1602, and took the degree of A.M. in 1610, obtaining also a fellowship. He was appointed likewise Greek lecturer, on Sir Walter Mildmay's foundation. In 1618 he became B.D., and in 1627 he published in quarto his great work "Clavis Apocalyptica," printing at his own expense only a few copies for his friends. A commentary on the principles of the "Clavis" appeared in 1632. Mede died in 1638, and his works were collected in folio by Dr. Worthington in 1677. The discourses in the volume are chiefly critical. The "Clavis" was translated in 1643, and another translation appeared in 1833. The "Clavis" has been much followed by English writers on the Apocalypse, at least down to a recent period, and its intricate and elaborate theory is that the visions of the book are not progressive, but synchronistic or contemporaneous—a theory on the face of it at variance with the structure of the prophecy. It was overthrown in its main positions by Vitringa in his Anacrisis, 1705. Mede's learned and ingenious disquisitions met with no reward. "His notions," he says, "about bowing to the altar would have made another man a dean, a prebend, or something else. But the point of the pope's being antichrist, as a dead fly, marred the savour of that ointment."—J. E.
MEDHURST, Walter Henry, missionary and linguist, was born in London in 1796, and educated at St Paul's school. At fourteen he was apprenticed to a printer at Gloucester, where he joined a congregational church. In 1816 he proceeded to Malacca, to superintend there the mission-press of the London Missionary Society. In addition to the performance of his special duties connected with the mission-press, he studied with zeal and success Malay and Chinese—the latter the language of thousands of emigrants from the Celestial Kingdom; and showing a great talent for preaching, was ordained in 1819. Between 1823 and 1836, besides working actively as a missionary at various stations in Malacca, and superintending the issue from the mission-press of numerous works by others, he not only printed but wrote (originals and translations) thirty works in Chinese and nine in Malay, suitable for missionary purposes. In 1836 he revisited England, where he remained for two years—a residence to which we owe his valuable work on "China, its State and Prospects," London, 1840. Returning to Java after the opening up of the five ports, he removed about 1843 the mission from Batavia to Shanghai. There he formed a small native church; and so great was his reputation as a preacher, that his very name became among the natives a cognomen for all missionaries. Few Europeans ever obtained his mastery not merely of classical Chinese, but of its dialects and patois. In spite of his wiry frame, good health, and exuberant spirits, long years of labour in the East had undermined his constitution, when, in 1856, he was invited by the London Missionary Society to return to England to recruit. He left Shanghai exactly forty years after his first departure from England, and disembarked at Southend on the 21st of January, 1857. He died on the 24th, a few days after his arrival. Among his contributions to Eastern philology and the knowledge of Eastern literature may be mentioned his "Japanese-English Vocabulary," Batavia, 1830; his "Chinese and English Dictionary," Batavia, 1842; and his translation of the Chinese "Historical Classic," the Shoo-king, 1846. In the section of the report of the London Missionary Society which recorded his labours and his death it was said—"The revision and translation of the Bible into the pure Mandarin and the Mandarin colloquial dialects, in which he was the most responsible and effective labourer, will be his memorial through future ages among myriads of Chinese."—F. E.
MEDICI: the more distinguished members of this famous Italian house are here noticed in alphabetical order.
Medici, Alessandro de', born in 1510, is believed to have been a natural son of Pope Clement VII. by a Moorish slave, Anna, but passed, for decency's sake, rather as the natural son of Lorenzo de' Medici, duke of Urbino. The Medici, expelled from Florence in 1527, were restored by Clement and Charles V. in 1530; and Alessandro, then duke of Città di Puena, was declared by the victors chief of the republic, with hereditary right. He proved apt for command, and of an independent spirit; but truculent, murderous, sunk in the most flagitious debauchery, and a lawless tyrant. On the 27th April, 1532, he had a new constitution proclaimed, suppressing the signoria, or deliberative body, and the gonfalonier of justice, and creating Alessandro Duke of Florence, an office ostensibly similar to that of the doges of Venice and Genoa, but not guarded by like restrictions. He weathered out the storm of charges brought against him to Charles V. by the numerous Florentine exiles, and married that emperor's illegitimate daughter Margaret. But, in the height of his abused supremacy, an unexpected blow struck him down. His kinsman, Lorenzo de' Medici, popularly named in scorn Lorenzaccio, the heir presumptive to the dukedom, and pander and companion in Alessandro's debaucheries, murdered him treacherously, with the assistance of a bravo, on the 6th of January, 1537, in Florence. His true motive remains a historical problem to this day, though he himself professed to have acted as the avenger of his country's wrongs.—W. M. R.
