Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 15.djvu/183

Rh M A C M A C 165 friends. In 1833 he exhibited Snap Apple Night, or All Hallow Eve in Ireland, and Mokanna Unveiling his Features to Zelica, which greatly increased his reputation, and were followed in the succeeding year by the powerfully dramatic subject of the Installation of Captain Rock, and in 1835 by the Chivalric Vow of the Ladies and the Peacock, a work which procured his election as associate of the Academy, of which he became full member in 1840. The years that followed were occupied with a long series of figure pictures, deriving their subjects from history and tradition, and from the works of Shakespeare, Goldsmith, and Le Sage. He also designed illustrations for Moore s Irish Melodies, Lytton s Pilgrims of the Rhine, and several of Dickens s Christmas books, and for The Story of tlie Norman Con quest and Shakespeare s Seven Ages, published by the Art Union. Between the years 1830 and 1836 he contributed to Eraser s Magazine, under the nom-de crayon of Alfred Croquis, a very remarkable series of portraits of the literary and other celebrities of the time, character studies, etched or lithographed in outline, and touched more or less with the emphasis of the caricaturist, which have been since reproduced and published in a volume. In 1858 JMaclise commenced one of the two great monumental works of his life, the Meeting of Wellington and Blucher, on the walls of Westminster Palace, where he had pre viously painted his Spirit of Religion and his Spirit of Chivalry. It was begun in fresco, a process which proved unmanageable. The artist wished to resign the task ; but, encouraged by Prince Albert, he studied in Berlin the new method of &quot; water-glass &quot;painting, and carried out the subject and its companion, the Death of Nelson, in that medium, completing the latter painting in 1864. The intense application which he gave to these great historic works, and the various depressing and discouraging circumstances connected with the commission, had a serious effect on the artist s health. He began to shun the company in which he formerly delighted ; his old buoyancy of spirits was gone; and when, in 1865, the presidentship of the Academy was offered to him, he declined the honour. In 186S he exhibited the Sleep of Duncan, and in 1869 his King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid. Having finished the Earls of Desmond and Ormond, he was attacked by acute pneumonia, which carried him off, after a brief illness, on the 25th April 1870. The works of Maclise are distinguished by powerful intellectual and imaginative qualities, but most of them are marred l&amp;gt;y harsh and dull colouring, by metallic hardness of surface and texture, anil liy frequent touches of the theatrical in the action and attitudes of the, figures. His fame rests most securely on his two greatest works at Westminster. A memoir of the artist by his friend W. J. O Driscoll was published in 1871. MACLURE, WILLIAM (1763-1840), the pioneer of American geology, was born at Ayr in Scotland in 1763. After a brief visit to New York he began active life as a jurtner in the firm of Miller, Hart, & Co., London. Four years later (1796) business affairs brought him again to America, which he thereafter made his home. In 1803 he visited France as one of the commissioners appointed to settle the claims of American citizens on the French Government for spoliations committed during the Revolu tion ; and during the few years then spent in Europe he applied himself with enthusiasm to the study of geology. On his return home he commenced the self-imposed task of making a geological survey of the United States. Almost every State in the Union from the St Lawrence to the Gulf of Mexico was traversed and mapped by him, the Alleghany mountains being crossed and recrossed some fifty times. The results of his unaided labours were submitted in a memoir to the American Philosophical Society (1809), and published in the Society s Transactions (vol. vL), together with a geological map, which thus antedates William Smith s great geological map of England by six years. Subsequent survey has corroborated the general accuracy of Maclure s observations, so far at least as the Primary and Secondary formations are concerned. From 1817 to his death Maclure was president of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, and much of the prosperity of the institution was due to his devoted services. In 1819 he visited Spain, and attempted to establish an agricultural college near the city of Alicante ; but with the overthrow of the short-lived Liberal constitu tion his plans became hopelessly deranged. Returning to America in 1824, he settled for some years at New Harmony, Indiana, endeavouring, but with small success, to develop his scheme of the agricultural college. Failing health ultimately constrained him to relinquish the attempt, and to seek (in 1827) a more congenial climate in Mexico. There, at San Angel, he died March 23, 1840. His great geological memoir was issued separately, with some additional matter, in 1817 ; and in 1837 he published a collection of essays, in 2 vols., mainly on political economy, entitled Opinions on Various Subjects. His other original papers, including obser vations on the geology of the West Indies and of Mexico, and re marks on the origin and arrangement of rocks, were published in the Journal of the Academy of Natural Sciences (Philadelphia), in Silliman s American Journal of Science and Arts, and in the French Journal de Physique, MACNEE, SIR DANIEL (1806-1882), portrait painter, was born in 1806 at Fintry in Stirlingshire. He was edu cated in Glasgow, and at the age of thirteen apprenticed, along with Horatio Macculloch and Leitch the water-colour painter, to John Knox, a landscapist of some repute at the time. He afterwards worked for a year as a lithographer, was employed by the Messrs Smith of Cumnock to paint the ornamental lids of the planewood snuff-boxes for which their manufactory was celebrated, and, having studied in Edinburgh at the &quot; Trustees Academy,&quot; sup porting himself meanwhile by designing and colouring book illustrations for Lizars the engraver, he established himself as an artist in Glasgow. At first he was occupied a good deal with figure pictures, but the increasing demands on his time as a fashionable portrait painter eventually left him little leisure for this branch of art. He was one of the twenty-four associates of the Royal Institution who, in 1829, were admitted members of the Royal Scottish Academy ; and on the death of Sir George Harvey in 1876 he was elected president, and received the honour of knighthood, and the degree of LL.D. from the Glasgow University. From this period till his death, on the 18th of January 1882, he resided in Edinburgh, where his genial social qualities and his inimitable powers as a teller of humorous Scottish anecdote rendered him popular. Among his portraits may be mentioned those of Lord Brougham, Viscount Melville, Lord Inglis, and Mrs Bough. His Dr Wardlaw obtained a gold medal at the Paris Inter national Exhibition of 1855. MACNEILL, HECTOR (1746-1818), a minor Scottish poet, born near Roslin, October 22, 1746, died at Edinburgh, March 15, 1818. The son of an impoverished army captain, he spent several years of his boyhood on a farm which his father had taken on the banks of Loch Lomond, and was sent to Bristol at the age of fourteen to enter on a mercantile career. Soon afterwards he was despatched to the West Indies, where he remained many years without ever enjoying even a moderate prosperity. When about forty he returned to Scotland with the inten tion of devoting himself to a literary life, but his ill fortune still pursued him, and he was obliged to go back to Jamaica. The kindness of two friends enabled him soon to come home again to Scotland, and on the journey he finished The Harp, a Legendary Tale, published at Edinburgh in 1789. After six years spent at Edinburgh,