Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 16.djvu/47

Rh M E R M E R 37 city dates from 1542, and it was made a bishopric in 1561. Compare Stephen s Yucatan. MERIDEN, a city of the United States, in New Haven county, Connecticut, 18 miles from New Haven by rail. It is a busy manufacturing town ; the population has increased from 3559 in 1850 to 7426, 10,495, and 18,340 in 1860, 1870, and 1880. The Britannia Company alone employs upwards of 1000 hands, and sends out every year nearly $3,000,000 worth of Britannia metal and electro plated goods ; and tin- ware, cutlery, brass- work, flint glass, guns, and woollen goods are also manufactured in the town. The State reform school had 307 inmates in 1880. A fortified tavern erected by Belcher in 1660 on the road between Boston and New Haven was the nucleus of Meriden ; but the place was not incorporated as a town till 1866, and became a city in 1867. MERIMEE, PROSPER (1803-1870), novelist, archaeo logist, essayist, and in all these capacities one of the greatest masters of French style during the century, was born at Paris on September 28, 1803, and died at Cannes on the 23d of the same month sixty-seven years later, having lived just long enough to know that ruin was threatening France. Not many details have been published in reference to his family, but his father seems to have been a man of position and competence. Merimee had English blood in his veins on the mother s side, and was always considered, at least in France, to look and behave more like an Englishman than a Frenchman. He was educated for the bar, but entered the public service instead. A young man at the time of the romantic movement, he felt its influence strongly, though his peculiar tempera ment prevented him from joining any of the coteries of the period. This temperament was indeed exhibited by the very form and nature of the works in which he showed the influence of romanticism. Nothing was more prominent among the romantics than the fancy, as Merimee himself puts it, for &quot;local colour,&quot; the more unfamiliar the better. Merimee exhibited this in an unusual way. In 1825 he published what purported to be the dramatic works of a Spanish lady, Clara Gazul, with a preface stating circumstan tially how the supposed translator, one Joseph L Estrange, had met the gifted poetess at Gibraltar. This was followed by a still more audacious and still more successful supercherie. In 1827 appeared a small book entitled La Guzla (the anagram of Gazul), and giving itself out as translated from the Illyrian of a certain Hyacinthe Maglanovich. This book, which has greater formal merit than Clara Gazul, is said to have taken in Sir John Bow- ring, a competent Slav scholar, the Russian poet Poushkin, and some German authorities, although not only had it no original, but, as Merimee declares, a few words of Illyrian and a book or two of travels and topography were the author s only materials. In the next year appeared a short dramatic romance, La Jacquerie, in which all Merimee s characteristics are visible his extraordinary faculty of local and historical colour, his command of language, his grim irony, and a certain predilection for tragic and terrible subjects which was one of his numerous points of contact with the men of the Renaissance. This in its turn was followed by a still better piece, the Chronique de Charles IX., which stands towards the 16th century much as the Jacquerie does towards the Middle Ages. All these works were to a certain extent second-hand, being either directly imitated or prompted by a course of reading on a particular subject. But they exhibited all the future literary qualities of the author save the two chiefest, his wonderfully severe and almost classical style, and his equally classical solidity and statuesqueness of construction. For the latter there was not much opportunity in their subjects, and the former required a certain maturity and self-discipline which Merimee had not yet given to himself. These were, however, displayed fully in the famous Corsican story of Colomba, published in the momentous year 1830. This, all things considered, is perhaps Merime e s best tale. He had already obtained a considerable position in the civil service, and after the revolution of July he was chef de cabinet to two different ministers. He was then appointed to the more congenial post of inspector of historical monuments. Merimee was a born archaeologist, combining linguistic faculty of a very unusual kind with the accurate scholarship which does not always accompany it, with remarkable historical appreciation, and with a sincere love for the arts of design and construction, in the former of which he had some practical skill. In his official capacity he published numerous reports, some of which, with other similar pieces, have been republished in his works. He also devoted himself to history proper during the latter years of the July monarchy, and published numerous essays and works of no great length, chiefly on Spanish, Russian, and ancient Roman history. He did not, however, neglect novel writing during this period, and numerous short tales, almost without exception master pieces, appeared, chiefly in the Revue de Paris. He travelled a good deal, both for his own amusement and on official errands ; and in one of his journeys to Spain, about the middle of Louis Philippe s reign, he made an acquaintance destined to influence his future life not a little that of Madame de Montijo, mother of the future empress Eugenie. Merimee, though in manner and language the most cynical of men, was a devoted friend, and shortly before the accession of Napoleon III. he had occasion to show this. His friend Libri was accused of having stolen valuable manuscripts and books from French libraries, and Merimee took his part so warmly that he was actually sentenced to and underwent fine and imprisonment. He had been elected of the Academy in 1844, and also of the Academy of Inscriptions, of which he was a prominent member. Between 1840 and 1850 he wrote more tales, the chief of which were Arsene Guillot and Carmen. The empire made a considerable difference in Merime e s life. He was not a very ardent politician, but all his sympathies were against democracy, and he had therefore no reason to object to the Bonapartist rule, especially as his habitual cynicism and his irreligious prejudices made legitimism distasteful to him. But the marriage of Napoleon III. with the daughter of Madame de Montijo at once enlisted what was always the strongest of Merimee s sympathies the sympathy of personal friend shipon the emperor s side. He was made a senator, and continued to exercise his archaeological functions ; but his most important role was that of a constant and valued private friend of both the &quot;master and mistress of the house,&quot; as he calls the emperor and empress in his letters. He was occasionally charged with a kind of irregular diplomacy, and once, in the matter of the emperor s Csesar, he had to pay the penalty frequently exacted from great men of letters by their political or social superiors who are ambitious of literary reputation. But for the most part he was strictly the &quot; ami de la maison.&quot; At the Tuileries, at Compiegne, at Biarritz, he was a con stant though not always a very willing guest, and his influence over the empress was very considerable and was fearlessly exerted, though he used to call himself, in imita tion of Scarron, &quot; le bouffon de sa majeste.&quot; His occupa tions during the last twenty years of his life were numerous and important, though rather nondescript. He found, however, time for not a few more tales, of which more will be said presently, and for two correspondences, which are not the least of his literary achievements, while they have an extraordinary interest of matter. One of these consists