OpenLLM-France/wikimedia huggingface dataset:
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Majorian

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​MAJORIAN (Julius Valerius Majorianus), emperor of the West from 457 to 461. He had distinguished himself as a general by victories over the Franks and Alemanni, and six months after the deposition of Avitus he was declared emperor by the regent Ricimer. After repelling an attack by the Vandals upon Campania (458) he prepared a large force, composed chiefly of barbarians, to invade Africa, which he previously visited in disguise. Having during his stay in Gaul defeated and concluded an alliance with Theodoric the Visigoth, at the beginning of 460 he crossed the Pyrenees for the purpose of joining the powerful fleet which he had collected at Carthagena. The Vandal king Genseric, however, after all overtures of peace had been rejected, succeeded through the treachery of certain officers in surprising the Roman fleet, most of the ships being either taken or destroyed. Majorian thereupon made peace with Genseric. But his ill-success had destroyed his military reputation; his efforts to put down abuses and improve the condition of the people had roused the hatred of the officials; and Ricimer, jealous of his fame and influence, stirred up the foreign troops against him. A mutiny broke out in Lombardy, and on the 2nd of August 461 Majorian was forced to resign. He died five days afterwards, either of dysentery or by violence. Majorian was the author of a number of remarkable laws, contained in the Theodosian Code. He remitted all arrears of taxes, the collection of which was for the future placed in the hands of the local officials. He revived the institution of defensores, defenders of cities, whose duty it was to protect the poor and inform the emperor of abuses committed in his name. The practice of pulling down the ancient monuments to be used as building material, which was connived at by venal officials, was strictly prohibited. He also passed laws against compulsory ordination and premature vows of celibacy.
See Sidonius Apollinaris, Panegyric of Majorian; Gibbon, Decline and Fall, ch. xxxvi. (where an outline of the “novels” of Majorian is given); J. B. Bury, Later Roman Empire, bk. iii.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Majority

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​MAJORITY (Fr. majorité; Med. Lat. majoritas; Lat. major, greater), a term signifying the greater number. In legislative and deliberative assemblies it is usual to decide questions by a majority of those present at a meeting and voting. In law, majority is the state of being of full age, which in the United Kingdom is twenty-one years of age. A person attains his majority at twelve o’clock at night of the day preceding his twenty-first birthday (see Infant; Age).
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Bridges, Robert

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​BRIDGES, ROBERT (1844–), English poet, born on the 23rd of October 1844, was educated at Eton and at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and studied medicine in London at St Bartholomew’s hospital. He was afterwards assistant physician at the Children’s hospital, Great Ormond Street, and physician at the Great Northern hospital, retiring in 1882. Two years later he married Mary, daughter of Alfred Waterhouse, R.A. As a poet Robert Bridges stands rather apart from the current of modern English verse, but his work has had great influence in a select circle, by its restraint, purity, precision, and delicacy yet strength of expression; and it embodies a distinct theory of prosody. His chief critical works are Milton’s Prosody (1893), a volume made up of two earlier essays (1887 and 1889), and John Keats, a Critical Essay (1895). He maintained that English prosody depended on the number of “stresses” in a line, not on the number of syllables, and that poetry should follow the rules of natural speech. His poetry was privately printed in the first instance, and was slow in making its way beyond a comparatively small circle of his admirers. His best work is to be found in his Shorter Poems (1890), and a complete edition of his Poetical Works (6 vols.) was published in 1898–1905. His chief volumes are Prometheus (Oxford, 1883, privately printed), a “mask in the Greek Manner”; Eros and Psyche (1885), a version of Apuleius; The Growth of Love, a series of sixty-nine sonnets printed for private circulation in 1876 and 1889; Shorter Poems (1890); Nero (1885), a historical tragedy, the second part of which appeared in 1894; Achilles in Scyros (1890), a drama; Palicio (1890), a romantic drama in the Elizabethan manner; The Return of Ulysses (1890), a drama in five acts; The Christian Captives (1890), a tragedy on the same subject as Calderon’s El Principe Constante; The Humours of the Court (1893), a comedy founded on the same dramatist’s El secreto á voces and on Lope de Vega’s El Perro del hortelano; The Feast of Bacchus (1889), partly translated from the Heauton-Timoroumenos of Terence; Hymns from the Yattendon Hymnal (Oxford, 1899); and Demeter, a Mask (Oxford, 1905).
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Bridgend

