Maraulay was born. He was to come from Lima, from Alaska, from the Antipodes, from nowhere in particular; and he was to sigh over the ruins of New York and Philadelphia as well as of London, or, indeed, ovei any ruins; the main point was the moral. Ezekiel knew him,—indeed, several 01 him,— and Ezekiel wrote about six hundred years before Christ:

Tyre shall be a place for the spreading of nets in the midst of the sea. Then all the princes of the sea shall come down from their thrones; , . they shall sit upon the ground, and shall tremble at every moment, and be astonished at thee. And they shall take up a lamentation for thee, and say to thee, How art thou destroyed, that wast inhabited ot seafaring men, the renowned city, which wast strong in the sea, she and her inhabitants (xxvi. 5,16, vj).

And it shall come to pass, that the fishers shall stand upon it from En-gedi even to Eneglaim; they shall be a place to spread forth nets (xlvii. 10).

And is not the Agricola of the "Georgics" who rests contemplative upon his plough to moralize over what he has turned up in the furrow,— Grandiaque effossis mirabitur ossa sepulchris,—

another early avatar of this venerable personage? In English and other modern literatures he turns up with the unassuming persistence of the Wandering Jew or the Little Joker. Shelley caught a glimpse of him:

In the firm expectation, that when London shall be a habitation of bitterns, when St. Paul's and Westminster Abbey shaJl stand shapeless and nameless ruins in the midst of an unpeopled marsh; when the piers of Westminster Bridge shall become the nuclei of islets of reeds and osiers and cast the jagged shadows of their broken arches on the solitary stream; some transatlantic commentator will be weighing in the scales of some new and now unimagined system of criticism the respective merits of the Bells, and the Fudges, and their historians.—Peter Bell the Third: Dedication (to Thomas Moore).

Volney, in his "Ruins of Empires," comes face to face with him:

Reflecting that if the places before me had once exhibited this animated picture, who, said I to myself, can assure me that their present desolation will not one day be the lot of our own country? Who knows but that hereafter some traveller like myself will sit down upon the banks of the Seine, the Thames, or the Zuyder Zee, where now, in the tumult of enjoyment, the heart and the eyes are too slow to take in the multitude of sensations,—who knows but that he will sit down solitary amid silent ruins, and weep a people inurned,and their greatness changed into an empty name?

Horace Walpole was equally favored. Writing to Sir Horace Mann, November 24, 1774, he says,—

For my part, I take Europe to be worn out. When Voltaire dies we may say " Goodnight." The next Augustan age will dawn on the other side of the Atlantic. There will perhaps be a Thucydides at Boston, a Xenophon at New York, and, in time, a Virgil at Mexico, and a Newton at Peru. At last some curious traveller from Lima will visit England, and give a description of the ruins of St. Paul's, like the editions of Baalbec and Palmyra.

There can be no doubt that this is the identical individual,—Macau lay's own man. Mrs. Barbauld, like Ezekiel, saw a number of him. In her poem of " Eighteen Hundred and Eleven," published the year after the titular date, she describes a band of enthusiastic travellers who

With duteous zeal their pilgrimage shall take

From the blue mountains on Ontario's lake,

With fond adoring steps to press the sod

By statesmen, sages, poets, heroes trod.

Pensive and thoughtful shall the wanderers greet

Each splendid square and still untrodden street;

Or of some crumbling turret, mined by time,

The broken stairs with perilous step may climb,

Thence stretch their view the wide horizon round,

By scattered hamlets trace its ancient bound,

And, choked no more with fleets, fair Thames survey

Through reeds and sedge pursue his idle way.

Oft shall the strangers turn their eager feet,

The rich remains of ancient art to greet;

The pictured walls with critic eye explore,
And Reynolds be what Raphael was before.
On spoils from every clime their eye shall gaze,
Egyptian granites and the Etruscan vase;
And when 'midst fallen London they survey
The stone where Alexander's ashes lay,
Shall own with humble pride the lesson just,
By Time's slow finger written in the dust.

