OpenLLM-France/wikimedia huggingface dataset:
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Dallas, George Mifflin

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​DALLAS, GEORGE MIFFLIN (1792–1864), American statesman and diplomat, was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on the 10th of July 1792. He graduated at Princeton in 1810 at the head of his class; then studied law in the office of his father, Alexander J. Dallas, the financier, and was admitted to the bar in 1813. In the same year he accompanied Albert Gallatin, as his secretary, to Russia, and in 1814 returned to the United States as the bearer of important dispatches from the American peace commissioners at Ghent. He practised law in New York and Philadelphia, was chosen mayor of Philadelphia in 1828, and in 1829 was appointed by President Jackson, whom he had twice warmly supported for the presidency, United States attorney for the eastern district of Pennsylvania, a position long held by his father. From 1831 to 1833 he was a Democratic member of the United States Senate, in which he advocated a compromise tariff and strongly supported Jackson’s position in regard to nullification. On the bank question he was at first at variance with the president; in January 1832 he presented in the Senate a memorial from the bank’s president, Nicholas Biddle, and its managers, praying for a recharter, and subsequently he was chairman of a committee which reported a bill re-chartering the institution for a fifteen-year period. Afterwards, however, his views changed and he opposed the bank. From 1833 to 1835 Dallas was attorney-general of Pennsylvania, and from 1835 to 1839 was minister to Russia. During the following years he was engaged in a long struggle with James Buchanan for party leadership in Pennsylvania. He was vice-president of the United States from 1845 to 1849, but the appointment of Buchanan as secretary of state at once shut him off from all hope of party patronage or influence in the Polk administration, and he came to be looked upon as the leader of that body of conservative Democrats of the North, who, while they themselves chafed at the domination of Southern leaders, were disposed to disparage all anti-slavery agitation. By his casting vote at a critical period during the debate in the Senate on the tariff bill of 1846, he irretrievably lost his influence with the protectionist element of his native state, to whom he had given assurances of his support of the Tyler tariff of 1842. For several years after his retirement from office, he devoted himself to his law practice, and in 1856 succeeded James Buchanan as United States minister to England, where he remained until relieved by Charles Francis Adams in May 1861. During this trying period he represented his country with ability and tact, making every endeavour to strengthen the Union cause in Great Britain. He died at Philadelphia on the 1st of December 1864. He wrote a biographical memoir for an edition of his father’s writings, which was published in 1871.
His Diary of his residence in St Petersburg and London was published in Philadelphia in 1892.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Dalle

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​DALLE (pronounced “dal,” Fr. for a flag-stone or flat tile), a rapid falling over flat smooth rock surfaces in a river bed, especially in rivers flowing between basaltic rocks. The name is common in America, and came into use through the French employés of the Hudson’s Bay Company. Well-known “dalles” are on the St Louis, St Croix and Wisconsin rivers. The “dalles” of the Columbia river are very beautiful, and have given its name to Dalles (1910 pop. 4880), county-seat of Wasco county, Oregon.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Dalkey

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​DALKEY, a small port and watering-place of Co. Dublin, Ireland, in the south parliamentary division; 9 m. S.E. of Dublin by the Dublin & South-Eastern railway. Pop. of urban district (1901), 3398. It is pleasantly situated on and about Sorrento Point, the southern horn of Dublin Bay. Dalkey Island, lying off the town, has an ancient ruined chapel, of the history of which nothing is certainly known, and a disused battery, which protected the harbour, a landing-place of some former importance. A castle in the town, of the 15th century, is restored to use as offices for the urban district council. There are also ruins of an old church, the dedication of which, like the island chapel, is ascribed to one St Begnet, perhaps a diminutive form of Bega, but the identity is not clear. Until the close of the 18th century Dalkey was notorious for the burlesque election of a “king,” a mock ceremony which became invested with a certain political importance.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Dallin, Cyrus Edwin

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​DALLIN, CYRUS EDWIN (1861– ), American sculptor, was born at Springville, Utah, on the 22nd of November 1861. He was a pupil of Truman H. Bartlett in Boston, of the École des Beaux Arts, the Académie Julien and the sculptors Henri M. Chapu and Jean Dampt (born 1858), in Paris, and on his return to America became instructor in modelling in the state normal art school in Boston. He is best known for his plastic representations of the North American Indian—especially for “The Signal of Peace” in Lincoln Park, Chicago, and “The Medicine Man,” in Fairmount Park, Philadelphia. As a boy he had lived among the Indians in the Far West, and had learned their language. His later works include “Pioneer Monument,” Salt Lake City; “Sir Isaac Newton,” Congressional Library, Washington; and “Don Quixote.” He won a silver medal at the Paris Exposition, 1900, and a gold medal at the St Louis Exposition, 1904.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Mendès, Catulle

