Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 15.djvu/597

Rh M A R M A R 560 bound themselves not to marry were deemed incapable of marrying. The order of the clergy were forbidden to marry. And disparity of faith was recognized by the early church as a bar to matrimony, e.g. ) between Christians and pagans, and between orthodox and heretics (see Dictionary of Christian Antiquities, art. &quot;Marriage&quot;). CONCUBINAGE, which such restrictions tended to develop, is noticed under a separate heading (q.v.). It might be described as marriage which has no consequences, or only slight and peculiar consequences, in legal status. In the left-handed or &quot;morganatic &quot; 1 marriages of the German royal families we have the nearest approach over made by concubinage to true marriage, the children being legitimate, but neither they nor the wife acquiring any right to the rank or fortune of the husband. Under the Royal Marriage Act in England a union of this kind has no matrimonial effect whatever. Differences of religion are no longer regarded in Christian countries as hindrances to marriage, except possibly in some branches of the Greek Church. But the marriage of persons of different religions frequently requires the intervention of the law as to the faith of the children, more particularly in Europe as between Catho lics and Protestants. In some countries the clergy make it a con dition of such marriages that the children shall be educated in the Catholic faith. English law gives the father an indefeasible right to dictate the faith of his children, no matter what engagements he may have entered into (see INFANT). The practice on this point varies in Europe the question being ignored in French law, Ger many following in some parts the same rule as England, in others giving effect to ante-nuptial stipulations. In Ireland mixed marriages (i.e., between Catholic and Protestant) we.re by 19 Geo. II. c. 13 null and void if celebrated by a Catholic priest. This Act is repealed by 33 & 34 Viet. c. 110, which permits mixed marriages to be validly celebrated by an Episcopalian or Roman Catholic clergyman, subject to conditions set forth in section 38. (E. R. ) MARRYAT, FREDERICK (1792-1848), has never been surpassed as a writer of tales of nautical adventure. His own life supplied him with abundant raw materials for his art. The son of a wealthy London gentleman (who sat in parliament for several years for the boroughs of Horsham and Sandwich, and was a writer of verses and political pamphlets), he distinguished himself as a boy by frequently running away towards sea ; and at last, at the age of fourteen, he was allowed to enter the navy. His first service was under Lord Cochrane in the famous &quot;Impe rieuse,&quot; and no midshipman ever had a livelier apprenticeship to the sea. &quot; The cruises of the Impe rieuse were,&quot; he says, &quot; periods of continual excitement, from the hour in which she hove up her anchor till she dropped it again in port; the day that passed without a shot being fired in anger was with us a blank day.&quot; During his two and a half years of service under the daring and active Cochrane, the young midshipman witnessed more than fifty engagements, many of them extremely brilliant, and had experience of every description of service, fighting duels with fairly matched ships of war, engaging gunboats, engaging batteries, storming forts, capturing and cutting out merchantmen. Before the general peace of 1815 he had added considerably to this experience of active service, and gained a wide knowledge of conditions of life onboard ship under various commanders. He frequently received honourable mention for his behaviour in action, and in 1818 he received the medal of the Humane Society for &quot; at least a dozen &quot; gallant rescues. He commanded with distinction in the Burmese war of 1824-25. And Marryat s honours were not confined to gallant exploits ; he was the inventor of a code of signals, obtained some celebrity as a caricaturist, and was elected an F.R.S. Marryat brought ripe experience and unimpaired vivacity to his work when he commenced novelist. His first pro duction was Frank Mildmay, or the Naval Officer, published 1 Said to be so called because the wife s rights were limited to the Morgengabe (donum matutinale). The common law in Germany per mits them to the royal houses and the higher nobility, and the law of Prussia to the lower nobility also. Inequality of condition (Uneben- burtigkeit) is not necessary to a marriage of this kind, which may be made between persons of equal rank, e.g., with the object of not pre judicing the children of a first marriage by allowing full rights to the offspring of a second. A woman of high rank may make a morganatic alliance with a man of inferior position. in 1829, and his second, published nine mouths later, The King s Own, &quot; I think,&quot; Washington Irving wrote to him soon after, &quot; the chivalry of the ocean quite a new region of fiction and romance, and to my taste one of the most captivating that could be explored.&quot; This was the general feeling. ^The freshness of the new field opened up to the imagination, so full of vivid lights and shadows, light- hearted fun, grinding hardship, stirring adventure, heroic action, warm friendships) bitter hatreds, was felt all the more keenly from its contrast with the world of the his torical romancer and the fashionable novelist, to which the mind of the general reader was at that date given over. The novels of the sea captain at once won public favour. His first attempt was somewhat severely criticized from an artistic point of view. It was without form, though the reverse of void ; he had packed into it matter enough for half a dozen novels. Marryat was accused also of gratify ing private grudges by introducing real personages too thinly disguised. He admitted the justice of these criticisms, and rapidly learnt the mechanical part of his new business without losing any of the vivacious charm of his style. The King s Own was a vast improvement, in point of construction, upon Frank Mildmay ; arid he werit on, through a qurck succession of tales, Neivton Forster, Peter Simple, Jacob Faithful, The Pacha of Many Tales, Japhet in Search of a Father, Mr Midshipman Easy, The Pirate and the Three Cutters, till he reached his high- water mark of constructive skill in Snarley-yow, or the Dog Fiend (1837). If he never surpassed this in story telling art, humorous portraiture, and richness of incident, the records of circulating libraries and the pencilled com ments of their subscribers show that his subsequent works he produced twenty-four in all during his twenty years of authorship were no less capable of riveting the atten tion, especially of youthful readers. The following is the list, with the dates of publication : The Phantom Ship (1839), A Diary in America (1839), Olla Podrida (1840), Poor Jack (1840), Masterman Ready (1841), Joseph Rwhbrook (1841), Percival Keene (1842), Monsieur Violet (1842), The Settlers in Canada (1843), The Privateer s Man (1844), The Mission, or Scenes in Africa (1845), The Children of the New Forest (1847), The Little Savage (1847), and Valerie, not completed by Marryat (1849). Captain Marryat retired from the naval service in 1830, and thereafter worked as hard at literature as any profes sional man of letters, making special historical and geo graphical studies for several of the works in the above list. He edited the Metropolitan Magazine for four years (1832-36). Marryat s novels were in the first flush of their success when Dickens was a youth, and they have an interest in the history of literature as forming an im portant link between Smollett and Fielding and the author of Sketches ly Boz. He died in 1848. There is a biography by his daughter, Florence Marryat. MARS was a Roman deity whose name has passed into later literature as that of the war god. There grew in Rome a tendency, fostered by Greek influence, to consider Jupiter as the one great god, and the other deities as repre senting special sides of his character. Mars then was iden tified with the Greek ARES (q.v.), and was regarded as almost the same in nature with the warlike element in Jupiter as Feretrius and Triumphator. In the actual worship of the Romans Mars bears a very different character, which, however, had almost disappeared from the mind of the people before Augustus built in the Forum his temple to- Mars Ultor, the avenger of the murder of Julius Caesar, Father Mars, Marspiter, Maspiter, Mavors, .or Maurs, was the great god of one of the races that composed the- Roman state. He is the god of heaven, the giver of light, the opener of the new year : he hurls the thunder and sends. XV 72