the Bones," which first appeared in 1726, and was designed for the use of the students at tending his lectures; but it became a very popular work to the faculty in general. He had the satisfaction of seeing eight editions of it during his life, and it was translated into most of the European languages. A French version, in folio, by Mr. Sue, was illustrated by a number of very fine figures. To the later editions of this work he annexed a concise neurology, or description of the nerves, and a description of the lacteal system and thoracic duct. The establishment of a public hospital at Edinburgh, of which the professor of anatomy was officially appointed one of the managers, made an important addition to the opportunities for improvement afforded in its medical school; and soon after, the professors of medicine, and many other practitioners of the town, formed themselves into a society for collecting and publishing papers relative to their profession, and nominated Dr. Monro to be their secretary. The first volume of their publication, entitled, "Medical Essays and Observations by a Society at Edinburgh," appeared in 1732, and it was carried on to the sixth volume. Of this collection many of the most valuable articles are written by Dr. Monro, on subjects anatomical, physiological, and practical. The most elaborate of these is an "Essay on the Nutrition of the Foetus" in three dissertations. This society was This society was succeeded, at the instance of the celebrated mathematical professor Maclaurin, by one of an enlarged plan, including philosophical and literary topics, in which Dr. Monro took an active part as one of the vice-presidents. To the two volumes of its memoirs which were printed before his death, entitled, "Essays Physical and Literary," he contributed several papers. It was his particular talent to draw practical utility out of all his remarks and speculations, and the practice of surgery is indebted to him for a variety of improvements suggested by his anatomical observations. An accident which happened to him of breaking the tendo achillis in dancing, put him upon devising an improved method of treating that injury, which was the subject of one of his memoirs. His concluding publication was an "Account of the Success of Inoculation in Scotland," written originally as an answer to some queries relative to that practice, from the faculty of physicians at Paris. After occupying the anatomical chair with high reputation for near forty years, Dr. Monro in 1759 resigned the business of it to his son Alexander, and thenceforth lectured only as one of the clinical professors on cases in the hospital. His life, however, continued to be a scene of activity as long as his health permitted. He was a member of numerous societies and institutions for promoting the useful and liberal arts and manufactures, and for charitable purposes, and was an assiduous attendant on their meetings. He was a director of the bank of Scotland, and a justice of the peace, and was punctual in the discharge of all his duties. In all the relations of private life he was kind and exemplary. To the literary honours he attained in his own country were added those of a fellow of the Royal Society of London, and an honorary member of the Royal Academy of Surgery at Paris. After a long and painful disorder which he bore with fortitude and resignation, he died in July, 1767, at the age of 70, His works were published collectively, in one volume, quarto, Edinburgh, 1781, by his son Dr. Alexander Monro, with the addition of two pieces, viz. an "Oration de Cuticula Humana," and an "Essay on Comparative Anatomy:" the latter. had been published anonymously in 1744 from notes taken at his lectures, but is here given in a more correct and enlarged form. His life is prefixed by his son Dr. Donald Monro, who settled as a physician in London, and made himself known by an Essay on the Dropsy; an Account of the British Hospitals in Germany; a Treatise on Mineral Waters; a Treatise on Preserving the Health of Soldiers; Prælectiones Medica; and other works. Dr. Alexander Monro, junior, has filled the anatomical chair at Edinburgh ever since his father's resignation, with great credit to himself and the university, and is known throughout Europe by his valuable publications. Life of Dr. Monro prefixed to his Works. Halleri Bibl. Anat.