MELVILLE, JAMES (1556-1614).—­Scottish divine and reformer, s. of the laird of Baldovie, in Forfarshire, and nephew of the great reformer and scholar, Andrew M., by whom, when Principal of the Univ. of Glasgow, he was chosen to assist him as a regent or professor.  When, in 1580, Andrew became Principal of St. Mary’s Coll., St. Andrews, James accompanied him, and acted as Prof. of Hebrew and Oriental Languages.  He wrote many poems, but his chief work was his Diary, an original authority for the period, written with much naivete, and revealing a singularly attractive personality.  M., who for his part in Church matters, had been banished to England, d. at Berwick on his way back to Scotland.

MELVILLE, SIR JAMES (1535-1617).—­Historian, s. of Sir John M., of Hallhill, was a page to Mary Queen of Scots at the French Court, and afterwards one of her Privy Council.  He also acted as her envoy to Queen Elizabeth and the Elector Palatine.  He was the author of an autobiography which is one of the original authorities for the period.  The MS., which lay for long hidden in Edin.  Castle, was discovered in 1660, and pub. 1683.  A later ed. was brought out in 1827 by the Bannatyne Club.  The work is written in a lively style, but is not always to be implicitly relied upon in regard either to facts or the characters attributed to individuals.

MEREDITH, GEORGE (1828-1909).—­Novelist and poet, b. at Portsmouth, s. of Augustus M., a naval outfitter, who afterwards went to Cape Town, and ed. at Portsmouth and Neuwied in Germany.  Owing to the neglect of a trustee, what means he had inherited were lost, and he was in his early days very poor.  Articled to a lawyer in London, he had no taste for law, which he soon exchanged for journalism, and at 21 he was writing poetry for magazines, his first printed work, a poem on the Battle of Chillianwallah, appearing in Chambers’s Journal.  Two years later he pub. Poems (1851), containing Love in the Valley.  Meantime he had been ed. a small provincial newspaper, and in 1866 he was war correspondent in Italy for the Morning Post, and he also acted for many years as literary adviser to Chapman and Hall.  By this time, however, he had produced several of his novels. The Shaving of Shagpat had appeared in 1856, Farina in 1857, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel in 1859, Evan Harrington in 1861, Emilia in England (also known as Sandra Belloni) in 1864, its sequel, Vittoria, in 1866, and Rhoda Fleming in 1865.  In poetry he had produced Modern Love and Poems of the English Roadside (1862), generally regarded as his best poetical work.  These were followed by The Adventures of Harry Richmond (1871), Beauchamp’s Career (1875), said to be the author’s favourite, The Egoist (1879), which marks the beginning of a change in style characterised by an even greater fastidiousness