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​BRIDGEND, a market town in the southern parliamentary division of Glamorganshire, Wales, on both sides of the river Ogwr (whence its Welsh name Penybont-ar-Ogwr). Pop. of urban district (1901) 6062. It has a station 165 m. from London on the South Wales trunk line of the Great Western railway, and is the junction of the Barry Company’s railway to Barry via Llantwit Major. Bridgend has a good market for agricultural produce, and is an important centre owing to its being the natural outlet for the mining valleys of the Llynvi, Garw and the two Ogwr rivers, which converge about 3 m. north of the town and are connected with it by branch lines of the Great Western railway. Though without large manufacturing industries, the town has joinery works, a brass and iron foundry, a tannery and brewery. There are brick-works and stone quarries, and much lime is burnt in the neighbourhood. Just outside the town at Angelton and Parc Gwyllt are the Glamorgan county lunatic asylums.
There was no civil parish of Bridgend previous to 1905, when one was formed out of portions of the parishes of Newcastle and Coity. Of the castle of Newcastle, built on the edge of a cliff above the church of that parish, there remain a courtyard with flanking towers and a fine Norman gateway. At Coity, about 2 m. distant, there are more extensive ruins of its castle, originally the seat of the Turbervilles, lords of Coity, but now belonging to the earls of Dunraven. Coity church, dating from the 14th century, is a fine cruciform building with central embattled tower in Early Decorated style.
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# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Bridges

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​BRIDGES. 1. Definitions and General Considerations.—Bridges (old forms, brig, brygge, brudge; Dutch, brug; German, Brücke; a common Teutonic word) are structures carrying roadways, waterways or railways across streams, valleys or other roads or railways, leaving a passage way below. Long bridges of several spans are often termed “viaducts,” and bridges carrying canals are termed “aqueducts,” though this term is sometimes used for waterways which have no bridge structure. A “culvert” is a bridge of small span giving passage to drainage. In railway work an “overbridge” is a bridge over the railway, and an “underbridge” is a bridge carrying the railway. In all countries there are legal regulations fixing the minimum span and height of such bridges and the width of roadway to be provided. Ordinarily bridges are fixed bridges, but there are also movable bridges with machinery for opening a clear and unobstructed passage way for navigation. Most commonly these are “swing” or “turning” bridges. “Floating” bridges are roadways carried on pontoons moored in a stream.

### Contents

* I. History (1)
* II. History (2)
* III. Substructure
* IV. Straining Actions and Working Stresses (1)
* V. Straining Actions and Working Stresses (2)
* VI. Straining Actions and Working Stresses (3)
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Nun

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​NUN (O. Eng. nunne, from Lat. nonnus, nonna, familiar terms for an old man or woman), a member of a community of women, living under vows a life of religious observance (see Monasticism). In ecclesiastical Latin nonnus was used by the younger members of a religious community for their elders, and so, in the regula of St Benedict, cap. 62, Juniores autem Priores suos nonnos vocant quod intelligitur paterna reverentia (Du Cange, Glossarium, s.v. nonnus). While nonna has remained as the generic name of a female religious, nonnus has been replaced by monachus and its various derivatives (see Monk).
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Nunatak

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​NUNATAK, a name applied in Greenland (and thence extended in use elsewhere) to a hill or mountain peak appearing above the surface of a glacier. Greenland is for the most part covered by an ice-cap of a certain thickness which moves slowly downwards to the sea. It will rise upwards and pass over a barrier if there is no outlet, but it will flow between and around mountain peaks leaving them standing as hills (nunataks) above the general surface of the ice-cap. These prominences are sometimes covered with arctic vegetation, and arctic flowers bloom freely upon them in the summer.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Nummulite

