[2] Mayhew was born at Tisbury, Wiltshire, was a merchant in Southampton, emigrated to Massachusetts about 1633, settled at Watertown, Mass., in 1635; was a member of the Massachusetts General Court in 1636-1644, and after 1644 or 1645 lived on Martha’s Vineyard.
[3] It appears from a letter from Mayhew to Governor Andros in 1675 that about 1641 Mayhew obtained a conveyance to Martha’s Vineyard from Richard Vines, agent of Gorges. See F. B. Hough, Papers Relating to the Island of Nantucket, with Documents Relating to the Original Settlement of that Island, Martha’s Vineyard, &c. (Albany, N.Y., 1856).
[4] In 1901, a boulder memorial was erected to the younger Mayhew on the West Tisbury road, between the village of that name and Edgartown, marking the spot where the missionary bade farewell to several hundred Indians. The Martha’s Vineyard Indians were subject to the Wampanoag tribe, on the mainland, were expert watermen, and were very numerous when the whites first came. Nearly all of them were converted to Christianity by the Mayhews, and they were friendly to the settlers during King Philip’s war. By 1698 their numbers had been reduced to about 1000, and by 1764 to about 300. Soon after this they began to intermarry with negroes, and now only faint traces of them remain.
MARTÍ, JUAN JOSÉ (1570?-1604), Spanish novelist, was born at Orihuela (Valencia) about 1570. He graduated as bachelor of canon law at Valencia in 1591, and in 1598 took his degree as doctor of canon law; in the latter year he was appointed co-examiner in canon law at Valencia University, and held the post for six years. He died at Valencia, and was buried in the cathedral of that city on the 22nd of December 1604. Martí joined the Valencian Academia de los nocturnos, under the name of “Atrevimiento,” but is best known by another pseudonym, Mateo Luján de Sayavedra, under which he issued an apocryphal continuation (1602) of Alemán’s Guzmán de Alfarache (1599). Marti obtained access to Alemán’s unfinished manuscript, and stole some of his ideas; this dishonesty lends point to the sarcastic congratulations which Alemán, in the genuine sequel (1604) pays to his rival’s sallies: “I greatly envy them, and should be proud that they were mine.” Martí’s book is clever, but the circumstances in which it was produced account for its cold reception and afford presumption that the best scenes are not original.
It has been suggested that Martí is identical with Avellaneda, the writer of a spurious continuation (1614) to Don Quixote; but he died before the first part of Don Quixote was published (1605).
MARTIAL (Marcus Valerius Martialis), Latin epigrammatist, was born, in one of the years A.D. 38-41, for in book x., of which the poems were composed in the years 95-98, he is found celebrating his fifty-seventh birthday (x. 24). Our knowledge of his career is derived almost entirely from himself. Reference to public events enables us approximately to fix the date of the publication of the different books of epigrams, and from these dates to determine those of various important events in his life. The place of his birth was Bilbilis, officially Augusta Bilbilis, in Spain. His name seems to imply that he was born a Roman citizen, but he speaks of himself as “sprung from the Celts and Iberians, and a countryman of the Tagus;” and, in contrasting his own masculine appearance with that of an effeminate Greek, he draws especial attention to “his stiff Spanish hair” (x. 65, 7). His parents, Fronto and Flaccilla, appear to have died in his youth (v. 34). His home was evidently one of rude comfort and plenty, sufficiently in the country to afford him the amusements of hunting and fishing, which he often recalls with keen pleasure, and sufficiently near the town to afford him the companionship of many comrades, the few survivors of whom he looks forward to meeting again after his four-and-thirty years’ absence (x. 104). The memories of this old home, and of other spots, the rough names and local associations which he delights to introduce into his verse, attest the enjoyment which he had in his early life, and were among the influences which kept his spirit alive in the routine of social life in Rome. But his Spanish home could impart, not only the vigorous vitality which was one condition of his success as a wit and poet, but the education which made him so accomplished a writer. The literary distinction obtained by the Senecas, by Lucan, by Quintilian, who belonged to a somewhat older generation, and by his friends and contemporaries, Licinianus of Bilbilis, Decianus of Emerita, and Canius of Gades, proves how eagerly the novel impulse of letters was received in Spain in the first century of the empire. The success of his countrymen may have been the motive which induced Martial to remove to Rome when he had completed his education. This he did in A.D. 64, one year before the fall of Seneca and Lucan, who were probably his earliest patrons.
