Lytton, EDWARD ROBERT, EARL OF, poet, diplomatist, and statesman, was born in Hertford Street, London, 8th November 1831, and was educated at Harrow and at Bonn. In 1849 he went to Washington as an attaché and private secretary to his uncle, Sir Henry Bulwer (q.v.); and subsequently he was appointed attaché, secretary of legation, consul or chargé d'affaires at Florence

(1852), Paris (1854), The Hague (1856), St Petersburg and Constantinople (1858), Vienna (1859), Belgrade (1860), Constantinople again (1863), Athens (1864), Lisbon (1865), Madrid (1868), Vienna again (1869), and Paris (1873). In that last year he succeeded his father as second Lord Lytton, and in 1874 became minister at Lisbon, in 1876 Viceroy of India, at the same time receiving the Grand Cross of the Bath. The chief events of his viceroyalty were the proclamation of the Queen as Empress of India at the grand Delhi durbar on 1st January 1877, and the outbreak in 1879 of the tedious and unpopular Afghan war. In 1880, on the fall of the Beaconsfield government, he resigned, and was made Earl of Lytton; in 1887 he was sent by Lord Salisbury as ambassador to Paris, and there he died 24th November 1891. His works, published mostly under the pseudonym of 'Owen Meredith,' include Clytemnestra (1855), a dramatic poem; The Wanderer (1859); Lueil (1860), a novel in verse; Serbski pesme (1861), translations from the Servian; The Ring of Amasis (1863), a prose romance; Orval, or the Fool of Times (1869); Fables in Song (1874); Glenaveril (2 vols. 1885), an epic of modern life; After Paradise, or Legends of Exile (1887); Marah (1892); and King Poppy (1892). A selection from his Poems by Miss M. Betham-Edwards appeared in 1890.

M

the thirteenth letter in our alphabet, is ultimately derived from the hieroglyphic picture of an owl. In the capital letter M the two peaks are the lineal descendants of the two ears of the bird, retaining between them a not inapt representation of the beak, the first of the vertical strokes corresponding to the breast (see ALPHABET). In the script form m the central hanger represents the beak, on either side of which are two curves corresponding to the ears. When the symbol was taken over by the Phoenicians from the Egyptian hieratic the zigzags in the form $\backslash gamma$ were supposed to resemble ripples, and hence the letter received the name mem, 'the waters,' and this name in the Greek alphabet became mu, owing probably to assonance with the name of the following letter nu. Our minuscule m is descended from the old Roman cursive, through the Irish semiuncial and the Caroline minuscule.

The sound of m is defined as a labial of the nasal class; that is, if the vocal organs are placed in the position for pronouncing the labial b, and the breath is allowed to pass into the nose, the sound produced is that of m. Hence m has a great attraction for b, as in limb, nimble, from A.S. lim and nimol, or in number, from the Latin numerus. Sometimes m becomes b, as in marble from marmor. So also we find the two nasals, m and n, interchanging according to the nature of the contiguous consonants. Thus n changes to m before a labial, as in imperator for imperator, while m changes to n before gutturals and dentals, as in conjux and concordia, or in ant from O.E. æmete, ransom from redemptionem, and count from computare.