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​NUMMULITE, NUMMULITES, A. d’Orbigny’s name for a genus of Perforate Foraminifera (q.v.), distinguished by the flattened, lenticular discoid shell of many turns, finely perforated; chambers subdivided by incomplete septa into squarish chamberlets. This genus is especially abundant in Eocene Limestones, which attain great thickness around the Mediterranean basin; the Pyramids of Egypt are built of it.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Numerianus, Marcus Aurelius

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​NUMERIANUS, MARCUS AURELIUS, son of the Roman emperor Carus. On the death of his father, whom he accompanied on his expedition against the Persians, he was proclaimed emperor (December, A.D. 283). He resolved to abandon the campaign, and died mysteriously on his way back to Europe, eight months afterwards. Arrius Aper, praefect of the praetorian guards, his father-in-law, who was suspected of having murdered him, was slain by Diocletian, whom the soldiers had already proclaimed his successor. Numerianus is represented as having been a man of considerable literary attainments, and of remarkably amiable character.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Numenius

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​NUMENIUS, a Greek philosopher, of Apamea in Syria, Neo-Pythagorean and forerunner of the Neo-Platonists, flourished during the latter half of the 2nd century A.D. He seems to have taken Pythagoras as his highest authority, while at the same time he chiefly follows Plato. He calls the latter an “Atticizing Moses.” His chief divergence from Plato is the distinction between the “first god” and the “demiurge.” This is probably due to the influence of the Valentinian Gnostics and the Jewish-Alexandrian philosophers (especially Philo and his theory of the Logos). According to Proclus (Comment. in Timaeum, 93) Numenius held that there was a kind of trinity of gods, the members of which he designated as πατήρ, ποιητής, ποίημα (“father,” “maker,” “that which is made,” i.e. the world), or πάππος, ἔκγονος, ἀπόγονος, (which Proclus calls “exaggerated language”). The first is the supreme deity or pure intelligence (νοῦς), the second the creator of the world (δημιουργός), the third the world (κόσμος). His works were highly esteemed by the Neoplatonists, and Amelius is said to have composed nearly 100 books of commentaries upon them.
Fragments of his treatises on the points of divergence between the Academicians and Plato, on the Good (in which according to Origen, Contra Celsum, iv. 51, he makes allusion to Jesus Christ), and on the mystical sayings in Plato, are preserved in the Praeparatio Evangelica of Eusebius. The fragments are collected in F. G. Mullach, Frag. phil. Graec. iii.; see also F. Thedinga, De Numenio philosopho Platonico (Bonn, 1875); Ritter and Preller, Hist. Phil. Graecae (ed. E. Wellmann, 1898), § 624-7; T. Whittaker, The Neo-Platonists (1901).
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Masson, David

