MARIVAUX 



MARK 



47 





fugitive, sitting on the niins of Carthage.' Here 

 he remained until a rising of liis friends took place 

 under Cinna. He then hurried back to Italy, and, 

 along with Cinna, inarched against Home, which 

 was obliged to yield. Marius was delirious in his 

 revenge upon the aristocracy ; a band of 4000 slaves 

 carried on the work of murder for five days and 

 nights. Marius and Cinna were elected consuls 

 together for the year 86, but the former died after 

 he had held the office seventeen days. On the 

 triumph of Sulla his l>ody, which had been buried, 

 not burned, was torn from its grave on the banks of 

 the Anio, and cast into the stream. Lucan tells us 

 how the troubled ghost haunted the spot and 

 scared the peasants from the plough on the eve of 

 impending revolutions. 



llarivaiix, PIERRE CARLET DE CHAMBLAIN 

 DE, was lrn at Paris, February 4, 1688. He 

 belonged to a good Norman family and devoted 

 himself to letters. He received but a slight educa- 

 tion and in his early writings affected a disdain of 

 the Greek and Latin authors, declaring, for example, 

 that he preferred Gregory of Tours to Tacitus and 

 Vincent Ferrier to Demosthenes. He published 

 L' llomere Traeesti, a burlesque of the Iliad, in' 

 1716, and brought out his best comedy, Le Jen 

 de F Amour et /// ffn.innl in 1730. He received 

 a pension from Helvctius, and another, of 1000 

 crowns a year, from Madame de Pompadour. His 

 romance of .)/;/</ came out in 11 parts between 

 1731 and 1741, but was never concluded by him, 

 the twelfth part being added by Madame Riccom- 

 boni. He followed up his first dramatic success by 

 numerous comedies : L'K/irem-e, Les Fausses Confi- 

 dences, Le Legs, Les isincerex. La Mfprise, Le 

 Triomjihe de I' Amour, &c. They are the work of a 

 clever analyst rather than a dramatist ; the dialogue, 

 says Sainte-Beuve, is a perpetual ' moral skirmish ;' 

 the writer sacrifices character and situation to 

 an ingenious playing with words. Marivaux, said 

 Voltaire, knew all the bypaths in the human heart, 

 but he did not know the highway. He died at 

 Paw, February 12, 1763. His title to fame rests 

 on Marianne, one of the best novels of the 18th 

 century. Its interest does not lie in exciting adven- 

 tures, but in the subtle analysis of character and 



the delicate pic- 

 turing of contem- 

 porary manners. 

 From the peculi- 

 arities of Mari- 

 vaux's finicking 

 style the term 

 Marivaudage was 

 at one time cur- 

 rent as a syn- 

 onym for affected 

 or 'precious' 

 writing. His 

 other romances, 

 Pharamond and 

 Le Pai/san par- 

 renn, are greatly 

 inferior to Mari- 

 anne. See Sainte- 

 Beuve's Causeries 

 du Lundi IX. , 

 andArseneHous- 

 saye's Gaterie de 

 Portraits dn dix- 

 huitieme Siede. 



Marjoram 



(Origanum), a 

 genus of plants of 

 the natural order Labiato*. Several of the species 

 are familiar as pot and gweet herlw in .gardens. 

 0. vulffare is the Common Marjoram, a native of 



Common Marjoram 

 (Origanum vulynre). 



Britain, and is aromatic with a bitter and slightly 

 acrid taste. The dry leaves have been used 

 instead of tea, and they are also used in fomenta- 

 tions. The tops of the plant have been used to dye 

 woollen cloth purple ; and, by a process of macer- 

 ating the material first in alum water and then in a 

 decoction of crab-tree bark, they also dye cotton 

 cloth a reddish brown. Oil of Marjoram is obtained 

 from this and other species by distillation. The 

 oil of marjoram is so caustic as to be used by 

 farriers as a stimulating liniment. A little cotton 

 moistened with it placed in the hollow of an aching 

 tooth relieves pain. 0. heracleoticum is the Winter 

 Sweet Marjoram of gardeners ; 0. onites is the Pot 

 Marjoram ; and the Knotted Marjoram is 0. Mar- 

 iorana. The dittany of Crete, a plant with round 

 leaves clothed with thick white down and purple 

 trailing stems, which is frequently cultivated as a 

 window-plant in Britain, is 0. Victamntu. 



.Mark, the standard weight of the money system 

 in various countries of Europe, especially in Ger- 

 many, where in the middle of the llth century the 

 Cologne mark = half a Cologne pound, or 283'812 

 grammes, was adopted as the standard, and as 

 such continued in use till 1 857. The mark gradu- 

 ally acquired a monetary value as well ; as such it 

 has been since 1875 the standard of currency in the 

 German empire, being equivalent to T: V 5 of a pound 

 ( 500grammes ) of line gold, and equal to 1 1 jd. English 

 and 24 cents United States currency. But there are 

 only 5, 10, and 20 mark pieces in gold. The silver 

 mark ( = ^ thaler) is divided into 100 pfennigs. The 

 Liibeck mark or mark current, a coin formerly in 

 use at Hamburg, was worth Is. 2d. ; the mark banco 

 there, a money of account, was worth Is. 6d. In 

 England marks are first heard of in the treaty 

 between Alfred and Guthrum the Dane, and are 

 supposed to have been then a Danish reckoning. 

 But these marks were not coins, only money of 

 account, or rather a weight. In 1194" the coined 

 mark had the nominal value it ever after retained, 

 100 pennies or 13s. 4d., two-thirds of the nominal 

 'pound.' The gold noble, first struck by Edward 

 III., was worth half a mark 6s. 8d. As late an 

 1703 Defoe was fined 200 marks. In Scotland the 

 mark or merk was a weight for gold and silver, or 

 common money reckoning, and also a coin. The 

 coin, like the other Scotch coins, had only one- 

 twelfth of the English value : nominally 13s. 4d. , it 

 was worth Is. IJd. English. There were two-merk, 

 one-merk (4J to the oz.), half, and quarter merk 

 pieces. The French standard weight mark weighed 

 244'75 grammes and the Dutch mark 246 '08 

 grammes. 



.Mark, a signature. See DEED, ILLITERATES. 



Mark. See MARCHES. 



Mark, also called JOHN (Acts, xiii. 5, 13), or, 

 more fully, ' John, whose surname was Mark ' ( Acts, 

 xii. 12, 25), is named by unvarying tradition from 

 the close of the 2d century as the author of the 

 second canonical gospel. Of Mary, his mother, 

 nothing is known except that her house in Jeru- 

 salem was visited by Peter and the other disciples. 

 Barnabas the Levite was his cousin ( Col. iv. 10, H.V.). 

 By some Mark has been supposed to be the young 

 man mentioned in Mark, xiv.-51, 52, and it has also 

 been conjectured that Mary's house may have been 

 the place where the Lord's Supper was instituted. 

 Mark accompanied Paul and Barnabas on their 

 first missionary journey from Antioch in Syria as 

 far as to Perga in Pamphylia ( Acts, xii. 25 ; xiii. 13 ); 

 here he quitted them on grounds which, whatever 

 they may have been, did not approve themselves to 

 Paul, who at a later date peremptorily declined to 

 have him as a companion on his second journey, 

 even though this involved his parting company with 

 Barnabas also. That a reconciliatiou afterwards 