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​MENDÈS, CATULLE (1841–1909), French poet and man of letters, of Jewish extraction, was born at Bordeaux on the 22nd of May 1841. He early established himself in Paris, attaining speedy notoriety by the publication in the Revue fantaisiste (1861) of his “Roman d’une nuit,” for which he was condemned to a month’s imprisonment and a fine of 500 francs. He was allied with the Parnassians from the beginning of the movement, and displayed extraordinary metrical skill in his first volume of poems, Philoméla (1863). In later volumes—Poésies, I $^{ère}$ série (1876), which includes much of his earlier verse, “Soirs moroses,” Contes épiques, Philoméla, &c; Poésies (7 vols., 1885), a new edition largely augmented; Les Poésies de Catulle Mendès (3 vols., 1892); La Grive des vignes (1895), &c.—his critics have noted that the elegant verse is distinguished rather by dexterous imitation of different writers than by any marked originality. The versatility and fecundity of Mendes’s talent is shown in a series of his critical and dramatic writings, and of novels and short stories, in the latter of which he continues the French tradition of the licentious conte. For the theatre he wrote: La Part du roi (1872), a one-act verse comedy; Les Frères d’armes (1873), drama; Justice (1877), in three acts, characterized by a hostile critic as a hymn in praise of suicide; the libretto of a light opera, Le Capitaine Fracasse (1878), founded on Théophile Gautier’s novel; La Femme de Tabarin (1887); Médée (1898), in three acts and in verse; La Reine Fiammette (1898), a conte dramatique in six acts and in verse, the scene of which is laid in the Italy of the Renaissance; Le Fils de l’étoile (1904), the hero of which is Bar-Cochebas, the Syrian pseudo-Messiah, for the music of C. Erlanger; Scarron (1905); Ariane (1906), for the music of Massenet; and Glatigny (1906). His critical work includes: Richard Wagner (1886); L’Art au théâtre (3 vols., 1896–1900), a series of dramatic criticisms reprinted from newspapers; and a report addressed to the minister of public instruction and of the fine arts on Le Mouvement poétique français de 1867 à 1900 (new ed., 1903), which includes a bibliographical and critical dictionary of the French poets of the 19th century. Perhaps the most famous of his novels are: Le Roi vierge (1880) in which he introduces Louis II. of Bavaria and Richard Wagner; La Maison de la vielle (1894), and Gog (1897). He married in 1866 Mlle Judith Gautier, younger daughter of the poet, from whom he was subsequently separated. ​On the 9th of February 1909, early in the morning, his dead body was discovered in the railway tunnel of Saint Germain. He had left Paris by the midnight train on the 7th, and it is supposed that, thinking he had arrived at the station, he had opened the door of his compartment while still in the tunnel.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Menenius Lanatus, Agrippa

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​MENENIUS LANATUS, AGRIPPA, Roman patrician and statesman, consul 503 B.C. On the occasion of the first secession of the people to the Sacred Mount, Agrippa, who was known to be a man of moderate views, was one of the commissioners empowered by the senate to treat with the seceders. On this occasion he recited the well-known fable of the belly and the members.
Livy ii. 16, 32, 33; Dion. Halic. v. 44–47; vi. 49–88, 96; Val. Max. iv. 4, 2.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Menes

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​MENES, the name of the founder of the 1st Dynasty of historical kings of Egypt. He appears at the head of the lists not only in Herodotus and Manetho, but also in the native Turin Papyrus of Kings and the lists of Abydos, while the list ​of Sakkara begins with the sixth king of the 1st Dynasty, a fact which may throw some doubt on the supposed foundation of Memphis by Menes. Until recently he was looked upon as semi-mythical, but the discovery of the tombs of many kings of the 1st Dynasty including probably that of Menes himself, as well as an abundance of remains of still earlier ages in Egypt has given him a personality. He was probably ruler of Upper Egypt and conquered the separate kingdom of Lower Egypt.
See Egypt; K. Sethe, “Menes und die Grundung von Memphis,” in his Untersuchungen zur Geschichte und Alterthumskunde Aegyptens, iii. 121. (F. Ll. G.)
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Mengs, Antony Raphael

