HERMAN

MERIVALE (1806-1874)  , English civil servant and author, elder brother of the preceding, was born at Dawlish, Devonshire, on the 8th of November 1806 . He was educated at Harrow School, and in 1823 entered Oriel College, Oxford . In 1825 he became a scholar of Trinity College and also won the Ireland scholarship, and three years later he was elected fellow of Balliol College . He became a member of the Inner Temple and practised on the western circuit, being made in 1841 recorder of Falmouth, Helston and Penzance . From 1837 to 1842 he was professor of political economy at Oxford . In this capacity he delivered a course of lectures on the British Colonies in which he dealt with questions of emigration, employment of labour and the allotment of public lands . The reputation he secured by these lectures had much to do with his appointment in 1847 as assistant under-secretary for the colonies, and in the next year he became permanent under-secretary . In 1859 he was transferred to the permanent under-secretaryship for India, receiving the distinction of C.B . In 187o Merivale was made D.C.L. of Oxford . He died on the 8th of February 1874 . Besides his Lectures on Colonization and Colonies (1841),he published Historical Studies (1868), and completed the Memoirs of Sir Philip Francis (1867); he wrote the second volume of the Life of Sir Henry Lawrence (1872) in continuation of Sir Herbert Edwardes's work . A tribute to his powers as an original thinker by his chief at the Colonial Office, Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton, is printed with a notice of his career which his brother contributed to the Transactions (1884) of the Devonshire Association .