Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 17.djvu/69

Rh M U R M U R price on record was given in 1852, some 24,600. His subjects may be broadly divided into two great groups the scenes from low life (which were a new kind of experiment in Spanish art, so far as the subjects of children are concerned), and the Scriptural, legendary, and religious works. The former, of which some salient specimens are in the Dulwich Gallery, are, although undoubtedly truthful, neither ingenious nor sympathetic ; sordid unsightliness and roguish squalor are their found ation. The children have little of the charm of childhood, and none of its auroral promise. The embodiments are accurate and knowing studies of ungainliness. &quot;Works of this class belong mostly to the earlier years of Murillo s practice. The subjects in which the painter most eminently excels are crowded compositions in which some act of saintliness, involving the ascetic or self-mortifying element, is being performed, subjects which, while obtrusively repulsive in some of their details, emphasize at once the broadly human and the expressly Catholic conceptions of life. A famous example is the picture, now in the Madrid academy, of St Elizabeth of Hungary washing patients afflicted with the scab or itch, and hence commonly named El Tinoso. Technically con sidered, it unites his three styles of painting, more especially the cold and the warm. His power of giving atmosphere to combined groups of figures is one of the marked characteristics of Murillo s art ; and he may be said to have excelled in this respect all his prede cessors or contemporaries of whatever school. Seville must still be visited by persons who wish to study Murillo thoroughly, and to relish the full and native flavour of his art. A large number of the works which used to adorn this city have, however, been transported elsewhither. In the Royal Gallery at Madrid are forty-five specimens of Murillo the Infant Christ and the Baptist (named Los Nifios della Concha), St lldefonso vested with a Chasuble by the Madonna, &c. ; in the Museo della Trinidad, Christ and the Virgin appearing to St Francis in a Cavern, an immense composition, and various others. In the London National Gallery the chief example is the Holy Family ; this was one of the master s latest works, painted in Cadiz. Murillo, who was the last pre-eminent painter of Seville, was an indefatigable and most pro lific worker, hardly leaving his painting-room save for his assiduous devotions in church ; he realized large prices according to the standard of his time, and made a great fortune. His character is recorded as very amiable and soft, yet not the less independent, subject also to sudden impulses, not unmixed with gusts of passion. For further information see, especially, Stirling, Annalsofthe Artists of Spain, 3 vols., London, 1848; Richard Ford, Handbook for Spain, London, 1855; and Curtis, Catalogue of the Works of Velazquez and Murillo (1883). (W. M. R.) MUROM, a district town of Russia in the province of Vladimir, on the craggy left bank of the Oka close by its junction with the Tesha, 107 miles by rail south-east of Vladimir. Murom is the chief entrepot for grain from the basin of the lower Oka and carries on an active trade with Moscow and JSTijni-Novgorod, partly by the Oka, partly by rail, a branch line to Kovroff connecting it with the rail way between the towns just mentioned. Murom is still famed, as in ancient times, for kitchen -gardens, raising especially cucumbers and seed for canary-birds. Its once famous tanneries have lost their importance, but the manu facture of linen has greatly increased ; it has also steam flour-mills, distilleries, manufactories of soap, &amp;lt;tc., and of iron implements. There are also several distilleries in the district. The population is 11,000. MURPHY, ARTHUR (1727-1805), dramatist, was the son of a Dublin merchant, and was born near Elphin in Roscommon in 1727. From 1740 to 1747 he was a student at St Omer (France). He then entered the counting-house of his uncle, a merchant at Cork. But four years afterwards he was in London, prosecuting litera ture as a profession and publishing The Gray s Inn Journal, a periodical in the style of The Spectator. The drama was also occupying his attention. He produced the farce of The Apprentice, and appeared as an actor in the character of Othello. His dramas were more successful than his acting. After treading the stages of Covent Garden and Drury Lane for one season each, he aban doned the profession. His next undertaking was the edit ing of a political periodical called The Test. In this, too, he was unsuccessful. He next turned his attention to the study of law, and was called to the bar by the Society of Lincoln s Inn in 1757. But the smallness of his practice forced him to have recourse to his form er vocation of writ ing for the stage. Among his many popular dramas, The Upholsterer, in 1758; The Way to Keep Him, in 1760; All in The Wrong, in 1761 ; The Grecian Daughter, in 1772 ; and Know Your Own Mind, in 1777, were very suc cessful, and secured for their author both fame and wealth. Murphy is also notable as the first biographer of Fielding, and amidst the miscellaneous literary work of his later years he produced an &quot;essay on the life and genius&quot; of Johnson and translations of Sallust and Tacitus. Towards the close of his life the office of a commissioner of bank rupts, and a pension of 200, were conferred upon him by Government. He died in June 1805. MURPHY, ROBERT (1806-1843), mathematician, was the son of a poor shoemaker, and was born at Mallow in Ireland in 1 806. At the age of thirteen, while working as an apprentice in his father s shop, he became known to certain gentlemen in the neighbourhood as a self-taught mathema tician of wonderful precocity. Through their exertions, after attending a classical school in his native town, he was admitted to Caius College, Cambridge, in 1825. Third wrangler in 1829, he was elected in the same year a fellow of his college. But the temptations of prosperity were too strong for him. A course of extravagant dissipation soon led him into debt ; iris fellowship was sequestered for the behoof of his creditors, and he was obliged to leave Cam bridge in December 1832. After living for some time with his relations in Ireland, he repaired to London in 1836, a penniless literary adventurer. He had already contributed several mathematical papers to the Cambridge Philosophical Transactions, and had published Elementary principles of the theories of Electricity, &c., Camb., 1833. His pen was now employed in writing for the &quot;Library of Useful Knowledge&quot; a Treatise on the Theory of Algebraical Equations (Lond., 1839). He was labouring diligently to throw off the load of debt that still pressed heavily upon him when a disease of the lungs cut short his career in March 1843. Murphy s mathematical writings are remarkable for elegance and ingenuity, and parts of his work on the theory of equations and on the mathematical theory of electricity still retain their importance. MURRAIN, a term usually restricted to extensive out breaks of disease in cattle, but also applied to serious disorders among sheep and pigs, is taken in this article to cover general or infectious disorders of all the domesti cated animals, and as synonymous with plague or epizooty. It is now an established fact that murrains are all in fectious, i.e., capable of transmission from diseased to healthy creatures of the same, or perhaps of many different species, the manner and degree of infectiousness varying somewhat in some of the disorders. It is also an established fact that several of them and presumably all owe their existence and spread to a micro-organism or germ, vegetable or animal in its nature, which, obtaining access to a healthy body disposed to its reception, grows and multiplies rapidly there, and produces characteristic morbid symptoms and alterations in tissues and organs. On the presence and dissemination of this germ or virulent agent these diseases depend for their continuance and extension ; and this knowledge furnishes us with the indications for the sani tary measures required to limit their spread, or to effect their extermination. In previous ages the great outbreaks of murrains only occurred at comparatively rare intervals, in regions more or less remote from those to which they were native ; and then they generally owed their diffusion to the events of war, which sometimes carried them far beyond their ordinary boundaries. In modern times their extension has been greatly facilitated by the vastly improved means of communi cation. The movement of large numbers of animals through the channels of commerce and their rapid transport from XVII. 8