William, a learned member of Lincoln's Inn, was born in the year 1666. In conjunction with Mr. Peere Williams, Mr. Melmoth was the publisher of Vernon's Reports, under an order of the court of Chancery. He had once an intention of printing his own reports, and a short time before his death advertised them at the end of those of his coadjutor Peere Williams, as then actually preparing for the press. They have not yet, however, made their appearance. But the performance for which he justly deserves to be held in perpetual remembrance is, The Great Importance of a Religious Life; concerning which it may be mentioned to the credit of the age, that notwithstanding many large editions had before been circulated, 42,000 copies of this useful treatise have been sold in the course of eighteen years. It is a somewhat singular circumstance, that the real author of this most admirable treatise should never before have been publicly known: it had been commonly attributed to the first Earl of Egmont, particularly by Mr. Walpole in his Catalogue; which is the more surprising, as the author is plainly pointed out in the short character prefixed to the book itself. "It may add weight, perhaps, to the reflections contained in the following pages," we are told, "to inform the reader, that the author's life was one uniform exemplar of those precepts which, with so generous a zeal, and such an elegant and affecting simplicity of style, he endeavours to recommend to general practice. He left others to contend for modes of faith, and inflame themselves and the world with endless controversy; it was the wiser purpose of his more ennobled aim, to act up to those clear rules of conduct which revelation hath graciously prescribed. He possessed by temper every moral virtue; by religion every Christian grace. He had a humanity that melted at every distress; a charity which not only thought no evil, but suspected none. He exercised his profession with a skill and integrity which nothing could equal but the disinterested motive that animated his labours, or the amiable modesty which accompanied all his virtues. He employed his industry, not to gratify his own desires; no man indulged himself less: not to accumulate useless wealth; no man more disdained so unworthy a pursuit: it was for the decent advancement of his family, for the generous assistance of his friends, for the ready relief of the indigent. How often did he exert his distinguished abilities, yet refuse the reward of them, in defence of the widow, the fatherless, and him that had none to help him. In a word, few have ever passed a more useful, not one a more blameless life; and his whole time was employed either in doing good, or in meditating it. He died on the 6th day of April 1743, and lies buried under the cloister of Lincoln's Inn chapel."

William, son of the preceding, was born in 1710. Of his early history little is known, nor do we find that he studied at either university, though it is probable that he received a liberal education. He was bred to the law, and appointed a commissioner of bankrupts in 1756; but the greater part of his life was spent in retirement from public business, partly at Shrewsbury, and partly at Bath, where he was not less distinguished for integrity of conduct, than for polished manners and elegant taste. He first appeared as a writer about the year 1742, when, under the name of Fitzosborne, he published a volume of Letters, which have been much admired by some for their style, though it is overlaboured and devoid of natural fluency, and by others for the just and liberal remarks with which they abound, on various topics, moral and literary. In 1747, he published his translation of the Letters of Pliny, in two vols. 8vo, which was then and is still regarded as one of the best versions of a Latin author that has appeared in our language. It is remarkable alike for elegance, precision, and correctness; the translator enters with rare felicity into the spirit not only of the author's ideas, but of his style, the characteristic attributes of which he has faithfully transposed; the freedom, ease, and graceful familiarity of the epistolary style are happily preserved; and there are few instances to be found in any language where an original has suffered so little in passing through the trying alembic of translation. In 1753, he published a translation of Cicero's Letters to several of his Friends, with remarks, in three volumes; and he likewise translated the treatises De Amicitia, and De Senectute, which were published in 1773 and 1779, and enriched with annotations, literary and philosophical, which added greatly to their value. In his remarks on the treatise De Amicitia, he combated the opinion of Lord Shaftesbury, who had imputed it to Christianity as a defect, that it contained no precepts in favour of friendship; and also that of Soame Jenyns, who had represented this very omission as a proof of its divine origin. His refutation, in both instances, rests upon solid grounds. Lord Shaftesbury's notion is founded on a total misconception of the true character and aim of the Christian religion; the paradox of Soame Jenyns proceeds on an oblivion of its first and greatest precept. The same just and orthodox spirit he had previously evinced in his reply to Mr. Bryant, who, in his Treatise on the Truth of the Christian Religion, had attacked Mr. Melmoth's remarks on Trajan's persecution of the Christians in Bithynia, contained in a note to his translation of Pliny's Letters. The concluding work of Mr. Melmoth was a tribute of filial affection, and consisted in Memoirs of his father, published in 1796. After a long life passed in literary pursuits, and in the exercise of private virtue, this excellent and accomplished person died at Bath on the 15th of March 1799, at the age of eighty-nine. He had been twice married; first, to the daughter of Dr. King, principal of St. Mary's Hall, Oxford; and, secondly, to a widow lady, named Mrs. Ogle. Mr. Melmoth was a happy example of the mild and humanizing influence of learning on a cultivated mind; we mean of that learning which is described by the great Roman orator as constituting "the aliment of youth, and the delight and consolation of declining years." "Who," says the author of the Pursuits of Literature, "who would not envy this fortunate old man his most finished translation and comment on Tully's Cato? or rather who would not rejoice in the refined and mellowed pleasure of so accomplished a gentleman, and so liberal a scholar?" Dr. Warton, in a note on Pope's works, mentions Melmoth's translation of Pliny's Letters as "one of the few that are better than the original;" and Birch, in his Life of Tillotson, makes nearly the same observation. Both have perhaps exceeded just bounds in pronouncing so unqualified an eulogium; but such an opinion deliberately expressed by such men, affords strong presumptive evidence in support of the more limited commendation which we have above ventured to bestow; and there can be no doubt whatever, that Melmoth is one of the few translators who have been successful in producing an "express image" of their originals. Besides the works already mentioned, Mr. Melmoth composed some poetical pieces, which were inserted, one of them in Dodsky's, and three in Peach's poems, but none of them possesses any peculiar merit, or rises above a decent mediocrity. The fame of Melmoth rests on his prose alone.