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​MENGS, ANTONY RAPHAEL (1728–1779), German painter, was born in 1728 at Aussig in Bohemia, but his father, Ismael Mengs, a Danish painter, established himself finally at Dresden, whence in 1741 he took his son to Rome. The appointment of Mengs in 1749 as first painter to the elector of Saxony did not prevent his spending much time in Rome, where he had married in 1748, and abjured the Protestant faith, and where he became in 1754 director of the Vatican school of painting, nor did this hinder him on two occasions from obeying the call of Charles III. of Spain to Madrid. There Mengs produced some of his best work, and specially the ceiling of the banqueting-hall, the subject of which was the Triumph of Trajan and the Temple of Glory. After the completion of this work in 1777, Mengs returned to Rome, and there he died, two years later, in poor circumstances, leaving twenty children, seven of whom were pensioned by the king of Spain. Besides numerous paintings in the Madrid gallery, the Ascension at Dresden, Perseus and Andromeda at St Petersburg, and the ceiling of the Villa Albani must be mentioned among his chief works. In England, the duke of Northumberland possesses a Holy Family, and the colleges of All Souls and Magdalen, at Oxford, have altar-pieces by his hand. In his writings, in Spanish, Italian and German, Mengs has put forth his eclectic theory of art, which treats of perfection as attainable by a well-schemed combination of diverse excellences—Greek design, with the expression of Raphael, the chiaroscuro of Correggio, and the colour of Titian. His intimacy with Winckelmann—who constantly wrote at his dictation—has enhanced his historical importance, for he formed no scholars, and the critic must now concur in Goethe’s judgment of Mengs in Winckelmann und sein Jahrhundert; he must deplore that so much learning should have been allied to a total want of initiative and poverty of invention, and embodied with a strained and artificial mannerism.
See Opere di Antonio Raffaello Mengs (Parma, 1780); Mengs Werke, übersetzt v. G. F. Prange (1786); Zeitschrift für bildende Kunst (1880); Bianconi, Elogio storico di Mengs Milan, 1780); Woermann, Ismael und Raphael Mengs (Leipzig, 1893).
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Menelaus

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​MENELAUS, in Greek legend, son of Atreus (or Pleisthenes), king of Sparta, brother of Agamemnon and husband of Helen. He was one of the Greeks who entered Troy concealed in the wooden horse (Virgil, Aeneid, 264) and recovered his wife at the sack of the city. On the voyage homewards his fleet was scattered off Cape Malea by a storm, which drove him to Egypt. After eight years' wandering in the east, he landed on the island of Pharos, where Proteus revealed to him the means of appeasing the gods and securing his return. He reached Sparta on the day on which Orestes was holding the funeral feast over Aegisthus and Clytaemnestra. After a long and happy life in Lacedaemon, Menelaus, as the son-in-law of Zeus, did not die but was translated to Elysium (Homer, Odyssey, iii. iv.). His grave and that of Helen were shown at Therapnae, where he was worshipped as a god (Pausanias iii. 19, 9). He was represented in works of art as carrying off the body of the dead Patroclus or lifting up his hand to slay Helen.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Mendoza (city)

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​MENDOZA, a city of Argentina, capital of Mendoza province, 632 m. by rail W.N.W. of Buenos Aires. Pop. (1904, estimate), 32,000. It stands on a plain near the foot of a secondary Andean range called the Sierra de los Paramillos, at an elevation of 2320 ft. The surrounding district is arid, but has been irrigated and is covered with gardens, orchards and cultivated fields. The city is about 15 m. N. of the Mendoza, or Lujan river, whose waters are utilized for irrigation and for the requirements of the city by means of a channel which leaves the main river a little above the town of Lujan and runs to the Tulumaya river and the lagoons of Huanacache. This channel is called El Zanjón, and is believed to have been opened by Guaymallén, the chief of the Guarpès who inhabited this district at the time of the Spanish conquest, but it is more probably natural. The city is laid out in a regular manner with broad well-paved streets and numerous public squares. The Zanjón and another stream called the Guaymallén traverse the city, and the principal streets have water flowing through them and are shaded by poplars. Because of earthquake risks, the public buildings are neither costly nor imposing. The private residences are commonly of one storey, built with wooden frames filled in with adobes. The climate is hot, dry and enervating, notwithstanding the elevation and the proximity of the Andes. The surrounding districts produce fruit, vegetables, alfalfa and cereals. The vineyard industry is prominent, and raisins and wine are exported. The position on the main route across the Andes into Chile, by way of the Uspallata or Cumbre pass (highest point 12,870 ft.), has given the city commercial importance. It has railway connexion with the principal cities of the republic, including the ports of Rosario, Buenos Aires and Bahia Blanca, and also with the capital of San Juan.
Mendoza was founded by Captain Pedro del Castillo, who had been sent from Santiago across the Andes in 1559 by Garcia Hurtado de Mendoza, the governor of Chile, to conquer and annex the territory extending N.E. to Tucuman. The city was named after Mendoza. It was made the capital of the province of Cuyo, and belonged to Chile down to 1776, when the province was transferred to the newly created viceroyalty of La Plata. It was the headquarters of General San Martin while he was organizing an army for the liberation of Chile, and greatly assisted him with men and money. Under republican administration Mendoza suffered much from revolutions. Moreover, on the 20th of March 1861, the city was destroyed by an earthquake and a fire which followed. Not a building was left standing, and the loss of life was estimated at 10,000 to 12,000. The French geologist Bravard, who had predicted the catastrophe, was one of its victims. The poplars in the streets, together with some species of fruit-trees, were first planted in Mendoza by a Spaniard, Juan Cobos, in 1809, who thus became one of its greatest benefactors.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Menedemus