Medici, Catherine de. See Catherine de Medici.
Medici, Cosmo de' (Italian, Cosimo), named the Old, and the Father of his Country (Pater Patriæ), born 27th September, 1389 (some accounts say 1398); died at Careggi, Florence, 1st August, 1464. He was the son of Giovanni de' Medici, named below. The family had become so popular, wealthy, and powerful, by the time of Cosmo's mature manhood, as to excite the jealousy and apprehensions of a party in the republic, headed by Rinaldo degli Albizzi. Cosmo received sentence of several years' banishment in 1433, as being a man of dangerous influence. He was received with marked honour in Venice; but, his party gaining the upper hand, he was recalled to Florence the following year; entered the city amid boundless applause; and, after putting to death the gonfalonier and a few others of his enemies, assumed a dominating position in the republic, which remained in his person and family for generations. He was the richest citizen in Europe; yet his munificence in public matters was only equalled by the simplicity of his personal tastes. He raised the power of the republic to a height before unattained, although under a mild administration, and without external conquests. He was also, though not a learned man, a splendid protector of arts and letters, founding an academy of Platonic philosophy, the Laurentian library, and a number of public buildings. He lived to be almost satiated with honours and influence, used consummately well, and only too successfully for the cause of Florentine liberty; and dying he left solid power to his son Pietro.
Medici, Cosmo I. de', first grand-duke of Tuscany, named the Great, born 11th June, 1519; died of paralysis in Florence, 21st April, 1574. His father was the famous Giovanni, captain of the Black Band. After the murder of Duke Alessandro, Cosmo stood next in succession; the murderer Lorenzo being excluded on account of his crime. On the 9th January, 1537, Cosmo was accordingly elected by the title of chief of the city of Florence and its dependencies, but with certain limitations of power, which he lost no time in breaking through. He retained Alessandro's title of duke of Florence, and exchanged it in 1569, under a papal grant, for that of grand-duke of Tuscany, with recognized sovereign power. Thus was ratified and consummated that elevation of the Medici family which had subsisted, on and off, for about a century and a half. The republican refugees, roused to action by the death of Alessandro, were in arms at Cosmo's accession; but their attempt was defeated in August, 1537. Many of them were tortured and put to death, or left to perish in prison, and their leader, Filippo Strozzi, escaped a more ignominious fate by suicide. Cosmo was at once ambitious, prudent, and unscrupulous. He got rid of the men who had procured his elevation, decimated equally the magnates of the popular and the earlier Medicean parties, and confiscated the lives and fortunes of four hundred and thirty contumacious refugees. In 1548 he had the murderer Lorenzo assassinated in Venice. After various shifty aggressions and negotiations to extend his territory, he applied himself to the reduction of the independent republic of Siena, for which he found a motive in the rejection by that state of the Spanish, and its acceptance of the French, protection. After a devastating siege of fifteen months, Siena capitulated in April, 1555. Charles V. invested his son, afterwards Philip II., with the supremacy in the state. Philip offered Siena and its dependencies to Cosmo in fief, but the latter declined them upon these terms, and finally obtained them as his own in exchange for some concessions of less importance to himself. In 1560 he instituted the military and religious order of St. Stephen, for the protection of the Tuscan coast against the piratical Moslems. In the autumn of 1562 he lost two sons, and also his wife Eleonora di Toledo. Many persons at the time and since have believed the tragic story of the murder of one of his sons by the other, and of the assassin by the indignant father himself, and the death of the mother through grief; and though the story is now somewhat discredited, it has not been disproved. Not long after, 11th May,
