MAXSE
MEDWIN
the Legion of Honour, the Medjidieh, the
Bavarian Maximilian, and the German
Albert the Bear ; and he was a member of
about forty learned societies. His Pan
theistic views are best seen in his Hibbert
Lectures, The Origin and Growth of Eeli-
gion (1878), and works on mythology. D.
Oct. 28, 1900.
MAXSE, Frederick Augustus, admiral. B. 1833. He entered the navy, and as early as 1855 won the rank of commander by his " conspicuous gallantry." In 1867 he became Bear- Admiral, and retired. He then took an active part in advanced move ments, and published a number of Eadical lectures and speeches. Mr. Howard Evans tells in his Radical Fights of Forty Years (1913) that " a calendar of Positivist saints occupied a prominent place in his study" (p. 33). There are probably few naval commanders among the austere Positivists, but we gather from George Meredith s Letters (p. 169) that Maxse was fiery enough as a Eationalist. Meredith was not himself very reserved, yet we find him repeatedly checking the aggressiveness of Maxse. D. June 25, 1900.
MAY, Professor Walther Victor,
Ph.D., German zoologist. B. June 12, 1868. Ed. Cassel Gymnasium and Leipzig and Jena Universities. In 1891 he was dismissed from Leipzig for Socialism, and he edited the Socialist Beobachter at Chemnitz. He was imprisoned for twenty- two months for blasphemy. In 1898 he was appointed assistant at the Hamburg Botanical Gardens, and from 1899 to 1904 he was assistant at the Carlsruhe Zoolo gical Institute. In 1905 he became pro fessor of zoology at the Carlsruhe Tech nical College. Professor May has written, besides zoological works, Goethe, Humboldt, Darwin, Haeckel (1904), E. HaecJiel (1909), and other volumes on Evolution. In Was Wir Ernst Haeckel Verdanken he explains that he does not strictly follow Haeckel, but is " as far removed as ever from any ecclesiastical creed " (i, 282). 495
MAZZINI, Giuseppe, LL.D., Italian
patriot. B. June 22, 1805. Ed. Genoa
University. He practised law for a time
at Genoa and contributed to the literary
journals. Very early, however, he threw
himself into the movement for the emanci
pation of Italy, and inaugurated his heroic
career of struggle and sacrifice. In 1828-
he founded the Indicatore Genovense, which
was suppressed. Mazzini joined the Car
bonari in 1830, and was expelled from
Italy. In Switzerland, under sentence of
death if he re-entered Italy, he organized,
the " Young Italy " movement, and infused
energy into his compatriots. Expelled
from Switzerland in 1837, he came to-
England, where he found a home and great
esteem until 1870. In 1848, when the
Pope fled from Rome, Mazzini went there,
and was the virtual head of the short
lived Roman Republic. He returned to
England at its failure, and, maintaining
himself by literary work, continued the
struggle for liberation. He returned to
live in Italy in 1870. Mazzini was a very
earnest Theist, as every page of his writings
testifies. His difficulties with Garibaldi
and other friends of Italy were in part due
to his strong insistence on natural religion.
He strongly opposed the doctrines of
Christianity, and spoke of a religion of
humanity," but of a Theistic nature. The
best statement of his beliefs is in a letter
to Holyoake in 1855 (McCabe s Life and
Letters of G. J. Holyoake, 1908, i, 240-43).
D. Mar. 10, 1872.
MEDWIN, Thomas, writer. B. Mar. 20, 1788. Ed. Sion House, Brentford. In 1810 he collaborated with Shelley, who was his cousin, in writing Ahasuerus the Wanderer, which publishers rejected as " Atheistic." It was finally published in 1823. Medwin served in the army, bufc kept his literary tastes, and was intimate with Byron as well as Shelley. In 1824 he published a Journal of the Conversations of Lord Byron, and after Shelley s death he wrote A Memoir of P. B. Shelley (1833), I which he later expanded into The Life of 496
