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dor de la India, quarto, Madrid, 1628. This is the work of D. Diego the first Conde. The character of the ancestor whose life he writes is very differently described by Barros and by Francisco de Andrada, the former giving him unqualified praise, the latter pointing out some great instances of misconduct.

2.

The second of the family, D. Fernando, published, 1. Historiarum Lusitanarum libri decem ab anno 1640 usque ad annum 1656, quarto, pars 1. Ulyssipone, 1734, pars 1. d. 1735. Historia de Tangere, folio, Lisboa, 1732. 3. Vida de el Rey D. Foam 1, quarto. Lisboa 1668. This is a work of very considerable merit. But the most valuable in the list is by his brother, son-in-law and heir, D. Luiz. Historia de Portugal Restaurado, 2. Tom. felio, Lisboa, 1679, 1698; a work of great extent and great authority, the last in the series of Portuguese historians. The wife also of D. Luiz was an author, and it has been said of her that she wrote not with the quill of an eagle,-for of such there are many ;-but with the quill of a phenix, of which there is but one! This lady belongs to the family by blood as well as marriage, having married her father's brother. It is amusing to observe how tyrannically the church of Rome dissolved marriages upon the plea of consanguinity in former ages, and how lightly it has set aside this obstacle in our own!

D. Francisco Xavier, the son of this marriage, left behind him four-and-forty works, of which the chief is his Henriqueida, Poema Heroico, em doze Cantos, Lisboa 1741. The Conde D. Henrique, founder of the royal house of Portugal, is the hero of this epic, which Voltaire has mentioned with praise, as in courtesy bound to do, Ericeira having called his Henriade the best French poem. The official censures affixed to the Henriqueida are, as usual, highly hyperbolical, but they furnish some anecdotes of the author. It appears that at the age of eight he was member of one academy, which seems by its title to have been designed for extemporary speaking; and when little older, was admitted into another, of which at twenty he was president! This was the age of academies in Portugal: he was secretary and protector of the Portuguese, and censor and director of the royal one; a member of the Arcadians of Rome, and of our own Royal Society. The most learned men of the time were his correspondents; Muratori and Crescembini in Italy; Boileau and Neufville (who wrote a history of Portugal) in France; marshal Schomberg, Le Clerc and Bayle; Salazar, Mayaus and

Feyjoo in Spain. His English correspondents were Silvester (a name which we do not recognize) and others of the Royal Society. He says, in the preface, that the knowledge which he has of Greek is not sufficient for him to understand Homer well; a proof how little that language was cultivated in his country, when the most learned man in it would make such a declaration in other respects this preface discovers a range of poetical reading which few have equalled, and none, perhaps, exceeded. The poem itself is not worse than its French namesake, though its faults are of a different character. He was blind when he wrote it, and died before it was published.

This truly estimable man was a munificent patron of letters. He increased the family library with above six hundred manuscripts, and 20,000 volumes. The vein was not yet exhausted. D. Luiz, the fifth Conde, wrote commentaries of his own administration in India, corrections and a supplement to Bluteau's Portuguese dictionary, and also to Moreri. He completed the catalogue of the library which his predecessor had begun: it was one of the noblest which any private family ever collected together, but it has been dispersed; and I, who write, have purchased some volumes from its wreck at the stalls in London.

Portuguese literature is deeply indebted to this noble house. Individuals have succeeded better, but no family has ever done so much. -R. S.

MENGOLI, PETER, an able Italian mathematician in the seventeenth century, concerning the place and time of whose birth we have no information. He studied under the celebrated father Bonaventure Cavalieri, to whom the Italians ascribe the invention of the first principles of the infinitesimal calculus. Mengoli was appointed professor of mechanics in the college of nobles at Bologna, and acquired high reputation by the success with which he filled that post, as well as by his publications. He was the author of a work entitled, "Geometria Speciosa Elementa," 1659, quarto, which is a kind of essay on infinitesimals, and contains similar signs with those of Leibnitz, in one part of his calculations. His other works, which are held in much esteem, are entitled, "Novæ Quadraturæ Arithmeticæ, seu de additione Fractionum;" "Via regia ad Mathematicas. ornata;" "Refrazzione è paralasse Solare;" "Speculatione de Musica;" "Circolo," 1672, quarto; "Arithmeticæ rationalis Ele

menta;" "Arithmetica realis, &c." The author was living in 1678. Moreri. Nouv. Dict. Hist.-M.

