MELVILLE, Andrew (1545-1622), a distinguished Scottish scholar, theologian, and religious reformer, was the youngest son of Richard Melville, proprietor of Baldovy, near Montrose, at which place Andrew was born in 1545. His father fell at the battle of Pinkie, fighting in the van of the Scottish army, two years after the birth of his son; and, his wife having soon after followed him to the grave, the young orphan, then a gentle and delicate child, was tenderly cared for by his eldest brother Richard and his amiable and pious wife, whose memory the great scholar ever afterwards cherished with the warmest gratitude and affection. At a very early age Melville began to show a strong taste for learning, and his brother did every thing in his power to give him the best education the country could then afford. The rudiments of Latin he obtained at the grammar school of Montrose, after leaving which he prosecuted the study of Greek for two years under Pierre de Marsilliers, a Frenchman whom John Erskine of Dun had induced to settle at Montrose; and such was the proficiency Melville made that on going to the university of St Andrews he excited the astonishment of both students and professors by using the Greek text of Aristotle, which no one else there understood, the Latin translation being that which was alone employed in the teaching of logic. On completing his course of study, Melville left St Andrew’s with the character of “the best poet, philosopher, and Grecian of any young master in the land.” He then, in 1564, being nineteen years of age, set out for France fo perfect his education at the university of Paris. He there applied himself especially to the study of the Oriental languages, but he had also the advantage of attending the last course of lectures delivered by Turnebus in the Greek chair, as well as those of the celebrated Ramus, whose mode of philosophizing and plan of teaching he afterwards introduced into the universities of Scotland. From Paris he proceeded to Poitiers for the purpose of studying civil law, and though only twenty-one years of age he was apparently at once made a regent in the college of St Marceon. After a residence of three years, however, the political troubles of the country compelled him to leave France, and he then went on to Geneva, where he was warmly welcomed by Theodore Beza, at whose instigation he was appointed to fill the chair of humanity in the academy of Geneva, which then happened to be vacant. In addition to his teaching, however, he also applied himself to the further prosecution of his studies in Oriental literature, and in particular acquired from Cornelius Bertram, one of his brother professors, a knowledge of Syriac. While he resided at Geneva the massacre of St Bartholomew in 1572 drove an immense number of Protestant refugees to that city, including several of the most distinguished French men ‘of letters of the time, with whom Melville had now the opportunity of intimate intercourse. Among these were several men deeply learned in civil law and political science, and their society no doubt tended greatly both to increase Melville’s knowledge of the world and to enlarge his ideas of civil and ecclesiastical liberty— acquisitions which he must have found of essential service when at a later period as a leader of the General Assembly he had to struggle against the attempts of James VI. to crush the liberties of the church of the Scottish Reformation. In 1574 Melville returned to Scotland, and almost immediately afterwards received the appointment of principal of Glasgow University, which at the time had fallen into an almost ruinous state, the college having in fact been shut up and the students dispersed. Melville, however, with the knowdedge of academic methods of training which he had obtained abroad, immediately set himself with immense energy to establish a good educational system, and in a short time his fame spread through the kingdom, and students flocked in from all quarters, till the class-rooms lately empty could not contain those who came for admission. After labouring for six years in Glasgow, and having brought the seminary into a state of the most thorough efficiency, it was thought desirable that he should undertake the same duties at St Andrews. He accordingly proceeded there in 1580, and was installed as principal of the new theological college. His duties there comprehended the teaching, not only of theology, but of the Hebrew, Chaldee, Syriac, and Rabbinical languages, and the great ability of his lectures was universally acknowledged, and excited quite a new interest in the university. The sweeping reforms, however, which his new modes of teaching necessarily involved, and even some of the new doctrines which he began to introduce, such as the non-infallibility of Aristotle, soon brought him into collision with some of the other teachers in the university; and this, along with the troubles which arose from the attempts of the court to force a bastard system of Episcopacy upon the Church of Scotland, forced him to flee into England in order to escape the consequences of an absurd charge of treason which was made against him, and which seemed to threaten a prolonged imprisonment and not improbably even his life. After an absence of twenty months be returned to Scotland in November 1585, and in March 1586 resumed his lectures in St Andrews, where he continued to fulfil the duties of his office for twenty more years. During the whole of that time, however, his more prominent work was that of contending with unwearied energy and indomitable courage against the encroachments of an unscrupulous and tyrannical Government upon the liberties of the Scottish Church. Into the details of these it is of course impossible to enter here. But that in the main he and his coadjutors were fighting for the constitutionally guaranteed rights of the church is now admitted by all candid inquirers. (See in particular The History of England from 1603 to 1616, by Samuel Rawson Gardiner, vol. i. chap, ix.). The chief charge against Melville is that his fervour often led him to forget the reverence due to an “anointed monarch.’' Of this, however, it is not very easy now to judge. Manners at that time were rougher than at present. Any thing more rude, insolent, and brutal than James’s own occasional explosions it would be difficult to match, and a king so undignified could scarcely expect to be treated with dignity. Besides, what title had one who was acting in a purely arbitrary and illegal manner to receive other than the plainest dealing,—such as being reminded that though he was king over men he was only “God’s silly vassal?” Melville’s rudeness (if it is to be called so) was simply the outburst of just indignation from a brave, true, and upright man, zealous only for the purity of religion and regardless of consequences to himself, and it contrasts nobly with the grovelling sycophancy of most of the English bishops towards Janies. The close of Melville’s career in Scotland was at length brought about by James iu characteristic fashion. In 1606 he and seven other clergymen of the Church of Scotland were summoned to London in order “that his majesty might treat with them of such things as would tend to settle the peace of the church.” The contention of the whole of these faithful men was that the only way to accomplish that purpose was a free Assembly. Melville delivered his opinion to j that effect with his accustomed freedom and boldness, and, having shortly afterwards written a sarcastic Latin epigram on some of the superstitious practices he had observed in the chapel of Hampton Court, and some eavesdropper having conveyed the lines to the king, ho was committed to the Tower, and detained there for the space of four years. On regaining his liberty, and being refused permission to return to his own country, he was invited to fill a professor’s chair in the university of Sedan, and there he spent the last eleven years of his brave, active, noble, and useful life. He died at Sedan in 1622, at the age of seventy-seven.

