Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 15.djvu/876

Rh 844 M E L M E L 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 Govern ment 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 Ilawson Gardiner, vol. i. chap. ix.). The chief charge against Melville is that his fervour often led him to forget the reverence due to an &quot;anointed monarch.&quot; 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 &quot;God s silly vassall&quot; 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 James. 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 &quot;that his majesty might treat with them of such things as would tend to settle the peace of the church.&quot; 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^ 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 Tyrtasus 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 Dinbij 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 ones drew attention to him as a novelist with a new vein. His power of sustain ing 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 (Eraser 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 in 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 ; Ilolmby House, 1860 ; Good for Nothing, 1861 ; Market II arbor on gh, 1861 ; The Gladi ators, 1863; Brookes of Bridlemere, 1864; The Queen s Maries, 1864; Cerise, 1865; Bones and I, 1868; The White Rose, 1868; M or N, 1869; Contraband, 1870; Sarchedon, 1871; Satanella, 1872; Uncle 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 stud- groom, 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. MELVILL VAN CARNBEE, TIETER, BAEOX, an eminent Dutch geographer, was born at the Hague 20th May 1816, and died October 24, 1856. He traced his descent from an old Scotch family, originally it is said of Hungarian extraction. Destined for the navy, in which his grandfather had won distinction, Melvill imbibed a taste for hydrography and cartography as a student under Pilaar in the college of Medemblik, and he showed his capacity as a surveyor on his very first voyage to the Dutch Indies (1835). In. 1839 he was again in the East, and was now attached to the hydrographical bureau at Batavia. With the assistance of the long-neglected documents collected by the old company, he completed in wonderfully short time his first great hydrographical work a map of Java in five sheets, accompanied by sailing directions (Amsterdam, 1842; 2d revised edition, 1849), which was received with great applause. Melvill remained in India till 1845 collecting materials for his second great hydro- graphical work, the chart of the waters between Sumatra and Borneo (two sheets, 1845 and 1846, revised edition of first sheet 1847; compare the descriptive memoir in Tindal and