MENGS, ANTONY RAPHAEL, an eminent painter, was born in 1728 at Aussig in Bohemia. His father, Ishmael, removed to Dresden, where he was made painter to Augustus III. king of Poland. He had from a very early age educated his son for his own profession, and practised him in all the different methods of painting. In 1741, he took him to Rome, and kept him very assiduously at study under his own direction, particularly exercising him in copying from the antique, and from the works of the greatest modern artists. After an abode in that capital of three or four years, Antony returned to Dresden, where he was employed at court, and obtained the rank of king's painter. He made a second journey to Rome, where he married a young woman from whom he had modelled the head of a Madonna. He was desirous of fixing himself there; but his father, who continued to hold him in the bonds of paternal authority, obliged him in 1749 to return to Dresden. The increased favour he experienced from the king did not prevent his longings to revisit Rome, and in 1752 he carried thither his wife and an infant child. The disasters which befel Saxony and its monarch deprived him of his pension, and he fell into a state of indigence, barely supporting himself by his ill-paid labours, which chiefly consisted of painting in fresco. Having become known to Charles III. king of Naples, on a visit to his capital, that monarch conceived such an opinion of his talents, that upon his accession to the throne of Spain he gave Mengs an invitation to Madrid honourable and lucrative conditions, which were willingly accepted, and he arrived in that city in 1761. He there executed a great many works, both frescos and easel pictures, of which a dead Christ, with the usual accompaniments, is reckoned the principal. After a considerable stay in Spain, excess of application, and the want of domestic society, threw him into a bad state of health, which induced him to ask leave to return to Italy, where he had left his wife and family. During his convalescence he painted for the king of Spain a nativity, in which the light is managed in the manner of Corregio's famous

on very

notte.

This piece was so much valued, that a plate of glass of uncommon dimensions was made to cover it. At Rome he was employed by pope Clement XIV. in a considerable

work; and it was not till after an abode there of three years that he reluctantly returned to Madrid. He there composed the apotheosis of Trajan for the ceiling of the great saloon of the palace in Madrid; but his incessant application again injured his health, and he obtained a final dismission from his generous master, who continued to him a very liberal appointment. He took up his residence for the last time at Rome, but it was embittered to him by the loss of his beloved wife. Grief hastened the decline of a shattered constitution, and the nostrums of an empiric precipitated the termination of his life, which took place in 1799, in the fifty-second year of his age. The academy of St. Luke assisted at his interment; and his friend the chevalier d'Azara placed his bust in bronze in the Pantheon, next to that of Raphael, with an honourable inscription in which he is entitled Pictor Philosophus. The private character of Mengs was marked with melancholy and reserve, with purity of manners, and strict regard to veracity. He had little knowledge of the world, and seemed under constraint in company; yet he sometimes delivered his sentiments with a blunt freedom that partook of harshness, and gave offence. He was however fundamentally kind and benignant; and was so disinterested or negligent in money concerns, that notwithstanding the large emoluments of his latter years, he scarcely left enough to defray the expenses of his funeral.

As an artist, very different opinions have been given respecting his merit. It seems generally allowed that his excellencies were less the product of native genius, than of intense application to the theory and practice of his art. A degree of coldness and dryness is said to mark his performances, even where they display sublimity of conception, and a knowledge of the grand principles of composition. His long practice of miniature-painting is asserted to have habituated him to a diminutive style; and his finishing had frequently a gloss that gave his pictures the effect of enamel. Mengs was not only a celebrated artist, but distinguished himself as a writer in his art. The year after his death, the chevalier d'Azara published "Opere di Antonio Raffaele Mengs," in two volumes quarto. These consist of various treatises on subjects relative to the principles of painting, and on the characters of the greatest masters of the art, particularly Raphael, Corregio, and Titian. They contain much metaphysical subtlety, and many singular and rather paradoxical notions;

but they inspire, elevated ideas of the art and its objects. He speaks much of that ideal beauty which surpasses any thing that nature offers to the senses; but he has, perhaps, not been more successful in suggesting precise notions concerning it, than others who have treated on the same topic. He carried his admiration of the ancients beyond almost any of his cotemporaries, except his intimate friend the abbé Winckelman; and, notwithstanding his exalted idea of the perfections of Raphael, (whom of all artists he most imitated) he imagined that the painters of antiquity were his superiors. Opere di Mengs. Cumberland's Account of Spanish Painters. Pilkington's Dict.