-A. MONSON, SIR WILLIAM, a naval commander, and writer upon naval topics, was the third son of sir John Monson or Munson, of South Carlton, Lincolnshire. He was born. about 1569, and was sent at an early age to Baliol-college, Oxford, where he passed nearly, two years. But an active and martial disposition induced him, at the age of 16, without the knowledge of his parents, to enter on board a small vessel fitted out to cruize against the Spaniards. After some years of various service, he accompanied the earl of Cumberlandin two of his expeditions, in the second of which, when commanding a vessel, he was taken by the Spaniards, and was kept two years a prisoner. Upon his liberation in 1593, he again ent red into the earl's service, in which he made two more voyages. He was captain of a ship in the earl of Essex's expedition to Cadiz in 1596; and the next year, in that to the Azores. In 1602 he acted as vice-admiral under sir Richard Lewson on the coast of Spain, which station he also occupied in 1603. After the accession of king James, he was ap punted in 1694, admiral of the narrow seas. this once he bore during twelve years, supporting with credit the honour of the English flag, and protecting the trade and fisheries from all encroachments. His zeal ag inst the pretensions of the Dutch, and his promoting an enquiry into the state of the navy, against the will of the earl of Nottingham, lord highadmiral, involved him in troubles, and oceasoned his committal to the Tower in 16.6; but upon an examination into his conduct he was discharged. He was consulted on the duke of Buckingham's proposed expeditions against Algiers, Cadiz, and the isle of Rhé, aut of wich he disapproved, and his opinion was justified by their want of success. Lis opposition to a favourite, how ver, caused hin to remain unemployed, till 1635, when a fleet being fitted out to break a confederacy between the French and Dutch, he was appointed vice admiral. He afterwards withdrew to a life of quiet and privacy, and emp oyed himself in fishing his naval tracts at his seat of inneisiey in Surrey, where he died in February, 1642 3 leaving a numerous posterity. Sir Wilham Monson appears to have been a brave, prudent, and upright commander; and though he had not the fortune to perform any splendid. services, yet he deserves honourable commemoration for his zeal for the improvement of the British navy. His "vaval Tracts" contain much valuable information, historical and professional, with s veral plans an projects for advancing the interests of trade and navigation. A part of these Tracts was published separately in 1682, folio, with the title of "A particular and exact Account of the last seventeen Years of Queen Elza beth's Reign," and they were all inserted in the third volume of Churchill's collection of voyages, 1703. Biogr. Britan.-A. MONSTRELET, ENGUERRAND DE, a chronicler of the fifteenth century, was a gentleman of an ancient family in Cambray, of which city he died governor in 1453. He left a history, in French, of his own times, commencing with the year-1400, and carried down to 14975 th last fifteen years being added by another hand. It was printed under the title of "Chronique d'aguerrand de Monstrelet, Gentilopamë, pedis demeurant a Cambrai en Camores's,' the best edition is that of Paris, 1572, two volumes, foiio. This work gives a fitaful but prolix narrative of the wars between the nou es of Orleans and Burgundy, of the capture of Normandy and Paris by the Englis, and then expulsion, and of all the memorable events in France and other countri ́s during that period. It fills the space between the his ories of Froissart and Comines, and is reckoned particularly valuable on account or the number of original documents which it coats. Areri. Nouv. Dict. Hist. - MONTAGNE or MONTAIGNE, MICHA LD a colporated essayist, born in 1533, was L. Sa of Peter Eyquem, lord of Montagne in De igord, and inayor of Bordeaux in 1553. liis forward parts were cultivated with great care by his father, who from his infancy place but him a German, with whom he conversed ta Latin alone, so that this language was perfectly tamiliar to him at the age of SIX. New ras learned Greek by way of diver sion; and it was a principle adopted in his educat on to cheat him into every kind of study under the semblance of amusement. By tais method he was brought so forward, that at the age of then he had completed his course at to conege of Bordeaux, where among his masters were the two eminent scholars Muret and Buchanan. He afterwards probably attend d some chool of law, since he was destined to that profes on; and upon his marriage with the a ughter of a counsellor of the parLament of Bord.aux, he occupied for some t me a simila post. le quitted, however, the legal profession with disgust, and devoted himsit to the study of men and books. After the death of his intimate friend Etienne de la Boetie, who left him his library and manuscripts, he published the remains of that friend in prose and verse. In 1569 he printed a translation of the “ lation of the "Natural Theology of Raymond de bebonde," a learned Spaniard. The death of his father some time after gave him possession of the estate and seat of Montague; and in that retreat he began to collect materials for his essays. In