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​MENEDEMUS, Greek philosopher, and founder of the Eretrian school of thought, was born at Eretria about 350 and died between 278 and 275 B.C. Though of noble birth, he worked as builder and tentmaker until he was sent with a military expedition to Megara, where, according to Diogenes Laertius, he heard Plato and resolved to devote himself to philosophy. It is more likely that he heard one of Plato’s followers, inasmuch as Plato died when he was only four years old, if the above dates are correct. At Megara he formed a life-long friendship with Asclepiades, with whom he toiled in the night that he might study philosophy by day. He was subsequently a pupil first of Stilpo and then of Phaedo of Elis, whose school he transferred to Eretria, by which name it was afterwards known. In addition to his philosophical work, he took a leading part in the political affairs of his city from the time of the Diadochi until his death, and obtained a remission of the tribute to Demetrius. His friendship with Antigonus Gonatas seems to have roused suspicion as to his loyalty, and he sought safety first in the temple of Amphiaraus at Oropus, and later with Antigonus, at whose court he is said to have died of grief. Other accounts say that he starved himself to death on failing to induce Antigonus to free his native city. His philosophical views are known only in part. Athenaeus quotes Epicrates as stating that he was a Platonist, but other accounts credit ​him with having preferred Stilpo to Plato. Diogenes Laërtius (ii. 134 and 135) says that he declined to identify the Good with the Useful, and that he denied the value of the negative proposition on the ground that affirmation alone can express truth. He probably meant to imply that qualities have no existence apart from the subject to which they belong. In ethics, we learn from Plutarch (De virt. mor. 2) and from Cicero (Acad. ii. 42) that he regarded Virtue as one, by whatever name it be called, and maintained that it is intellectual. Cicero’s evidence is the less valuable in that he always assumed that Menedemus was a follower of the Megarians. Diogenes says that he left no writings, and the Eretrian school disappeared after a short and unobtrusive existence.
Beside the ancient sources quoted above, see H. Mallett, Histoire de l’école de Mégare et des écoles d’Elis et d’Erétrie (1845). Also the articles Megarian School; Phaedo; Stilpo.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Morrison, Richard James

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​MORRISON, RICHARD JAMES (1795–1874), English astrologer, commonly known by his pseudonym “Zadkiel,” was born on the 15th of June 1795. He served in the Royal Navy, but resigned with the rank of lieutenant in 1829. He then devoted himself to the study of astrology, and in 1831 issued The Herald of Astrology, subsequently known as Zadkiel’s Almanac. In this annual pamphlet Morrison, over the signature “Zadkiel Tao-Sze,” published predictions of the chief events of the coming year. In 1863 Morrison brought a libel action against Admiral Sir Edward Belcher, who had accused him of obtaining money by charlatanism in the form of crystal-gazing. He was awarded twenty shillings damages, but was deprived of his costs. Morrison died on the 5th of April 1874.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Morristown

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​MORRISTOWN, a town and the county-seat of Morris county, New Jersey, U.S.A., on the Whippany river, 31 m. (by rail) W. of New York City. Pop. (1890) 8156; (1900) 11,267; (1910 census) 12,507. It is served by the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western, the New Jersey & Pennsylvania and the Morristown & Erie railways. Morristown is situated on a table-land surrounded by picturesque hills. It is primarily a residential suburb of New York, and has many handsome residences and a number of large estates. Near its centre is a public park, in which is a soldiers’ monument (59 ft. in height). At Morris Plains, about 4 m. to the north, is a state hospital for the insane (1876). Morristown, officially named in 1740 in honour of Lewis Morris (1671–1746), then governor of New Jersey, and grandfather of Gouverneur Morris, was settled about 1710, under the name of West Hanover, by Puritans, who were attracted here by the presence of iron ore. From January to May 1777, and again from December 1779 to June 1780, Morristown was occupied by the American army under Washington. Behind the court-house is the site of Fort Nonsense, built at Washington’s orders, largely to keep his soldiers employed. In December 1779–January 1780 General Benedict Arnold was tried before a court martial presided over by General Robert Howe (1732–1785) in the Dickerson tavern here, still standing. In Morristown, at the old Speedwell ironworks (almost completely destroyed by fire in 1909), was made a part of the machinery of the “Savannah,” the first steamboat that crossed the Atlantic, and here Samuel F. B. Morse and Alfred Vail completed the invention of the electric telegraph. Morristown was incorporated as a town in 1865.
See A. M. Sherman, Historic Morristown, New Jersey; The Story of its First Century (Morristown, 1905) and Julia K. Colles, Authors and Writers Associated with Morristown (Morristown, 1893).