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​MASSON, DAVID (1822–1907), Scottish man of letters, was born at Aberdeen on the 2nd of December 1822, and educated at the grammar school there and at Marischal College. Intending to enter the Church, he proceeded to Edinburgh University, where he studied theology under Dr Chalmers, whose friendship he enjoyed until the divine’s death in 1847. However, abandoning his project of the ministry, he returned to his native city to undertake the editorship of the Banner, a weekly paper devoted to the advocacy of Free Kirk principles. After two years he resigned this post and went back to the capital, bent upon pursuing a purely literary career. There he wrote a great deal, contributing to Fraser’s Magazine, Dublin University Magazine (in which appeared his essays on Chatterton) and other periodicals. In 1847 he went to London, where he found wider scope for his energy and knowledge. He was secretary (1851–1852) of the “Society of the Friends of Italy.” In a famous interview with Mrs Browning at Florence he contested her admiration for Napoleon III. He had known De Quincey, whose biography he contributed in 1878 to the “English Men of Letters” series, and he was an enthusiastic friend and admirer of Carlyle. In 1852 he was appointed professor of English literature at University College, London, in succession to A. H. Clough, and from 1858 to 1865 he edited the newly established Macmillan’s Magazine. In 1865 he was selected for the chair of rhetoric and English literature at Edinburgh, and during the early years of his professorship actively promoted the movement for the university education of women. In 1879 he became editor of the Register of the Scottish Privy Council, and in 1893 was appointed Historiographer Royal for Scotland. Two years later he resigned his professorship. His magnum opus in his Life of Milton in Connexion with the History of His Own Time in six volumes, the first of which appeared in 1858 and the last in 1880. He also edited the library edition of Milton’s Poetical Works (3 vols., 1874), and De Quincey’s Collected Works (14 vols., 1889–1890). Among his other publications are Essays, Biographical and Critical (1856, reprinted with additions, 3 vols., 1874), British Novelists and their Styles (1859), Drummond of Hawthornden (1873), Chatterton (1873) and Edinburgh Sketches (1892). He died on the 6th of October 1907. A bust of Masson was presented to the senate of the university of Edinburgh in 1897. Professor Masson had married Rosaline Orme. His son Orme Masson became professor of chemistry in the university of Melbourne, and his daughter Rosaline is known as a writer and novelist.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Master of the Horse

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​MASTER OF THE HORSE, in England, an important official of the sovereign’s household. The master of the horse is the third dignitary of the court, and is always a member of the ministry (before 1782 the office was of cabinet rank), a peer and a privy councillor. All matters connected with the horses and hounds of the sovereign, as well as the stables and coach-houses, the stud, mews and kennels, are within his jurisdiction. The practical management of the royal stables and stud devolves on the chief or crown equerry, formerly called the gentleman of the horse, who is never in personal attendance on the sovereign and whose appointment is permanent. The clerk marshal has the supervision of the accounts of the department before they are submitted to the Board of Green Cloth, and is in waiting on the sovereign on state occasions only. Exclusive of the crown equerry there are seven regular equerries, besides extra and honorary equerries, one of whom is always in attendance on the sovereign and rides at the side of the royal carriage. They are always officers of the army, and each of them is “on duty” for about the same time as the lords and grooms in waiting. There are also several pages of honour in the master of the horse’s department, who must not be confounded with the pages of various kinds who are in the department of the lord chamberlain. They are youths aged from twelve to sixteen, selected by the sovereign in person, to attend on him at state ceremonies, when two of them, arrayed in an antique costume, assist the groom of the stole in carrying the royal train.
In France the master of the horse (“Grand Écuyer,” or more usually “Monsieur le grand”) was one of the seven great officers of the crown from 1617. As well as the superintendence of the royal ​stables, he had that of the retinue of the sovereign, also the charge of the funds set aside for the religious functions of the court, coronations, &c. On the death of a sovereign he had the right to all the horses and their equipment in the royal stables. Distinct from this officer and independent of him, was the first equerry (“Premier Écuyer”), who had charge of the horses which the sovereign used personally (“la petite écurie”), and who attended on him when he rode out. The office of master of the horse existed down to the reign of Louis XVI. Under Louis XVIII. and Charles X. the duties were discharged by the first equerry, but under Napoléon I. and Napoléon III. the office was revived with much of its old importance.
In Germany the master of the horse (Oberststallmeister) is a high court dignitary; but his office is merely titular, the superintendence of the king’s stables being carried out by the Oberstallmeister, an official corresponding to the crown equerry in England.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Master of the Rolls