order to enlarge the sphere of his observation, he travelled through France, and visited Germany, Switzerland, and Italy. At Rome he was honoured with the right of citizenship. During his absence, in 1581, he was chosen mayor of Bordeaux, in which office he succeeded marshal Biron. He held this office during four years, and in the course of it was delegated by his fellow-citizens on some public business at the court. He was also present at the states of Blois in 1588. By Charles IX. he was decorated with the order of St. Michael. During one of his residences at Paris for the purpose of printing his essays, he contracted that intimate friendship with mademoiselle de Gournai which continued as long as he lived. (See her article.) Though he interfered little in the divisions which disturbed France in the reign of Charles IX, he underwent some temporary dangers from the military parties which roaned about uncontrouled, pillaging friend and foe alike. In his In his advanced years he was much afflicted with nephritic complaints, for which he refused all assistance from the faculty, being a confirmed sceptic in the powers of medicine, or rather in the knowledge of its professors. He died of a quinsey in 1592, leaving an only daughter, who was well marri- d. With a considerable share of vanity, and other foibles, Montagne possessed a fund of philosophy which enabled him to pass through life with credit and tranquillity. He loved ease and independence, and was an enemy to constraint of every kind. He was moderate in his pleasures, frank and ingenuous in his manners, fond of instructive conversation, and prone to debate and discussion, but without moroseness or ill-humour, liberal and indulgent in his opinions, and remote from bigotry and superstition. His literary reputation is founded on his "Essays," which were long the most popular book in the French language, and are still read with pleasure. They embrace a great variety of topics, which are touched in a lively and entertaining manner, but without much accuracy or profundity. They are full of sentences and anecdotes from the ancients, interspersed at random, with his own remarks and opinions, and with stories of himself in a pleasant strain of egotism. Their style is neither pure nor correct, but simple, bold, lively, and energetic. The character of the author and his performance has been excel lenty drawn by M. de la Harpe in his "Cours de Literature." "Montagne (says he) had read much, but his erudition was founded on his philosophy. After having heard both the ancients and the moderns, he asked himself what he thought of them. This enquiry was somewhat prolix. He sometimes abuses the liberty of conversation, and loses sight of the question which he had proposed for discussion. He cites from memory, and makes some false or forced applications of the passages he quotes. He too much contracts the limits. of human knowledge with respect to some objects that have since been found not inaccessible to reasoning and experiment. As a writer, he has impressed on our language an energy which it did not before possess, and which has not become antiquated, because it is that of sentiments and ideas, and is besides not alienfrom the nature of our idiom. As a philoso pher he has painted man as he is: he praises. without compliment, and blames without misanthropy. His book has a stamp of good faith. which no other book in the world can have: in fact, it is not a book we are reading, but a conversation to which we are listening; and he persuades because he does not teach. He often speaks of himself, but so as to appears neither vain, hypocritical, nor tiresome. He is never dry; his heart or his character is in évery part.' The best editions of Montagne's essays are that of Coste, in three volumes, quarto, 1725, with notes and other additions, and a supplemental volume, quarto, 1740; reprinted at Trevoux, under the title of London, in six volumes, 12mo.; and that of Brussels, three volumes, 12mo. 1759. In 1772, Montagne's "Travels were published by M. de Qerlon, in one volume, quarto, and three volumes, small 12mo. This work rather disappointed the public expectation, being scarcely more than a journal hastily written, with little of the style and manner of the author. Moreri.. Nouv. Dict. Hist.