In a similar strain Kirke White, in his poem on "Time" (1803), picture* "the decay of empire" in Britain and its reduction to "a primitive barbarity:"

Meanwhile the Arts, in second infancy,

Rise in some distant clime, and then, perchance,

Some bold adventurer, filled with golden dreams,

Steering his bark through trackless solitudes,

Where, to his wandering thoughts, no daring prow

Hath ever ploughed before, espies the cliffs

Of fallen Albion. To the land unknown

He journeys joyful; and perhaps desires

Some vestige of her ancient stateliness;

Then he with vain conjecture fills his mind

Of the unheard-of race, which had arrived

At science in that solitary nook

Far from the civil world; and sagely sighs,

And moralizes on the state of man.

Ten or a dozen years before White, Richard Alsop, of Connecticut, one of the Hartford wits, announced the arrival of this same traveller from

his distant home
From western shores with brilliant cities graced—
Where now Alaska lifts her forests rude—

to stray, "contemplative,"

Where Philadelphia caught the admiring gaze,
Mid ambient waves where York's emporium shone,
Or fair Bostonia graced her Eastern throne.

He hears no human voice,—only

the moan of winds that sadly sigh O'er many a shattered pile and broken stone.

In 1759, more than thirty years earlier, Goldsmith describes the man and his feelings in the "Citizen of the World." London itself, he says, will fade away some day, and leave a desert in its room. *' The sorrowful traveller wanders over the awful ruins," and as he beholds he learns wisdom and feels the transiency of every sublunary possession. "Here, he cries, stood their citadel, now grown over with weeds; there their Senate House, now the haunt of every noxious reptile; temples and theatres stood here," etc Alsop's man also notices the noxious reptile, and defines it:

From some gray tomb by withering fern overspread.
Slow rears the rattlesnake his glistening crest,
And fills with dreadful sounds the dreary waste.

Goldsmith, it is not unlikely, had in mind an essay entitled "Humorous Thoughts on the Removal of the Seat of Empire and Commerce," which appeared in the London Magazine for July 6, 1745. At least there is a remarkable parallelism between his description and that contained in the following passage:

When I have been indulging in this thought, I have in imagination seen the Britons of some future century walking by the banks of the Thames, then overgrown with weed* and rendered almost impassable with rubbish. The father points out to his son where stood St Paufst the Monument, the Bank, the Mansion ff§m*et and other places of the first disunc tion, just as one traveller now shows another of less experience the venerable luins of pagan Rome.

But why continue our extracts? The traveller of the future who is to visit the ruins of some now flourishing city or empire and indulge in the melancholy and moral reflections which such a spectacle should awaken in the properly-regulated man is a commonplace in literature. Nay, he was a familiar figure in Macaulay even before his avatar as a New Zealander. He had already been utilized in no less than three places. Under the name of Richard Quogti he is the author of a Grand National Epic Poem to be entitled The Wellingtoniad and to be published A.d. 2824, which is analyzed at length in an early contribution to Knighfs Quarterly Magazine, November, 1824. The same magazine in the same issue contained a review of Mitford's Greece in which he reappears anonymously:

When the sceptre shall have passed away from England; when, perhaps, travellers from distant regions shall iu vain labor to decipher on some mouldering pedestal the name of our proudest chief; shall hear savage hymns chanted to some misshapen idol, over the ruined dome of our proudest temple; and shall see a single naked fisherman wash his nets in the river of the ten thousand masts ; her [Athens's] influence and her glory will still survive, fresh in eternal youth.

A passage in the "Review of Mill's Essay on Government" (1829) is very closely analogous:

Is it possible that in two or three hundred years a few lean and half-naked fishermen may divide with owls and foxes the ruins of the greatest European cities?—nay, wash their nets amidst the relics of her gigantic docks, and build their huts out of the capitals of her stately cathedrals?

Macaulay's schoolboy, an eidolon almost as famous as his New Zealander, a purely imaginary being who in the course of Macaulay's writings is continually brought in to shame the opponent he is belaboring. The latter is scornfully told that every school-boy knows the matter in which he is caught delinquent.

The school-boy is usually spoken of as an original creation of Macaulay's. It may, therefore, be of some interest to note that the following sentence occurs on p. 114 of the Christian Observer for 1808, in an editorial review of a *' Vindication of the Hindoos" by "A Bengal Officer:" "It is beneath the dignity of criticism to stoop to the refutation of positions which every schoolboy could shake to pieces." The Christian Observer, it should be remembered, was edited by Zachary Macaulay, father of the historian.

