and the higher education of women.  He was the author of many important works, including Essays Biographical and Critical (1856), British Novelists (1859), and Recent British Philosophy (1865).  His magnum opus is his monumental Life of John Milton (6 vols., 1859-80) the most complete biography of any Englishman, dealing as it does not only with the personal life of the poet, but with the history, political, social, and religious of his time.  Other books are Drummond of Hawthornden (1873), De Quincey (in English Men of Letters Series) (1878), Edinburgh Sketches and Memories (1892), and Carlyle Personally and in his Writings.  He also ed. the standard ed. of De Quincey’s works, and the Register of the Privy Council of Scotland, his introductions in connection with which are of great historical value.  He was appointed Historiographer for Scotland in 1893.  M. was full of learning guided by sagacity, genial, broad-minded, and sane in his judgments of men and things, and thoroughly honest and sincere.

MATHER, COTTON (1663-1728).—­Divine, s. of Increase M., a leading American divine, was ed. at Harvard, became a minister, and was colleague to his f. He was laborious, able, and learned, but extremely bigoted and self-sufficient.  He carried on a persecution of so-called “witches,” which led to the shedding of much innocent blood; on the other hand he was so much of a reformer as to advocate inoculation for small-pox.  He was a copious author, his chief work being Magnalia Christi Americana (1702), an ecclesiastical history of New England.  Others were Late Memorable Providences relating to Witchcraft and Possession (1689), and The Wonders of the Invisible World (1693).  In his later years he admitted that “he had gone too far” in his crusade against witches.

MATHIAS, THOMAS JAMES (1754?-1835).—­Satirist, ed. at Camb., and held some minor appointments in the Royal household.  He was an accomplished Italian scholar, and made various translations from the English into Italian, and vice versa.  He also produced a fine ed. of Gray, on which he lost heavily.  His chief work, however, was The Pursuits of Literature (1794), an undiscriminating satire on his literary contemporaries which went through 16 ed., but is now almost forgotten.

MATURIN, CHARLES ROBERT (1782-1824).—­Novelist, b. in Dublin of Huguenot ancestry, was ed. at Trinity Coll. there, and taking orders held various benefices.  He was the author of a few dramas, one of which, Bertram, had some success.  He is, perhaps, better known for his romances in the style of Mrs. Radcliffe and “Monk” Lewis.  The first of these, The Fatal Revenge appeared in 1807, and was followed by, among others, The Milesian Chief (1812), Women, which was the most successful, and lastly by Melmoth, in which he outdoes his models in the mysterious, the horrible, and indeed the revolting, without, except very occasionally, reaching their power.  His last work, The Albigenses, in a somewhat different style, was pub. in the year of his death.