Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 37.djvu/244

 clear and flexible; while his emphatic pronunciation and his hurried manner of speaking impressed the hearers with a conviction of his sincerity. But his sermons lacked simplicity and directness of style, and his ornate phraseology, his happy analogies, smoothly balanced sentences, appealed more directly to the literary than to the spiritual sense. His views were evangelical, and he was a zealous parish priest. He died at the residentiary house, Amen Corner, London, 9 Feb. 1871, and was buried in St. Paul's Cathedral on 15 Feb. He married Margaret Alice, daughter of Peter Dobree of Beauregard, Guernsey. She died 18 April 1878, aged 73, leaving a daughter Edith, who married Clement Alexander Midleton.

Melvill's more important works—all sermons—were: 1. ‘Sermons, 1833–8,’ 2 vols., 6th edit. 1870. 2. ‘Sermons preached before the University of Cambridge,’ to which are added two sermons preached in Great St. Mary's, 1836, five editions. 3. ‘Four Sermons preached before the University of Cambridge,’ 1837, five editions. 4. ‘Four Sermons preached before the University of Cambridge,’ 1839, three editions. 5. ‘Sermons preached at Cambridge,’ 1840. 6. ‘Sermons on certain of the less prominent Facts and References in Sacred Story,’ 1843–5, 2 vols., new edit. 1872. 7. ‘Sermons preached on Public Occasions,’ 1846. 8. ‘The Preacher in Print,’ ‘The Golden Lectures,’ ‘Forty-eight Sermons delivered at St. Margaret's Church, Lothbury,’ 1850 (published without Melvill's sanction). 9. ‘Thoughts appropriate to the Season and the Days: Lectures delivered at St. Margaret's, Lothbury,’ 1851. 10. ‘A Selection from the Lectures delivered at St. Margaret's, Lothbury,’ 1853. 11. ‘The Golden Lectures for the Years 1850 to 1855 inclusive,’ 1856, 6 vols. 12. ‘Selections from the Sermons preached in the Parish Church of Barnes, and in the Cathedral of St. Paul's,’ 1872, 2 vols.

[Grant's Metropolitan Pulpit, 1839, ii. 1–21; Diary of H. C. Robinson, 1869, iii. 177–8; Ritchie's London Pulpit, 1858, pp. 60–8; Johnson's Popular Preachers, 1863, pp. 189–201; Hood and Longwill's Preacher's Lantern, 1871, i. 193–207, 257–67, 332–42; The Pulpit, 1830, xiv. 92–3; Roose's Ecclesiastica, 1842, pp. 410–413; The Lamps of the Temple, 3rd edit. 1856, pp. 210–41; Blanch's Parish of Camberwell, 1875, pp. 209–10; Illustrated London News, 1844 iv. 48, with portrait, 1871 lviii. 163; Illustrated News of the World, 6 Sept. 1862, with portrait; Boase and Courtney's Bibl. Cornub. pp. 345–8, 1279–80; Boase's Collect. Cornub. 1890, col. 552; cf. Memoirs of the late Philip Melvill, esq., 1812, 2nd edit. 1815.]  MELVILL, THOMAS (1726–1753), experimental philosopher, was a student of divinity in 1748–9 at the university of Glasgow, where he became intimate with Dr. Alexander Wilson [q. v.] They discussed many philosophic schemes, and experimented together, by means of kites, on the temperature of the air at various altitudes. Melvill then studied optics with the view of verifying Newton's theories. His ‘Observations on Light and Colours,’ read before the Medical Society of Edinburgh on 3 Jan. and 7 Feb. 1752, showed him to be familiar with the use of the prism for examining coloured flames, and contained a remarkable notice of the peculiar yellow light of burning sodium (Edinburgh Physical and Literary Essays, ii. 34). These fundamental experiments in spectrum analysis were not repeated until after seventy years.

In a communication to Dr. Bradley on the ‘Cause of the different Refrangibility of the Rays of Light,’ dated from Geneva 2 Feb. 1753, and read before the Royal Society on 8 March, Melvill threw out the idea of employing the eclipses of Jupiter's satellites to test possible variations with colour in the velocity of light (Phil. Trans. xlviii. 261). A second letter to Bradley of 2 June suggested that the rate of light-travel concerned in aberration might be that in the humours of the eye itself. Melvill died at Geneva in December 1753, at the early age of twenty-seven. 

MELVILLE,. [See, first , 1740–1811; , second , 1771– 1857; , third , 1801–1876.]

MELVILLE or MELVILL, ANDREW (1545–1622), Scottish presbyterian leader and scholar, youngest child of Richard Melvill (d. 1547) of Baldovie, Forfarshire, by his wife Gills, daughter of Thomas Abercrombie of Montrose, was born at Baldovie on 1 Aug. 1545. He is described as the ninth son, yet speaks in a letter of 1612 as having outlived his ‘fourteen brethren.’ The family was attached to the reformed religion. His father was killed at the battle of Pinkie, his mother died soon after, and he was brought up by his eldest brother, Richard (1522–1575), who had married Isabel Scrimgeour. This brother and two others, James and John, subsequently entered the reformed ministry. Andrew was educated first at the Montrose grammar