MACER, AEMILIUS, of Verona, Roman didactic poet, author of two poems, one on birds (Ornithogonia), the other on the antidotes against the poison of serpents (Theriaca), imitated from the Greek poet Nicander of Colophon. According to Jerome, he died in 16 B.C. It is possible that he wrote also a botanical work. The extant hexameter poem De viribus (or virtutibus) herbarum, ascribed to Macer, is a medieval production by Odo Magdunensis, a French physician. Aemilius Macer must be distinguished from the Macer called Iliacus in the Ovidian catalogue of poets, the author of an epic poem on the events preceding the opening of the Iliad. The fact of his being addressed by Ovid in one of the epistles Ex Ponto shows that he was alive long after Aemilius Macer. He had been identified with the son or grandson of Theophanes of Mytilene, the intimate friend of Pompey.
See Ovid, Tristia, iv. 10, 43; Quintilian, Instit. x. 1, 56, 87; R. Unger, De Macro Nicandri imitatore (Friedland, 1845); C. P. Schulze in Rheinisches Museum (1898), liii. p. 541; for Macer Iliacus see Ovid, Ex Ponto, ii 10, 13, iv. 16, 6; Amores, ii. 18.
MACERATA, a city of the Marches, Italy, the chief town of the province of Macerata and a bishop’s see, 44 m. by rail S. of Ancona. Pop. (1901), 6,176 (town), 22,473 (commune). Crowning a hill 919 ft. above sea-level, with a picturesque mass of buildings enclosed by walls and towers, Macerata looks out over the Adriatic. The cathedral is modern, but some of the churches and palaces are not without interest. Besides the university, agricultural school and industrial institute, Macerata has a communal library founded by Leo XII., containing a small but choice collection of early pictures, and in the municipal buildings, a collection of antiquities from Helvia Ricina. There is an enormous amphitheatre or sferisterio for pallone, a ball game which is very popular in the district. The industries comprise the making of bricks, matches, terra-cotta and chemicals.
Macerata, as well as Recanati, was founded by the inhabitants of Ricina after the destruction of their city by Alaric in 408. During the Lombard period it was a flourishing town; but it was raised from comparative insignificance by Nicholas IV. to be the seat of the governors of the March. It was enclosed in the 13th century by a new line of walls more than 2½ m. in circuit; and in the troubles of the next two hundred years it had frequent occasion to learn their value. For the most part it remained faithful to the popes, and in return it was rewarded by a multitude of privileges. Though in 1797 the inhabitants opened their gates to the French, two years afterwards, when the country people took refuge within the walls, the city was taken by storm and delivered to pillage. The bishopric of Macerata dates from the suppression of the see of Recanati (1320).
MACFARREN, SIR GEORGE ALEXANDER (1813-1887), English composer, was born in London on the 2nd of March 1813, and entered the Royal Academy of Music in 1829. A symphony by him was played at an Academy concert in 1830; for the opening of the Queen’s Theatre in Tottenham Street, under the management of his father, in 1831, he wrote an overture. His Chevy Chase overture, the orchestral work by which he is perhaps best known, was written as early as 1836, and in a single night. On leaving the Academy in 1836, Macfarren was for about a year a music teacher in the Isle of Man, and wrote two unsuccessful operas. In 1837 he was appointed a professor at the Academy, and wrote his Romeo and Juliet overture. In the following year he brought out The Devil’s Opera, one of his best works. In 1843 he became conductor at Covent Garden, producing the Antigone with Mendelssohn’s music; his opera on Don Quixote was produced under Bunn at Drury Lane in 1846; his subsequent operas include Charles II. (1849), Robin Hood (1860), She Stoops to Conquer (1864), and Helvellyn (1864). A gradual failure of his eyesight, which had been defective from boyhood, resulted in total blindness in 1865, but he overcame the difficulties by employing an amanuensis in composition, and made hardly a break in the course of his work. He was made principal of the Royal Academy of Music in succession to Sterndale Bennett in February 1875, and in March of the same year professor of music in Cambridge University. Shortly before this he had begun a series of oratorios: St John the Baptist (Bristol, 1873); Resurrection (Birmingham, 1876); Joseph (Leeds, 1877); and King David (Leeds, 1883). In spite of their solid workmanship, and the skill with which the ideas are treated, it is difficult to hear or read them through without smiling at some of the touches of quite unconscious humour often resulting from the way in which the Biblical narratives have been, as it were, dramatized. He delivered many lectures of great and lasting value, and his theoretical works, such as the Rudiments of Harmony, and the treatise on counterpoint, will probably be remembered longer than many of his compositions. He was knighted in 1883, and died suddenly in London on the 31st of October 1887.
An excellent memoir by H. C. Banister appeared in 1891.
McGEE, THOMAS D’ARCY (1825-1868), Irish-Canadian politician and writer, second son of James McGee, a coast-guard, was born at Carlingford, Co. Louth, on the 13th of April 1825. He early showed a remarkable aptitude for oratory. At the age of thirteen he delivered a speech at Wexford, and when four years later he emigrated to America he quickly gained a reputation as a writer and public speaker in the city of Boston. He thus attracted the attention of O’Connell, and before he was twenty years of age he returned to London to become parliamentary correspondent of the Freeman’s Journal, and shortly afterwards London correspondent of the Nation, to which he also contributed a number of poems. He married in 1847 Mary Theresa Caffry, by whom he had two children. In 1846 he became one of the moving spirits in the “Young Ireland” party, and in promoting the objects of that organization he contributed two volumes to the “Library of Ireland.” On the failure of the movement in 1848 McGee escaped in the disguise of a priest to the United States, where between 1848 and 1853 he established two newspapers, the New York Nation and the American Celt. His writings at first were exceedingly bitter and anti-English; but as years passed he realized that a greater measure of political freedom was possible under the British constitution than under the American. He had now become well-known as an author, and as a lecturer of unusual ability. In 1857 McGee, driven from the United States by the scurrilous attacks of the extreme Irish revolutionaries, took up his abode in Canada, and was admitted to the bar of the province of Lower Canada in 1861. At the general election in 1858 he was returned to parliament as the member for Montreal, and for four years he was regarded as a powerful factor in the house. On the formation of the Sandfield-Macdonald-Sicotte administration in 1862 he accepted the office of president of the council. When the cabinet was reconstructed a year later the Irish were left without representation, and McGee sought re-election as a member of the opposite party. In 1864 he was appointed minister of agriculture in the administration of Sir E. P. Taché, and he served the country in that capacity until his death. He actively supported the policy of federation and was elected a member of the first Dominion parliament in 1867. On the 7th of April 1868, after having delivered a notable speech in the house, he was shot by an assassin as he was about to enter his house at Ottawa. His utterances against the Fenian invasion are believed to have been the cause of the crime for which P. J. Whelan was executed. McGee’s loss was keenly felt by all classes, and within a few weeks of his death parliament granted an annuity to his widow and children. McGee had great faith in the future of Canada as a part of the empire. Speaking at St John, N.B., in 1863, he said: “There are before the public men of British America at this moment but two courses: either to drift with the tide of democracy, or to seize the golden moment and fix for ever the monarchical character of our institutions. I invite every fellow colonist who agrees with me to unite our efforts that we may give our province the aspect of an empire, in order to exercise the influence abroad and at home of a state, and to originate a history which the world will not willingly let die.” Sir Charles Gavan Duffy considered that as a poet McGee was not inferior to Davis, and that as an orator he possessed powers rarer than those of T. F. Meagher.