-A.

- MENINSKI, or MENIN, FRANCIS, (Franciscus a Mesgnien), a celebrated orientalist, was born in Lorraine in 1623. He studied at Rome under the learned Jesuit Giattini; and being particularly attached to the acquisition of the Eastern languages, when about the age of thirty, he accompanied the Polish embassador to Constantinople, and there applied assiduously to the study of the Turkish tongue. In this he was so successful, that he was made first interpreter to the Polish embassy at the Porte. His able services in this department caused him, after a summons into Poland, to be sent out again as embassador plenipotenrary to that court. The consequence of this appointment was his being naturalized in Poland, on which occasion he added the termination ski to his family name of Menin. In 1661 he accepted the post of interpreter of the Oriental languages at the court of Vienna; and in this capacity he accompanied several imperial embassadors to the Porte. He was, likewise entrusted with various important and confidential commissions; and having visited in 1669 the holy sepulchre at Jerusalem, he was created a knight of that order. His services were so much approved, that on his return to Vienna he was made one of the emperor's council of war, as well as first interpreter. He died in that capital in 1698. The great work of Meninski was his "Thesaurus Linguarum Orientalium," published at Vienna in 1680, in four volumes folio. The fourth of these volumes, entitled "Complementum Thesauri, seu Onomasticum Latino-Turcico, ArabicoPersicum, &c." was entirely destroyed by the accident of a bomb falling upon the author's house during the siege of Vienna by the Turks, which obliged him to recompose it, and was the cause that it did not appear till

1687. The other volumes were likewise
'greatly injured, which rendered the work ex-
tremely scarce and dear. A new edition of
this very laborious and valuable performance
with various improvements was commenced at
Vienna in 1780, but is as yet unfinished.
The Turkish, Persian and Arabic grammars
contained in the "Ihesaurus" were republish-
ed in two volumes quarto, Vien. 1756. The
other works of Meninski were chiefly in con--
troversy with I. B. Podesta, professor of the
Oriental languages in Vienna. New Biogr.
Dict. Bibliogr. Dict.-A.

MENNO, surnamed Simonson, a celebrated
and leading minister among the Anabaptists in
the sixteenth century, after whom the mem-
bers of that sect in the Low-Countries were
called Mennonites, was born at Witmarsum, a
village in the neighbourhood of Bolswert in
Friesland, in the year 1505.
His parents,
who were Catholics, caused him to be educated
to the church; and after he had been ordained
priest, he preached the doctrines of popery
with great zeal for some time; first at a vil-
lage belonging to his father, called Pinnin-
gum, and afterwards at the place of his birth.
With all his zeal, however, he led a profligate
life, as he himself confesses; but, becoming
acquainted with some Anabaptists, he received
serious impressions, and gradually became a
convert to their principles. For some time he
frequented their assemblies with the utmost
secresy; but, in the year 1536, he threw off
the mask, resigned his station and office in the
Romish church, and publicly embraced their
communion. The members of that sect with
whom Menno connected himself were simple
and inoffensive men, exempt from that fanati-
cal frenzy which had disgraced the Anabap-
tists of Munster, and holding the same reli-
gious opinions with the reformed churches,
excepting their own peculiar tenets, which
will be hereafter noticed. About a year after
Menno had joined himself to them, several of
the sect earnestly solicited him to undertake
the office of a public teacher; to whose en-
treaties he yielded, and was accordingly ordain-
ed at Groningen. Menno possessed genius;
had the advantage of a natural and persuasive
eloquence; and had a sufficient portion of
learning to pass for an oracle in the eyes of the
multitude. He was also a man of probity, of
a meek and tractable spirit, gentle in his man-
ners, and accommodating in his commerce with
persons of all ranks and characters. He was
at the same time extremely zealous in promot-