-A. MONTAGUE, CHARLES, earl of Halifax, an eminent statesman and a distinguished patron of letters, was the fourth son of the honourable George Montague, a younger son. of the earl of Manchester. He was born in 1661 at Horton in Northamptonshire, and after acquiring the rudiments of learning in a country school, was sent, at the age of 14, to that of Westminster, of which Dr. Busby was the master. He remained in that seminary till he had completed his twenty-first year, when he was admitted of Trinity-college, Cambridge.. Here he pursued his academical studies with success, and especially cultivated a talent for poetry, of which he gave specimens in an ode on the marriage of the princess Anne to prince George of Denmark, and a copy of verses on the death of Charles II. The latter piece at tracted the notice of the earl of Dorset, who gave him an invitation to London, and introduced him to the wits of the day. The share he had with Prior in an humorous parody of Dryden's Hind and Panther, entitled "The Country and City Mouse," gave him the far ther merit of a friend to the constitution and religion of his country, which he enhanced by signing the invitation to the prince of Orange. He was chosen a member of the convention which declared the throne vacant on the abdication of king James; and having married the countess dowager of Manchester, he purchased the place of one of the clerks of the council, renouncing his previous intention of entering into the church. The earl of Dorset, now lord chamberlain, introduced him in such favourable terms to king William, that a pension of five hundred pounds was conferred upon him till some adequate promotion should offer. In the House of Commons, of which he was a member, Mr. Montague distinguished himself by promoting a bill for regulating trials in cases of high-treason, of which one of the provisions was the allowing council to the culprit. On this occasion, having felt an embarrassment in his speech, which for a time prevented him from going on, he made a very happy use of the circumstance. "If (said he) I, one of your own members, not only innocent but unaccused, am so awed by the view of a wise and illustrious assembly as to lose my powers of utterance, what must be the condition of a man obliged to plead in a public court for his life?" The increase of his reputation was soon followed by his political advancement. He was made one of the commissioners of the treasury, was sworn of the privy-council, and in 1694 was nominated chancellor of the exchequer and under-treasurer. In 1695 he undertook the arduous task of recoining all the silver money of the kingdom, which had become extremely defective; which useful design he completed within two years. He also procured the establishment of a general fund, which was the parent of the famous sinking fund. For these services he had a grant of crownlands in Ireland, which was approved by a vote of the House of Commons. In 1698 he was made first commissioner of the treasury, and was appointed one of the lords justices in the king's absence abroad. In the next year the post of auditor of the exchequer was conferred upon him; and in December, 1700, having resigned his office in the treasury, he was called to the House of Peers by the style of baron Halifax. He fell, however, into discredit with the House of Commons, which, in the parliament of this year, addressed the king to remove him from his councils, and impeached him of high crimes and misdemeanours. The articles against him referred to divers grants which he had obtained from the crown; to his possessing at the same time the inconsistent offices of commissioner and chancellor of the treasury, and auditor of the exchequer; and to his advising the partition-treaty, which last he absolutely denied. The charges were all dismissed by the House of Lords, and he continued in king William's favour till the death of that sovereign. Soon after the accession of Anne he was struck out of the list of privycounsellors, and was again attacked by the House of Commons, which voted him guilty of a breach of trust in his office of auditor, and addressed the queen to cause him to be prosecuted by the attorney-general. The lords, however, again supported him, and the prosecution was dropt. cution was dropt. During that reign he took the lead among those who resisted the high principles which were again in vogue. He successfully opposed the attempts of the House of Commons for repealing the bill for occasional conformity; and he made the motion for that enquiry into the danger of the church, which terminated in a parliamentary declaration that those were enemies to the state who suggested the existence of such danger. In 1706 he was appointed one of the commissioners to negociate the union with Scotland, and proposed that equivalent given to the Scotch for their public revenues, which was in reality a bribe to their leading men, but without which the measure would have been defeated. When the act passed for the naturalization of the Hanover family, and the security of the protestant succession to the crown, he was pitched upon to carry it over to the electoral court. He vigorously maintained the struggle of the Whig party to retain a share of power; and after their entire defeat, he was a strenu ous opposer of the treaty of Utrecht, and a stedfast supporter of the