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​MASTER OF THE ROLLS, the third member of the Supreme Court of Judicature in England, the lord chancellor, president of the chancery division, being the first, and the lord chief justice, president of the king’s bench division, being the second. At first he was the principal clerk of the chancery, and as such had charge of the records of the court, especially of the register of original writs and of all patents and grants under the Great Seal. Until the end of the 15th century he was called either the clerk or the keeper of the rolls, and he is still formally designated as the master or keeper of the rolls. The earliest mention of him as master of the rolls is in an act of 1495; and in another act of the same year he is again described as clerk of the rolls, showing that his official designation still remained unsettled. About the same period, however, the chief clerks of the chancery came to be called masters in chancery, and the clerk, master or keeper of the rolls was always the first among them, whichever name they bore. In course of time, from causes which are not very easy to trace, his original functions as keeper of the records passed away from him and he gradually assumed a jurisdiction in the court of chancery second only to that of the lord chancellor himself. In the beginning he only heard causes in conjunction with the other masters in chancery, and his decrees were invalid until they had been approved and signed by the lord chancellor. Sitting in the Rolls chapel or in the court in Rolls yard, he heard causes without assistance, and his decrees held good until they were reversed on petition either to the lord chancellor or afterwards to the lords justices of appeal. Before any judge with the formal title of vice-chancellor was appointed the master of the rolls was often spoken of as vice-chancellor, and in theory acted as such, sitting only when the lord chancellor was not sitting and holding his court in the evening from six o’clock to ten. Only since 1827 has the master of the rolls sat in the morning hours. By the Public Record Office Act 1838 the custody of the records was restored to him, and he is chairman of the State Papers and Historical Manuscripts Commissions. Under the Judicature Act 1875, and the Appellate Jurisdiction Act 1876, he now always sits with the lords justices in the court of appeal (which usually sits in two divisions of three judges, the master of the rolls presiding over one division), whose decisions can be questioned only in the House of Lords. The master of the rolls was formerly eligible to a seat in the House of Commons—a privilege enjoyed by no other member of the judicial bench; but he was deprived of it by the Supreme Court of Judicature Act 1873, which provides that all judges of the High Court of Justice and the court of appeal shall be incapable of being elected to or sitting in the House of Commons. The master of the rolls is always sworn of the privy council. His salary is £6000 a year.
See Lord Hardwicke, Office of the Master of the Rolls.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Masson, Louis Claude Fredéric

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​MASSON, LOUIS CLAUDE FREDÉRIC (1847–), French historian, was born at Paris on the 8th of March 1847. His father, Francis Masson, a solicitor, was killed on the 23rd of June 1848, when major in the garde nationale. Young Masson was educated at the college of Sainte Barbe, and at the lycée Louis-le-Grand, and then travelled in Germany and in England; from 1869 to 1880 he was librarian at the Foreign Office. At first he devoted himself to the history of diplomacy, and published between 1877 and 1884 several volumes connected with that subject. Later he published a number of more or less curious memoirs illustrating the history of the Revolution and of the empire. But he is best known for his books connected with Napoleon. In Napoléon inconnu (1895), Masson, together with M. Guido Biagi, brought out the unpublished writings (1786–1793) of the future emperor. These were notes, extracts from historical, philosophical and literary books, and personal reflections in which one can watch the growth of the ideas later carried out by the emperor with modifications necessitated by the force of circumstances and his own genius. But this was only one in a remarkable series: Joséphine de Beauharnais, 1763–1796 (1898); Joséphine, impératrice et reine (1899); Joséphine répudiée 1809–1814 (1901); L’Impératrice Marie Louise (1902); Napoléon et les femmes (1894); Napoléon et sa famille (9 vols., 1897–1907); Napoléon et son fils (1904); and Autour de l’Île d’Elbe (1908). These works abound in details and amusing anecdotes, which throw much light on the events and men of the time, laying stress on the personal, romantic and dramatic aspects of history. The author was made a member of the Académie française in 1903. From 1886 to 1889 he edited the review Arts and Letters, published in London and New York.
A bibliography of his works, including anonymous ones and those under an assumed name, has been published by G. Vicaire (Manuel de l’amateur des livres du XIX$^e$ siècle, tome v., 1904). Napoléon et les femmes has been translated into English as Napoleon and the Fair Sex (1894).