ing practical religion and virtue, which he recominended by his example, as well as by his precepts. With such talents and dispositions, he was excellently qualified to gain a number of adherents wherever he exercised his ministry. That office he diligently discharged during five-and-twenty years, travelling with his wife and children from one country to another, under pressures and calamities of various kinds, and continually exposed to the danger of falling a victim to persecuting and sanguinary laws. He visited East and West Friesland, Groningen, Holland, Gelderland, Brabant, Westphalia, the German provinces which lie on the coast of the Baltic sea, and penetrated so far as Livonia. In all these countries he gained a prodigious number of proselytes to his sect. -The peculiar tenets which he inculcated on them were, that it was an unscriptural abuse and prostitution of the sacrament of baptism to administer it to infants, adult persons only, who are come to the full use of their reason, being the proper subjects of it; the doctrine of the Millenium, or thousand years reign of Christ's upon earth; the exclusion of civil rulers from their communion, and the prohibition of any of their members from performing the functions of magistracy; the unlawfulness of repelling force by force, and consequently of war, in all its shapes; the absolute unlawfulness of oaths, either in confirmation of truth or on any other occasion; and the vanity, as well as pernicious effects of human science. Menno also denied that Christ derived from his mother the body which he assumed; and thought, on the contrary, that it was produced out of nothing, in the womb of the Virgin Mary, by the creating power of the Holy Ghost. These opinions the eloquence of Menno set off to great advantage, and the number of his followers rapidly increased, notwithstanding the inhuman and bloody persecutions with which they were harrassed.

The remarkable success which attended Menno's ministerial labours, occasioned him to be regarded as the common chief of almost all the Anabaptists, for whom he drew up a plan of doctrine and discipline corresponding with the principles above-mentioned, and professedly drawn from the Holy Scriptures alone, which united them in one community. About the middle of the sixteenth century, however, a spirit of dissention broke out among them, which produced a schism in the sect that has continued to this day. The ground of their dispute was the discipline of excommunica

tion, which a considerable number of their body carried to an enormous degree of severity and rigour. They not only maintained that open offenders, even those who sincerely deplored and lamented their faults, should, without any previous warning or admonition, be expelled from the communion of the church, but they even pretended to exclude the persons. thus excommunicated from all intercourse with their wives, husbands, brothers, sisters, children, and relations, and even from following their ordinary calling. They were also for imposing a course of moral discipline, which was difficult and austere in the highest degree. Against these severe methods of procedure several other Anabaptists, chiefly inhabitants of Waterland and Franeker, protested, as unreasonable and unnecessary; but they were outvoted by the violent and rigid party, excommunicated, and cast out. The moderate Anabaptists being in this manner cut off, and divided from their brethren, became a particular sect or community under the name of the Franekerians or Waterlandians. Menno employed his most vigorous endeavours to prevent, this schism, and to restore peace and concord in the community; but when he perceived that they proved ineffectual, he attempted to conduct himself in such a manner as he thought might preserve his influence with both parties. For this purpose he at first declared himself in favour of neither party, but reproved each for such parts of their proceedings as he considered to be faulty. Afterwards he discovered an unworthy and blameable degree of irresolution and inconstancy, which tended to offend both, and by so doing to inflame rather than heal their divisions. For at one time he seemed inclined to the moderate party, and, as appears not only from their testimony but his own writings, would have joined with them, had he not dreaded falling under the same excommunication. At another time he acted with the violent Anabaptists, extending the rigour of excommunication so far as to include under it those of their brethren who sometimes frequented the Lutheran churches, believing that they were at liberty to hear the ministers of that persuasion as well as their own, and that no person ought to deprive them of that liberty. He also rashly ventured to pronounce all persons, and especially ministers who did not agree with him in all points, to be worldly and carnal men." Thus," says the learned and candid Brandt, "were Menno's good intentions attended with human passions and infir