Of the details of his life for the first twenty years or so after he came to Rome we do not know much. He published some juvenile poems of which he thought very little in his maturer years, and he laughs at a foolish bookseller who would not allow them to die a natural death (i. 113). Martial had neither youthful passion nor youthful enthusiasm to make him precociously a poet. His faculty ripened with experience and with the knowledge of that social life which was both his theme and his inspiration; and many of his best epigrams are among those written in his last years. From many answers which he makes to the remonstrances of friends—among others to those of Quintilian—it may be inferred that he was urged to practise at the bar, but that he preferred his own lazy Bohemian kind of life. He made many influential friends and patrons, and secured the favour both of Titus and Domitian. From them he obtained various privileges, among others the semestris tribunatus, which conferred on him equestrian rank. He failed, however, in his application to the latter for more substantial advantages, although he commemorates the glory of having been invited to dinner by him, and also the fact that he procured the privilege of citizenship for many persons in whose behalf he appealed to him. The earliest of his extant works, that known by the name of Liber spectaculorum, was first published at the opening of the Colosseum in the reign of Titus, and relates to the theatrical performances given by him; but the book as it now stands was given to the world in or about the first year of Domitian, i.e. about A.D. 81. The favour of the emperor procured him the countenance of some of the worst creatures at the imperial court—among them of the notorious Crispinus, and probably of Paris, the supposed author of Juvenal’s exile, for whose monument Martial afterwards wrote a eulogistic epitaph. The two books, numbered by editors xiii. and xiv., and known by the names of Xenia and Apophoreta—inscriptions in two lines each for presents,—were published at the Saturnalia of 84. In 86 he gave to the world the first two of the twelve books on which his reputation rests. From that time till his return to Spain in A.D. 98 he published a volume almost every year. The first nine books and the first edition of book x. appeared in the reign of Domitian; and book xi. at the end of A.D. 96, shortly after the accession of Nerva. A revised edition of book x., that which we now possess, appeared in A.D. 98, about the time of the entrance of Trajan into Rome. The last book was written after three years’ absence in Spain, shortly before his death, which happened about the year A.D. 102 or 103.
These twelve books bring Martial’s ordinary mode of life between the age of five-and-forty and sixty very fully before us. His regular home for five-and-thirty years was Rome. He lived at first up three pairs of stairs, and his “garret” overlooked the laurels in front of the portico of Agrippa. He had a small villa and unproductive farm near Nomentum, in the Sabine territory, to which he occasionally retired from the bores and noises of the city (ii. 38, xii. 57). In his later years he had also a small house on the Quirinal, near the temple of Quirinus. At the time when his third book was brought out he had retired for a short time to Cisalpine Gaul, in weariness, as he tells us, of his unremunerative attendance on the levées of the great. For a time he seems to have felt the charm of the new scenes which he visited, and in a later book (iv. 25) he contemplates the prospect of retiring to the neighbourhood of Aquileia and the Timavus. But the spell exercised over him by Rome and Roman society was too great; even the epigrams sent from Forum Corneli and the Aemilian Way ring much more of the Roman forum, and of the streets, baths, porticos and clubs of Rome, than of the places from which they are dated. So too his motive for his final departure from Rome in A.D. 98 was a weariness of the burdens imposed on him by his social position, and apparently the difficulties of meeting the ordinary expenses of living in the metropolis (x. 96); and he looks forward to a return to the scenes familiar to his youth. The well-known epigram addressed to Juvenal (xii. 18) shows that for a time his ideal was realized; but the more trustworthy evidence of the prose epistle prefixed to book xii. proves that his contentment was of short duration, and that he could not live happily away from the literary and social pleasures of Rome. The one consolation of his exile was the society of a lady, Marcella, of whom he writes rather as if she were his patroness—and it seems to have been a necessity of his being to have always a patron or patroness—than his wife or mistress.