MARIE ANTOINETTE, JosepheJeanne (1755- 1793), queen of France, was the fourth daughter of Maria Theresa and the emperor Francis T., and was born on the 2d November 1755, on the day of the great earthquake at Lisbon, and in the year in which the hereditary policy of enmity between the houses of France and Austria was changed to an alliance between them. From her earliest years she was destined by her mother to sustain this alliance, and was educated, with a view to a marriage with a French prince, by the Abbé de Vermond, who was to have a great influence on her future life. In 1770 Choiseul negotiated her marriage to the young dauphin, which took place on May 16 with the greatest pomp, but which was soon overshadowed by a terrible accident in Paris at the fête given in honour of the marriage. The dauphine soon found her position very difficult; she was but fourteen, and was intended by her mother to support the Austrian alliance and Choiseul at the court of France. This use of her daughters for political purposes has been recently denied by Von Arneth, the able editor of Maria Theresa’s letters; b it a consideration of the letters themselves confirms the i lea, which was at the bottom of Marie Antoinette’s unpopularity in France, that she was only an Austrian spy in a high position. She had hardly arrived at Paris, when her friend and the friend of the Austrian alliance, Choiseul, was dismissed from the ministry, and she was left alone to steer a difficult course by the advice of the Austrian minister, the Count de Mercy-Argenteau, whose reports of her d ιily doings to Maria Theresa have been published. In May 1774 Louis XV. died, and Marie Antoinette became queen of France. Through the first years of her reign she played a very important political part, but, ...

MARIE DE FRANCE is one of the most interesting figures in the literary history of the Middle Ages. She is also one of the most mysterious. Nothing is known of her except from her own statements, which amount to little more than that her name was Marie and her country France, that she dedicated one of her works to an unnamed king, and another to a certain Count William. She is mentioned by Denis Pyramus, who was her contemporary, and who says that she was very popular, but gives no particulars. Attempts have been made to identify conjecturally the king and the count,—the most probable hypotheses being that the former was Henry III. of England, and the latter William Longsword of Salisbury; that is to say, Marie lived in the first half of the 13th century, and rather towards the beginning than the end of that half. Her work which remains to us is entirely poetical, and by no means inconsiderable in extent. It falls naturally into three divisions. The first consists of lais or narrative poems in octosyllabic couplets. There are fourteen of them, the titles being Gugemer, Equitan, Le Frêne, Le Bisclavaret, Lanval, Les deux amants, Ywenec, Le Laustic (*‘ the Nightingale ”), Milon, Le Chaitivel ( “the Unhappy One”), Le Chèvrefeuille, Eliduc,Graelent, I.’Epine. The longest of these contains nearly twelve hundred lines; the shortest only just exceeds a hundred. The term lai is of Breton origin, and is believed to have had reference originally to the kind of music to which it was performed. But in Marie it is simply a short romance, generally of an amatory character. The merits of these poems are very great. They have much tenderness and delicacy of expression, flowing and melodious verse, and not a little descriptive power. The dialect is decidedly Norman in ...

MARIENBURG (in Polish, Malborg∖ the chief town of a circle in the district of Dantzic, Prussia, lies 30 miles to the south-east of Dantzic, in a fertile plain on the right bank of the Nogat, a channel of the Vistula, here spanned by a handsome railway bridge and by a bridge of boats. Marienburg contains a large chemical wool-cleaning work and several other factories, carries on a considerable trade in grain, wood, linen, feathers, and brushes, and is the seat of important cattle, horse, and wool markets. Its educational institutions include a gymnasium and a Protestant normal school. In the old market-place, many of the houses in which are built with arcades in the Italian style, stands a Gothic town-house, dating from the end of the 14th century. The town is also embellished with a good statue of Frederick the Great, who added this district to Prussia, and a monument commemorating the war of 1870-71. The population in 1880 was 9559. Marienburg is chiefly interesting from its having been for a century and a half the residence of the grand masters of the Teutonic order. The large castle of the order here was originally founded in 1274 as the seat of a simple commandery against the pagan Prussians, but in 1309 the headquarters of the grand master were transferred hither from Venice, and the “Marienburger Schloss” soon became one of the largest and most strongly fortified buildings in Germany. On the decline of the order in the middle of the 15th century, the castle passed into the hands of the Poles, by whom it was allowed to fall into neglect and decay. It came into the possession of Prussia in 1772, and was carefully restored at the beginning of the present century. This interesting and curious building consists of three parts, the Alte or Hohe Schloss, the Mittel ...

MARIETTA, a city of the United States, the capital of Washington county, Ohio, lies on the right bank of the Ohio, at the mouth of the Muskingum, 85 miles south-east of Columbus, and is the eastern terminus of the Marietta and Cincinnati Railroad, and the southern terminus of the Cleveland and Marietta Railroad. The surrounding country being rich in petroleum, iron, and coal, the city has become the seat of no inconsiderable industry in the shape of oil-works, iron foundries, and machine-shops, a rolling mill, tanneries, and carriage, car, bucket, aud chair factories. Marietta College, chartered in 1835, and maintained by voluntary endowment and subscription, is a flourishing institution, with eight instructors and a library of 25,000 volumes, occupying a fine group of buildings in the midst of extensive grounds. The population of the city has risen from 3175 in 1850 to 5444 in 1880. At the latter date the township, which includes the village of Harmar (1572), contained 8830 persons.

Marietta, founded in 1788 by General Putnam, and named in honour of Marie Antoinette, is the oldest town in Ohio. It is built on the site of a remarkable group of prehistoric monuments, the largest of which are two enclosures, respectively 40 and 20 acres in extent, formed by walls from 20 to 30 feet broad at the base, and still in some places 5 and 6 feet high. See Squier and Davis, Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley.

MARIETTE, AugusteFerdinand François, elder son of François P. Mariette, advocate and town-clerk of Boulogne-sur-Mer, was born in that town on the 11th of February 1821. Educated at the Boulogne municipal college, he distinguished himself in geometry, physics, chemistry, history, Latin, Greek, and English. He also evinced a remarkable talent for art. In 1839, when but eighteen years of age, he went to England in the capacity of professor of French aud drawing at a boys’ school at Stratford-on-Avon, which occupation he exchanged in 1840 for that of pattern-designer to a ribbon manufacturer at Coventry. Weary of ill-paid exile, he returned that same year to Boulogne, resumed his interrupted studies, and in March 1841 took his bachelor’s degree (with honourable mention) at Douai. He now became a professor at the college where he had formerly been a student, and for some years supplemented his modest salary by giving private lessons, and writing on historical and archaeological subjects for various local periodicals. In the meanwhile his cousin, Nestor I.’Hôte, the friend and fellow-traveller of Champoilion, died; and upon Auguste Mariette devolved the pious task of sorting the multitudinous papers of the deceased savant. The young man thenceforth became passionately interested in Egyptology, devoted himself to the study of hieroglyphs and Coptic, and in 1847 published a Catalogue Analytique of the Egyptian Gallery of the Boulogne Museum. He had now found his vocation, and in 1849, being appointed to a subordinate position in the Louvre, left Boulogne for Paris. Entrusted shortly after with a Government mission for the purpose of seeking and purchasing Coptic, Syriac, Arabic, and Ethiopie MSS. for the national collection, he started for Egypt in 1850. Soon after his ...