And, after all, Burton was before either of the Macaulays: "But every school-boy hath that famous testament of Grunnius Corocotta Porcellus at his fingers'ends." (Anatomy of Melancholy.)

Macedonia's Madman. By this title Alexander the Great is sometimes referred to, on account of his alleged furious lust of conquest and unparalleled succession of victories. He left his kingdom, accompanied by a comparatively small force, and with an empty treasury, for the subjection of the world. The Swedish king Charles XII. is sometimes called the "Madman of the North/1

Heroes are much the same, the point's agreed,
From Macedonia's madman to the Swede.

Pope. "A nation which can fight," think the Gazetteers." . . and is led on by its king, too, who may prove, in his way, a very Charles XII., or small Macedonia's Madman, for aught one knows;" in which latter branch of their prognostic the Gazetteers were much out.—Car

Machine, an epithet, with a sting of reproach, for the managing spirits in the organization of political parties in the United States. The machine consists of those persons affiliated with a political party (as distinguished from the mass of voters) who, from ambition or for profit, follow politics as a profession, arrange the nominating conventions, and assume control of eleo tions. The political machine is a highly-perfected organism, extending from the chairman of the State committee down to the "captain" of a voting district. At times its decisions in political matters are in direct opposition Co the wishes of large portions or even the bulk of the voters affiliated with the party of which it is the engine. These latter then have four courses open to them. They may *• scratch" objectionable candidates, organize a bolt, fritter away their strength by unorganized independent voting, or perforce accept the dictates of the machine for the party's sake. The name is sometimes derived from the times of the old volunteer fire-companies when these organizations were an influential factor in politics in most American cities; "to run wid de machine" meant to be associated with one of the volunteer fire-companies, and, ipso facto, to belong to a political coterie. The word, however, has been used in the general sense of political organization since early in the present century. It was used in this very sense by the Duke of Wellington in a letter to Thomas Raikes, September 12, 1845, wnen speaking of the change effected by the growth of democratic sentiment on the deliberations of the House of Commons: "Such is the operation of the machine, as now established, that no individual, be his character, conduct in antecedent circumstances, and his abilities, what they may, can have any personal influence in general. • Scarcely an individual is certain oi his political existence."

Mad world, my masters. This proverbial expression, frequently but wrongly attributed to Shakespeare, has been taken by Middleton as the title of a play, "A Mad World, my Masters" (1608). Taylor, the Water Poet, probably had Middleton in mind when he wrote,—

'Tis a mad world (my masters) and in sadnes
I travail'd madly in these dayes of madnes.

Wandering to see the Wonders of the West (1649).

The imputation, of course, is a very old one. Thus, Plautus, H Hei mini, insanire me ajunt, ultro cum ipsi insaniunt*' (Menach., v. 2). But the particular phrase is not, apparently, found in any author before Middleton.

Madstones, or Snakestones, stones which are vulgarly believed to have the power of absorbing the virus from wounds caused by serpents, mad dogs, poisoned arrows, etc. The belief is not a modern one: it has existed among the Orientals for centuries, and is frequently mentioned by early travellers in the East. Jean Baptiste Tavernier, in his •* Travels in India" (1677), says,—

I will finally make mention of the snakestone, which is nearly of the size of a double doubloon [a Spanish gold coin], some of them tending to an oval shape, being thick in the middle and becoming thin towards the edges. The Indians say that it grows on the heads of certain snakes, but I should rather believe that it is the priests of the idolaters who make them think so, and that this stone is a composition which is made of certain drugs. Whatever it may be, it has an excellent virtue in extracting all the poison when one has been bitten by a poisonous animal. If the part bitten is not punctured it is necessary to make an incision so that the blood may flow; and when the stone has been applied to it. it does not fa41 off until it has extracted all the venom, which is drawn to it. In order to clean it it is steeped in woman's milk, or. in default of it, in that of a cow; and after having been steeped for ten or twelve hours, the milk, which has absorbed all the venom, assumes the color of matter. One day when I dined with the Archbishop of Goa he took me into his museum, where he bad many curiosities. Among other things he showed me one of the-e stones, and in telling me of Us

Croperties assured me that it was but three days since he had made a trial of it, after which e presented it to me. As he traversed a marsh on the island of Salsette, upon which Goa is situated, on his way to a house in the country, one of his palanquin-bearers, who was almost naked, was bitten by a serpent, and was at once cured by this stone. I have bought many of them, and it is that which makes me think th.it they make them. You employ two methods to ascertain if the snakestone is good and that there is no fraud. The first is by placing the stone in the mouth, for then, if is good, it leaps and attaches itself immediately to the palate. The other is to place it in a glassful of water, and immediately if it» genuine the water begins to boil.