mities; yet it must be owned that he laboured very much, and contributed a great deal towards the reformation of doctrine and manners: and even in the midst of his fierce zeal there appeared sometimes the rays of moderation and good temper when amongst his own people; but stiffness against others, and his complying with the temerity and self conceitedness of the most violent of his fraternity, whom he durst not oppose, or else his own unsteadiness, darkened, as some think, the brightness of his other qualities !" In the latter part of In the latter part of his life Menno resided at the country seat of a certain nobleman, not far from the city of Oldensloe, who, moved with compasion at a view of the perils to which he was exposed, and the snare, that were daily laid for his ruin, took him, together with certain of his as sociates, into his protection, and gave him an asylum. Here he died in 1561, about the age of fifty-six. He was the author of various productions in defence of his peculiar opinions, which are almost all composed in the Dutch language, and were published together in folio, at Amsterdam, in the year 1651. Branat's Hist. Reform. in the Low Countries, vol. I. b. iii. &iv. Mosh. Hist. Eccl. sac. xvi. cap. 3. sect. iii. par. ü.-M.

MENOCHIO, JACOPO, a learned Jurist, was a native of Pavia, and began in 1555 to occupy the chair of civil law in its university. Five years afterwards he accepted an invitation from Emanuel Philibert, duke of Savoy, to his newly erected university of Mondovi. Thence he removed in 1566 to the first chair of common law in Padua, which he afterwards changed for that of civil law. His high reputation caused him in 1589 to be recalled by the senate of Milan to Pavia; and he was at length elected a senator of Milan, and president of the extraordinary magistracy. He died in that city in 1607. A number of volumes on legal subjects attest his diligence and profundity in his professional studies. These are still in use with many lawyers; and in particular, his treatises "De Conjecturis ultimum Voluntatum," and, "De tacitis et ambiguis Conventionibus," are much esteemed. He has been reckoned the first doctor both in civil and canon law, in the age in which he lived. Tiraboschi.-A:

MENOCHIO, JOHN STEPHEN, a learned Italian Jesuit and biblical scholar who flourished in the former part of the seventeenth century, was the son of the preceding, and born at Pavia in the year 1576. After having been

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carefully instructed in classical and polite learning, at the age of seventeen he entered the society of Jesus, where he distinguished himself by his proficiency in his studies, and particularly in scriptural literature. Having completed his academical course, he was selected by his superiors to fill the chair of professor, which he occupied with great applause during several years; and he was afterwards raised to the most honourable posts belonging to the society, in the colleges and provinces of Italy. Italy. Equally respected for his virtues and for his erudition, he died at Rome in 1656, when about eighty years of age. He was the author of "Hieropoliticon, seu Institutiones Politica è Sacris Scripturis depromptæ, Lib. III.;" "Institutiones Economicæ ex Sacris Literis depromptæ, Lib. II.;" "De Republica Hebræorum Lib. VIII;" and "Brevis Explicatio sensus Literalis totius Scripture," in two volumes. These different works are highly commended for the extensive knowledge and solid learning which they display; and that last mentioned is particularly esteemed on account of the perspicuity, precision, and judgment by which it is distinguished. The best edition of it is that published by father Tournemine, a Jesuit, in 1719, in two volumes folio, accompanied with a number of valuable treatises and dissertations on biblical subjects; which was reprinted at Avignon, in 1607, in four volumes, quarto. Father Menochio also published, in the Italian language, “A History of the Life of Jesus Christ," a Sacred History, founded on the Acts of the Apostles ;" and six volumes of "Dissertations on different Subjects," chiefly designed to elucidate the Scriptures. After his death, a treatise "On the Christian Economy," and some other pieces were published from his MSS. Landi's Hist. de la Lit. de l'Italie, vol. V. liv. xiii. art. ii. Moreri. Nouv. Dict. Hist.M.

MENTCHIKOF, ALEXANDER, a statesman. and general under czar Peter I., and a remarkable example of a rise to a high fortune from the meanest origin, was the son of peasants who were vassals of the monastery of Cosmopoli. At the age of thirteen he went to Moscow, where he was taken into the service of a pastry-cook, and employed to cry his wares. about the streets. The czar happening one day to hear him, was struck with the pleasant song which he annexed to his cry, and entered into conversation with him. The smartness of the boy's replies pleased him so well, that

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