of a group of impecunious students, artists, and men of letters, of whom Rodolphe represents Murger himself, while the others have been more or less positively identified. Murger, in fact, belonged to a set or clique of so-called Bohemians, the most remarkable of whom, besides himself, were Privat d Anglemont and Champfleury. The Scenes de la Vie de Boheme have been very variously judged. Their very easy-going morality, and the supposed danger of their pictures in prompting to imitation have prejudiced some readers against the book. It is fair, however, to Murger to say that he neither holds up the Bohemian as a hero, nor in the least disguises the hardship and the folly of his ways. He was himself an instance of the dangers of Bohemianism. From the date above mentioned it was perfectly easy for him to make a comfortable living by journalism and general literature. He was introduced in 1851 to the Revue des Deux Mondes, and contributed to it for two or three years, and he never had any difficulty in securing or keeping literary employment. But he was a slow, a fastidious, and a very capricious worker, and his years of hardship and dissipation had very seriously impaired his health. He continued, however, to produce work pretty regularly, publishing Claude et Marianne in 1851, Le Dernier Rendezvous and Le Pays Latin in 1852, Adeline Protat (one of the most graceful and innocent if not the most original of his tales) in 1853, and Les Buveurs d Eau in 1854. This last, the most powerful of his books next to the Vie de Boheme, exhibits a reverse side to the picture by tracing the fate of certain artists and students who, exaggerating their own powers and foolishly disdaining merely profitable work, come to an evil end not less rapidly if more respectably than by dissipation. Some years before his death, which took place in a maison de sante near Paris on 28th January 1861, Murger went to live at Marlotte, near Fontainebleau, and it was there that he wrote, and in 1859 published, an unequal book entitled Le Sabot Rouge,