MACROOM, a market town in the western part of county Cork, Ireland, on the river Sullane, an affluent of the Lee, 24½ m. W. of Cork by the Cork & Macroom railway, of which it is the terminus. Pop. (1901), 3016. Besides a fine Roman Catholic church, a court house and barracks, Macroom possesses a modernized castle, which is said to have been founded by King John, though it is more probably attributable to Norman invaders. It was besieged more than once in the 17th century, and is said to have been the birthplace of Admiral Sir William Penn, whose more famous son founded Pennsylvania. Here some rebels of 1798 were executed and their heads exhibited on the spikes of the castle gate. Macroom has trade in corn-milling, leather-work and dairy produce, and is a good centre for salmon and trout fishing. It is governed by an urban district council.
MACUGNAGA, a village of Piedmont, Italy, in the province of Novara, 20 m. W.S.W. of Piedimulera, which is 7 m. S. of Domodossola by rail. Pop. (1901), 798. It is situated 4047 ft. above sea-level, and is 10 m. N.E. of the highest summit of Monte Rosa. It is frequented as a summer resort.
MacVEAGH, WAYNE (1833- ), American lawyer and diplomatist, was born near Phoenixville, Chester county, Pa., on the 19th of April 1833. He graduated at Yale in 1853, was admitted to the bar in 1856, and was district attorney of Chester county in 1859-1864. He held commands in militia forces raised to meet threatened Confederate invasions of Pennsylvania (1862-63). He became a leader in the Republican party, and was a prominent opponent of his father-in-law, Simon Cameron, in the fight within the party in 1871. MacVeagh was minister to Turkey in 1870-1871; was a member of the state constitutional convention of 1872-1873; was chairman of the “MacVeagh Commission,” sent in 1877 by President Hayes to Louisiana, which secured the settlement of the contest between the two existing state governments and thus made possible the withdrawal of Federal troops from the state; and was attorney-general of the United States in 1881 under President Garfield, but resigned immediately after Garfield’s death. In 1892 he supported Grover Cleveland, the Democratic nominee for the presidency, and from 1893 to 1897 was ambassador to Italy. He returned to the Republican party in 1896. In 1903 he was chief counsel of the United States before the Hague tribunal in the case regarding the claims of Germany, Great Britain and Italy against the republic of Venezuela.
MADÁCH, IMRE (1829-1864), Hungarian dramatist, was born at Alsó-Sztregova. He took part in the great revolution of 1848-49 and was imprisoned; on his return to his small estate in the county of Nógrád, he found that his family life had meanwhile been completely wrecked. This only increased his natural tendency to melancholy, and he withdrew from public life till 1861, devoting his time mainly to the composition of his chief work, Az ember tragoediája (“The Tragedy of Man”). John Arany, then at the height of his fame as a poet, at once recognized the great merits of that peculiar drama, and Madách enjoyed a short spell of fame before his untimely death of heart-disease in 1864. In The Tragedy of Man Madách takes us from the hour when Adam and Eve were innocently walking in the Garden of Eden to the times of the Pharaohs; then to the Athens of Miltiades; to declining Rome; to the period of the crusades; into the study of the astronomer Kepler; thence into the horrors of the French Revolution; into greed-eaten and commerce-ridden modern London; nay, into the ultra-Socialist state of the future, when all the former ideals of man will by scientific formulae be shown up in their hollowness; still further, the poet shows the future of ice-clad earth, when man will be reduced to a degraded brute dragging on the misery of his existence in a cave. In all these scenes, or rather anticipatory dreams, Adam, Eve and the arch-fiend Lucifer are the chief and constantly recurring personae dramatis. In the end, Adam, despairing of his race, wants to commit suicide, when at the critical moment Eve tells him that she is going to be a mother. Adam then prostrates himself before God, who encourages him to hope and trust. The diction of the drama is elevated and pure, and although not meant for the stage, it has proved very effective at several public performances.
Concerning Madách there is an ample literature, consisting mostly of elaborate articles by Charles Szász (1862), Augustus Greguss (1872), B. Alexander (1871), M. Palágyi (1890), and others.