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 old quarter of the town. There is a statue of the poet Théodore de Banville, born at Moulins in 1823. The town is the seat of a prefect, a bishop, and a court of assizes, and has tribunals of first instance and commerce, and a branch of the Bank of France. Yzeure, 1 m. E. of Moulins, has an interesting Romanesque church (12th century); 7 m. W.S.W. of Moulins is Souvigny, formerly famous for its Cluniac priory. Its church, a fine building of the 11th and 12th centuries, restored in the 15th century, contains the splendid tombs of Louis II. and Charles I., dukes of Bourbon in the 15th century, and other tombs of the Bourbon family, now in ruins.

Moulins became the residence of the dukes of Bourbon about the middle of the 14th century, and capital of the duchy towards the end of the 15th century. In 1566, under Charles IX., an important assembly of notables was held in the town, at which the judicial system of France was reorganized.

 MOULMEIN (or ), the port and headquarters of Amherst district and Tenasserim division of Lower Burma. The population in 1901 was 58,346, and the increase in the last quarter of a century has been very slight. Ship-building, which formerly was an important industry, has now been given up, but there is still a considerable export of teak and rice, and there are several steam rice- and saw-mills. The total exports average more than a million sterling. Three steamers run weekly to Rangoon. Germany and Siam are represented by consuls; Persia, Denmark, and Norway and Sweden by vice-consuls; and Italy and the United States of America by consular agents. The garrison of Madras native infantry, formerly stationed in the town, was withdrawn in 1898. The town, which has the appearance of being on a river, the Salween, is really on the sea, with the island of Bilugyun in front. It is one of the most picturesque ports in the East. There is a branch of the Bank of Bengal, and two newspapers are published—one in English and one in Burmese.

MOULT, a term for the shedding of feathers at the periodic renewal of the plumage by birds, and so transferred to the periodic shedding of the old skin, shell, &c., by other animals. The word is seen in O. Eng. in the verb bimútian, to exchange; from Lat. mutare, to change; cf. mod. Ger. mausen, mausern; the earlier forms in English are mout, mute; the insertion of the l, as in “fault,” dates from the 16th century.

MOULTON, LOUISE CHANDLER (1835–1908), American poet, story-writer and critic, daughter of Lucius L. Chandler, was born in Pomfret, Connecticut, in 1835. In 1855 she married a Boston publisher, William U. Moulton (d. 1898), under whose auspices her earliest literary work had appeared in The True Flag. Her first volume of collected verse and prose, This, That and the Other (1854), was followed by a story, Juno Clifford (1855), and by My Third Book (1859); her literary output was then interrupted until 1873 when she resumed activity with Bed-time Stories, the first of a series of volumes, including Firelight Stories (1883) and Stories told at Twilight (1890). Meanwhile she had taken an important place in American literary society, writing regular critiques for the New York Tribune from 1870 to 1876 and a weekly literary letter for the Sunday issue of the Boston Herald from 1886 to 1892. In 1876 she published a volume of notable Poems (renamed Swallow-flights in the English edition of 1877) and visited Europe, where she began close and lasting friendships with leading men and women of letters. Thenceforward she spent the summers in London and the rest of the year in Boston, where her salon was one of the principal resorts of literary talent. In 1889 another volume of verse, In the Garden of Dreams, confirmed her reputation as a poet. She also wrote several volumes of prose fiction, including Miss Eyre from Boston and Other Stories, and some descriptions of travel, including Lazy Tours in Spain (1896). She was well known for the extent of her literary influence, the result of a sympathetic personality combined with fine critical taste. She died in Boston on the 10th of August 1908.

MOULTRIE, JOHN (1799–1874), English poet, was born in London on the 30th of December 1799. He was educated at Eton, and many of his best verses were contributed to the Etonian. He entered Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1819, and in 1822 began to reside at the Middle Temple. Three years later he was ordained, and was presented to the living of Rugby by Lord Craven. At Rugby he became intimate with Thomas Arnold, to whom two of his best sonnets are addressed. He died at Rugby on the 26th of December 1874. He published several volumes of verse during his lifetime, and a complete edition of his poems was published (2 vols., 1876) with a memoir by Derwent Coleridge. They include, amongst much that is dull, some popular pieces, “Godiva,” “Three Minstrels,” an account of meetings with Wordsworth, Coleridge and Tennyson, “My Brother’s Grave,” and some excellent hymns.

MOULTRIE, WILLIAM (1730–1805), American soldier, was born in Charleston, South Carolina, on the 23rd of November 1730. His father, a physician, and a graduate of the University of Edinburgh, migrated to Charleston before 1729. The son was elected to the Commons House of the Assembly in 1754, 1769 and 1772; and in 1760 he was captain of a provincial regiment in the expedition under Governor William H. Lyttelton against the Cherokees. Although he was connected by many ties to the British, he espoused the American cause on the outbreak of the War of Independence, and was a member of the first provincial congress (1775) of South Carolina, which in June made him a colonel of the Second South Carolina regiment; and he was a member of the second provincial congress (1775–1776). On Fort Johnson, on James Island in Charleston harbour, he raised what is said to have been the first American battle-flag—blue, with a white crescent in the dexter corner, inscribed with the word “Liberty”; the flag was devised by him in September 1775. In March 1776 he took command of a palmetto fort which he had built on Sullivan's Island, off Charleston, which he held against the attack of Admiral Sir Peter Parker on the 28th of June, and which soon after the battle was renamed Fort Moultrie by the General Assembly. He was thanked by Congress, was made a brigadier-general in the continental army in September 1776, and was placed in command of the department of Georgia and South Carolina. He dislodged the British from Beaufort, South Carolina, in February 1779, and in April made it possible for the city of Charleston to put itself into a state of defence by delaying the advance of General Augustine Prevost. He was one of those who advised against the surrender of Charleston, where he commanded the garrison until the arrival of General Benjamin Lincoln. His imprisonment after the surrender of Charleston (May 1780) lasted until his exchange with others for General Burgoyne in February 1782. In October 1782 he. was made a major-general. He was governor of South Carolina. in 1785–1787 and in 1792–1794. He died in Charleston on the 27th of September 1805.

MOUND, now used in the sense of a pile or heap of earth, artificial or natural, especially such a pile raised over a grave or burial-place, a tumulus, or as a means of defence, and so used to translate Lat. agger. The earliest use in English is for a hedge or other boundary between adjoining lands; this only survives dialectically. The word is obscure in origin, but was early influenced by “mount,” i.e. hill; Lat. mons, montis. A connexion with O. Eng. mund, guardianship, hand, has been suggested. The “orb,” i.e. a globe of gold surmounted by a cross, as forming part of the (q.v.), is often known as a “mound”; this is a translation of Fr. monde; Lat. mundus, world.

MOUND-BUILDERS, in North America, the name given to the prehistoric inhabitants who chiefly centred in the valleys of the Mississippi and Ohio, and who seem to have possessed a measure of civilization far in excess of that of the North American Indians when first met by the whites. The remarkable mounds, which have given occasion for the name, are fortified enclosures and tumuli of the most varied appearance, round, conical, or in the shape of animals. They are scattered