Page:A biographical dictionary of modern rationalists.djvu/284

 MAXSE

MEDWIN

the Legion of Honour, the Medjidieh, the Bavarian Maximilian, and the German Albert the Bear ; and he was a member of about forty learned societies. His Pan theistic views are best seen in his Hibbert Lectures, The Origin and Growth of Eeli- gion (1878), and works on mythology. D. Oct. 28, 1900.

MAXSE, Frederick Augustus, admiral. B. 1833. He entered the navy, and as early as 1855 won the rank of commander by his &quot; conspicuous gallantry.&quot; In 1867 he became Bear- Admiral, and retired. He then took an active part in advanced move ments, and published a number of Eadical lectures and speeches. Mr. Howard Evans tells in his Radical Fights of Forty Years (1913) that &quot; a calendar of Positivist saints occupied a prominent place in his study&quot; (p. 33). There are probably few naval commanders among the austere Positivists, but we gather from George Meredith s Letters (p. 169) that Maxse was fiery enough as a Eationalist. Meredith was not himself very reserved, yet we find him repeatedly checking the aggressiveness of Maxse. D. June 25, 1900.

MAY, Professor Walther Victor,

Ph.D., German zoologist. B. June 12, 1868. Ed. Cassel Gymnasium and Leipzig and Jena Universities. In 1891 he was dismissed from Leipzig for Socialism, and he edited the Socialist Beobachter at Chemnitz. He was imprisoned for twenty- two months for blasphemy. In 1898 he was appointed assistant at the Hamburg Botanical Gardens, and from 1899 to 1904 he was assistant at the Carlsruhe Zoolo gical Institute. In 1905 he became pro fessor of zoology at the Carlsruhe Tech nical College. Professor May has written, besides zoological works, Goethe, Humboldt, Darwin, Haeckel (1904), E. HaecJiel (1909), and other volumes on Evolution. In Was Wir Ernst Haeckel Verdanken he explains that he does not strictly follow Haeckel, but is &quot; as far removed as ever from any ecclesiastical creed &quot; (i, 282). 495

MAZZINI, Giuseppe, LL.D., Italian patriot. B. June 22, 1805. Ed. Genoa University. He practised law for a time at Genoa and contributed to the literary journals. Very early, however, he threw himself into the movement for the emanci pation of Italy, and inaugurated his heroic career of struggle and sacrifice. In 1828- he founded the Indicatore Genovense, which was suppressed. Mazzini joined the Car bonari in 1830, and was expelled from Italy. In Switzerland, under sentence of death if he re-entered Italy, he organized, the &quot; Young Italy &quot; movement, and infused energy into his compatriots. Expelled from Switzerland in 1837, he came to- England, where he found a home and great esteem until 1870. In 1848, when the Pope fled from Rome, Mazzini went there, and was the virtual head of the short lived Roman Republic. He returned to England at its failure, and, maintaining himself by literary work, continued the struggle for liberation. He returned to live in Italy in 1870. Mazzini was a very earnest Theist, as every page of his writings testifies. His difficulties with Garibaldi and other friends of Italy were in part due to his strong insistence on natural religion. He strongly opposed the doctrines of Christianity, and spoke of a religion of humanity,&quot; but of a Theistic nature. The best statement of his beliefs is in a letter to Holyoake in 1855 (McCabe s Life and Letters of G. J. Holyoake, 1908, i, 240-43). D. Mar. 10, 1872.

MEDWIN, Thomas, writer. B. Mar. 20, 1788. Ed. Sion House, Brentford. In 1810 he collaborated with Shelley, who was his cousin, in writing Ahasuerus the Wanderer, which publishers rejected as &quot; Atheistic.&quot; It was finally published in 1823. Medwin served in the army, bufc kept his literary tastes, and was intimate with Byron as well as Shelley. In 1824 he published a Journal of the Conversations of Lord Byron, and after Shelley s death he wrote A Memoir of P. B. Shelley (1833), I which he later expanded into The Life of 496