to Paris, telling him that it was only in the capital that he could find opportunity for the cultivation and display of his oratorical gifts. Bossuet and Bourdaloue were now full of years and honours; and in the opinion of the general it was no doubt desirable that their successor, though they were both jesuits, should be an Oratorian. Massillon, however, shrank from the temptation thus offered to his ambition, and, refusing to visit Paris, shut himself up in the convent of Sept Fonts. Here he had remained only for a short while when the Oratorians reclaimed him for their seminary of St. Magloire in Paris, where he was instructed to apply himself to the cultivation of pulpit eloquence. In 1698, after having preached occasionally in Paris for a year or two, he was sent to Montpellier to officiate during Lent; and, on his return to Paris in the following year, was appointed Lent preacher in the Oratorian church in St. Honoré Street. The event justified the sanguine expectations of his superiors. Such was the reputation which he instantly secured, that from the pulpit of the Oratorians he passed as Advent preacher to that of the royal chapel at Versailles, Bourdaloue saying of him, "He must increase, but I must decrease." Louis XIV. listened to him with pleasure, and it might have been hoped with profit; for he said to the preacher at the close of his ministrations, "I have heard great orators in my chapel and been much satisfied with them; as for you, every time I have heard you I have been much dissatisfied with myself." The Grand Monarque, however, gave the preacher no more substantial mark of his admiration than this well-turned compliment; and though Massillon appeared a second time at Versailles in 1701, and again in 1704, it was left to the regent to promote him to the episcopate. He was made bishop of Clermont in 1717. The following year he preached before Louis XV., then eight years of age, the ten sermons known as "Le Petit Careme," which according to some critics are decidedly the best, according to others decidedly the feeblest, of his oratorical efforts. In 1719 he was admitted into the Academy. The following year, finally quitting Paris, he retired to his diocese, where he spent the remainder of his life in the faithful discharge of his duties, made more onerous by the neglect of his predecessors. He died on the 28th of September, 1742. It is characteristic of the fame of Massillon that he was a special favourite with Voltaire. The spirit of the eighteenth century—restless, inquisitive, sceptical—was that with which the athletic genius of Massillon chiefly wrestled. For his age he was the philosopher of the pulpit, presaging in his sermons, at the same time that he denounced, the philosophy of the encyclopedists. With the stately oratory and the stern dogma of Bourdaloue such a mind as Voltaire's was incapable of feeling sympathy; but in the charming diction, the rare mastery of the secrets of the human heart, the artful yet powerful appeals to reason which characterize the sermons of Massillon, Voltaire found abundant intellectual recreation; while many another reader then and since has felt that, in addressing himself primarily to the intellect, the great preacher by no means neglected the conscience of his hearers. His whole works were collected by his nephew, Joseph Massillon, in 1745-48. They have since been frequently reprinted.