MELVILLE, George John Whyte (1821-1878), has a right to be regarded as the founder of a school of fashionable novels,—the fashionable sporting novel.. He was lamented on his death as the Tyrtaeus of the hunting field, the laureate of fox-hunting; all his most popular and distinctive heroes and heroines, Digby Grand, Tilbury Nogo, the Honourable Crasher, Mr Sawyer, Kate Coventry, Mrs Lascelles, are or would be mighty hunters. The eldest son of Major Whyte Melville, of Mount Melville, Fifeshire, he received his school education, like so many of his heroes, at Eton, entered the army in 1839, became captain in the Coldstream Guards in 1846, and retired in 1849. His first appearance in literature was made soon after, with a translation of Horace into fluent and graceful verse, published in 1850. His first novel was Digby Grand, published in 1853. Although this first effort has a good deal more in it of Lytton’s early high-flying style than Whyte Melville’s later works, the unflagging verve and intimate knowledge with which he described sporting scenes and sporting characters at once drew attention to him as a novelist with a new vein. His power of sustaining interest in hunting and the things connected with hunting appeared more markedly in his next novel, Tilbury Nogo, contributed to the Sporting Magazine in 1853. He showed in the adventures of Mr Nogo, what became more apparent in his later works, that he had a surer hand in humorous narrative than in pathetic description; there are many pathetic scenes in his novels, but the pathos is sometimes rather forced, intended to point a moral—rather the pathos of the preacher than the poet. The hero of General Bounce, his next novel in order of publication {Fraser's Magazine, 1854), little as one would expect it from the title, ends in a painful manner, somewhat out of keeping with the lively middle and beginning. When the Crimean War broke out, Whyte Melville took part in it as a volunteer iu the Turkish contingent; but this was the only break in his literary career from the time that he began to write novels till his death in 1878. By a strange accident, he lost his life in the hunting-field, the hero of many a stiff ride meeting his fate in galloping quietly over an ordinary ploughed field.

Twenty-one novels appeared from his pen after his return from the Crimea:— Kate Coventry, 1856; The Interpreter, 1858; Holwiby House, 1860; Good for Nothing, 1861; Market Harborough, 1861; The Gladiators, 1863; Brookes of Bridlemere, 1864; The Queen's Maries, 1864; Cerise, 1865; Bones and I, 1868; The White Bose, 1868; Μ or A r , 1869; Contraband, 1870; Sarchedon, 1871; Satanella, 1872; Ende John, 1874; Sister Louise, 1875; Katerfelto, 1875; Rosine, 1876; Roy's Wife, 1878; Black but Comely, 1878. Several of these novels are historical, the Gladiators being perhaps the most famous of them. As an historical novelist Whyte Melville cannot be put on a level with Harrison Ainsworth for painstaking accuracy and minuteness of detail; he makes his characters live and move with great vividness, but he obviously did not know at first hand the history of the periods chosen by him. It is on his portraiture of contemporary sporting society that his reputation as a novelist must rest; and, though now and then a character reappears, such as the supercilious studgroom, the dark and wary steeple-chaser, or the fascinating sporting widow, his variety in the invention of incidents is amazing. Whyte Melville was not merely the annalist of sporting society for his generation, but may also be fairly described as the principal moralist of that society; he exerted a considerable and a wholesome influence on the manners and morals of the gilded youth of his time. His Songs and Verses and his metrical Legend of the True Cross, though respectable in point of versification, are hardly worth mentioning on their own merits.