The stone may have been tabasheer or other absorptive stone, which might act as a sort of blotting-paper to the wound when it is open enough, but would hardly be recommended by physicians as an antidote. The madstones of America are also some aluminous shale or other absorptive substance.

Maggot bites, When the,—i.e., when one is seized with a whim. Parallel figures of speech are the Scotch saying " He has his head full of bees" (see Bees In His Bonnet), the French "II a des rats dans la tete," and the Dutch " He has a mouse's nest in his head." But the "biting maggot" is all Swift's own. He tells of the discovery of certain virtuosi that the brain is rilled with little worms or maggots, and that thought is produced by these worms biting the nerves. "If the bite is hexagonal, it produces poetry; if circular, eloquence; if conical, politics," etc. (The Mechanical Operation of the Spirit.)

To tickle the maggot born in empty head.

Tennyson: Maud.

Magna Charta is such a fellow that he will have no sovereign. This famous phrase was used by Sir Edward Coke, May 17, 1628, during the debate in the House of Lords on the Petition of Right. Here is the context: "Sovereign Power is no parliamentary word. In my opinion it weakens Magna Charta and all our Statutes; for they are absolute, without any saving of sovereign power; and shall we now add it, we shall weaken the foundation of law, and then the building must needs fall. Take we heed what we yield unto. Magna Charta is such a fellow that he will have no sovereign. If we grant this, by implication we give a sovereign power above all these laws. We must not admit of it; and to qualify it is impossible. Let us hold our privileges according to the law."—1 Rushworth, 568.

Magna est Veritas et praevalebit (L,, "Truth is mighty and will prevail"), a mediaeval proverb, probably a reminiscence of "Great is truth, and mighty above all things" (/. Esdras iv. 41), which in the Greek runs peyafai % afydeut Koi inepiaxveh and in the Vulgate is translated "Magna est Veritas et praevalet." (I. Esdras of the English Apocrypha is numbered III. Esdras in the Vulgate.) The substitution of the more sonorous future tense for the present is undoubtedly due to the popular instinct for euphony.

Truth (like the sun itself, especially in England) is so often under a cloud that a proverb is wanted to support waverers. When the appearances are dead against them,—when the majorities are massed, as commonly they must always be, on the side of error, and in their Philistine force seem sure of victory-f—it is then that a wise saw is wanted to tell the fainting ones that the battle is not to the seeming strong, but that truth is great, and will prevail at last. "Magna est Veritas, et praevalebit." Here you have sound and sense more pertinent to the occasion and fuller to the ear than if the words in Esdras were more strictly kept to.— C. A. Ward, in Notes and Queries, seventh series, iv. 92.

Suppose we were to invite volunteers amongst our respected readers to send in little statements of the lies which they know have been told about themselves: what a heap of correspondence, what an exaggeration of malignities, what a crackling bonfire of incendiary falsehoods, might we not gather together I And a lie once set going, having the breath of life breathed into It by the father oflying, and ordered to run its diabolical little course, lives with a prodigious vitality. You say, " Magna est Veritas et praevalebit." Psha 1 great lies are as mat as great truths, and prevail constantly, and day after day. Take an instance or two out of my own little budget. I sit near a gentleman at dinner, and the conversation turns upon a certain anonymous literary performance which at the time is amusing the town. •• On," •aysthe gentleman, "everybody knows who wrote that paper: it is Momus's." I was a young author at the time, perhaps proud of my bantling. "I beg your pardon." I say, " it was written by your humble servant." "Indeed ("was all that tne man replied, and he shrugged his shoulders, turned hit back, and talked to his other neighbor. I never heard •■rcaetic Incredulity more finely conveyed than by that "indeed." "Impudent liar" the genUeman's face said, as clear as face could ■peak. Where was Magna Veritas, and how did she prevail then T She lifted up her voice, she made her appeal, and the was, kicked out rf court.—Thackeray: Roundabout Papers.