MASSINGER, Philip, the dramatist, was born in 1584. His father was a gentleman in the service of Henry earl of Pembroke, and the younger Massinger seems to have been brought up in the family of that nobleman. At the age of eighteen he was sent to Oxford, and about four years later removed to London, where he found employment as a writer for the stage. In this occupation he seems to have passed the remainder of his life. Very little more is known about him, except that he suffered much from poverty. It has been conjectured that he became a Roman catholic; but of this there is no evidence. He died in London at the age of fifty-six, and was buried as a stranger. The titles of thirty-seven of his plays are known to us, of which eighteen are still extant. In a few of them he is supposed to have been assisted by other authors, as by Decker in the "Virgin-Martyr," and by Middleton and Rowley in the "Old Law." The first critical edition of his works is that by Gifford, 1805—second edition, 1813. This contains some valuable notes. A useful edition is that by Hartley Coleridge, Moxon, 1839. The groundwork of Massinger's stories is commonly taken from some forgotten French or Italian novelist; but the admirable conduct of the plot—one of his great merits—is certainly his own. Five of his dramas belong to the class of tragedies, according to the common classification, i.e., they are concluded in death; the rest may be considered as tragi-comedies, being raised by the depth of the interest or the weight of the characters from the region of pure comedy. Usually he intermixes grave and comic scenes after the manner of his contemporaries. His versification, though much less musical than that of Shakspeare, is excellent of its kind. He was a good scholar, and his writings contain frequent allusions to the classics, but are in general free from the cumbrous and pedantic ostentation of Ben Jonson. He was not a poet of high imagination, and his plays are more remarkable for the excellence of their form and execution than for creative genius. Like Beaumont and Fletcher, he commonly derives the main interest of his plot from a love story; and the range of human passion is therefore much more limited than in Shakspeare. His greatest fault is perhaps a want of comic power, which unhappily leads him too often to substitute coarse buffoonery for wit, and dull ribaldry for genuine humour. "The most striking excellence of Massinger," says Mr. Hallam, "is his conception of character; and in this I must incline to place him above Fletcher, and, if I may venture to say so, even above Jonson. He is free from the hard outline of the one and the negligent looseness of the other. As a tragic writer he appears to me second only to Shakspeare; in the higher comedy I can hardly think him inferior to Jonson." Two of Massinger's plays are still occasionally acted—the "City Madam," and the "New way to pay old debts"—principally on account of the scope which the part of Luke in the former, and Overreach in the latter, affords to a first-rate actor.—G.
MASSON, Antoine, a celebrated French engraver, was born in 1636 at Lowry, near Orleans. Brought up as a damascener, or engraver and inlayer of metals, an art then much in vogue, he seems to have been self-instructed in the higher branch of engraving in which he acquired so great a reputation. Masson's style of engraving was quite original. He depended solely on the graver, which he used with extraordinary facility and precision, and he attained to a discrimination of surface and texture that was then quite novel; but his facility is often too apparent, his cleverness running into eccentricity and mannerism. His characteristic merits and defects are well shown in his most celebrated plate, "The Disciples at Emmaus," after Titian, copies of which are much prized by collectors. He engraved a large number of other figure subjects which are also highly esteemed, and which are described at length by Dumesnil. Masson drew portraits and engraved a large number from his original drawings, including among them many of the most distinguished men of his time: one of the most celebrated as an engraving is the head of M. de Brisacier, or the Grey-haired Man, as it is called by amateurs. Masson was engraver-in-ordinary to the king, and a member of the Academy. He died at Paris in 1700.—His daughter, Madelaine Masson, born about 1660, engraved several heads, nearly life-size, in the manner of her father whose pupil she was.—J. T—e.
MASSON, Francis, a Scotch naturalist, was born at Aberdeen, and died at Montreal in December, 1805. He was fond of gardening, and went to London in order to get employment at Kew. He attracted the notice of Alton, the director of the garden at Kew, and in 1771 he was sent on a botanical expedition to the Cape of Good Hope, where he made large collections of bulbs and seeds. In 1776 he was sent to the Canaries, Azores, Madeira, a portion of the Antilles, and the island of St. Christopher. He returned to England in 1781. Subsequently he was sent to Portugal, and paid a second visit to Africa and the Cape; and in 1797 he explored Canada. He was a zealous and indefatigable collector. He published a work in folio entitled "Stapeliæ Novæ; or a collection of several new species of that genus discovered in the interior parts of Africa." A genus Massonia has been named after him by Linnæus, with whom he corresponded during his visit to Africa.—J. H. B.
MASSOUDI, otherwise Aboul Hassan Ali, was a celebrated Arabian writer of the tenth century. His surname had been religiously preserved in the family as being derived from an ancestor named Masoud, whose eldest son had accompanied the prophet in his flight, and had served him faithfully and zealously. Massoudi was born at Bagdad about the end of the ninth century. He spent the greater part of his life in travelling through the then vast extent of Mussulman dominion. To describe the length of his journeys he applies to himself the words of an Arab poet who says, "I have gone so far towards the setting sun that I have forgotten his rising;" and again, "I have gone