honour and interest of the duke of Marlborough. In 1714 he exerted himself to ward off the danger which seemed to threaten the Hanover succession, and by his contrivance procured a writ for calling the electoral prince to the House of Peers as duke of Cambridge. This zeal was rewarded immediately after the accession of George I. by his advancement to the earldom of Halifax, with the order of the garter, and reinstatement in the post of first commissioner of the treasury. But the high prospects which now opened to him were blasted by a sudden attack of an inflammation in the lungs, which carried him off in May 1715, at the age of 54. Lord Halifax is distinguished among English statesmen for the patronage he afforded to polite literature, which has been repaid by the eulogies of many of the most eminent writers of the time, among whom may be mentioned. Addison, Congreve, Steele, and Tickell. Of Addison he was the particular friend and patron, and was repaid by various returns of praise, and especially by the address of his epistle from Italy. Steele, in dedicating the fourth volume of the Tatler to his lordship, mentions him as having given a new era to wit and learning; by his patronage "to have produced those arts which before shunned the commerce of the world, into the service of life, and to have been the cause that the man of wit has turned himself to be a man of business." How far this was of real service to letters and business, may remain to be estimated. Swift and Pope alone of the wits of that time were hostile to him; the first, on a political account; the last, probably, through jealousy of his patronage of rival but inferior geniuses. The following severe lines, with several that follow, testify this irritable poet's contempt: Proud as Apollo on his forked hill, Sat full-blown Bufo puff'd by every quill; Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot. Pope also communicated to Spence a curious anecdote of lord Halifax's mode of acting the critic. By his lordship's desire, Pope read before him the two or three first books of his Iliad, in presence of Addison, Congreve, and Garth. Lord Halifax stopt him civilly in four or five places, and said there was something in those passages that did not quite please him, and begged he would reconsider them at his leisure. On coming away, in Garth's chariot, Pope expressed the difficulty he was laid under by his lordship's loose objections, of which he VOL. VII. could not find out the import. "Garth (says Pope), laughed heartily at my embarrassment; said, I had not been long enough acquainted with lord Halifax to know his way yet; that I need not puzzle myself about looking those places over and over when I got home. All you need do (says he) is to leave them just as they are; call on lord Halifax two or three months hence, thank him for his kind observations on those passages, and then read them to him as altered. I have known him much longer than you have, and will be answerable for the event." Pope followed this advice, and his lordship at the second reading was extremely pleased with the lines, and cried out, "Ay, now they are perfectly right: nothing can be better." This story, if authentic, justifies a sufficiently contemptible idea of this noble amateur's critical sagacity; yet it cannot be denied that he contributed much to the credit which letters obtained in the reigns of William and Anne, and this merit ought to be gratefully With respect to his own acknowledged. poetical character, when Addison himself has been content to say of it, a How negligently graceful he unreins His verse, and writes in loose familiar strains, modern reader will scarcely be induced to conceive highly of it. In fact, his few poems, though allowed to occupy a place in the modern collections of English poetry, fall rather below mediocrity; and Dr. Johnson had reason to say, "It would now be esteemed no honour, by a contributor to the monthly bundles of verses, to be told that, in strains either familiar or solemn, he sings like Montague." Big. Britan. Johnson's English Poets.-A. MONTAGUE, LADY MARY WORTLEY, one of the most celebrated among the female literary characters of England, was the eldest daughter of Evelyn duke of Kingston, and lady Mary Fielding, daughter of William earl of Denbigh. She was born about it90, at Thoresby in Nottinghamshire, and lost her mother at four years of age. Her early display of uncommon abilities caused her to be cducated upon a liberal plan, and she attended the same masters as her brother, under whom she French languages. She gave an extraordinary acquired a knowledge of the Greek, Latin, and proof of her crudition, as well as of the solidity of her disposition, in her twentieth year, by a translation of the Enchiridion of Epictetus, which she presented for revision to bishop Y |