John Herman Merivale (5 August 1779 – 25 April 1844, Bedford Square) was an English barrister and man of letters.
The grandson of Samuel Merivale (1715–1771), tutor in a local dissenting academy in Exeter, he was brought up a presbyterian.
[2] In 1811 Merivale published, for the Society for the Diffusion of Knowledge respecting the Punishment of Death and the Improvement of Prison Discipline, A Brief Statement of the Proceedings in both Houses of Parliament in the Last and Present Sessions upon the several Bills introduced with a view to the Amendment of the Criminal Law: together with a General Review of the Arguments used in the Debates upon those occasions, London.
He was Robert Bland's principal collaborator in his ‘Collections from the Greek Anthology and from the Pastoral, Elegiac, and Dramatic Poets of Greece,’ London, 1813, In 1814 he published Orlando in Roncesvalles, London, a poem in ottava rima, based on the Morgante Maggiore of Luigi Pulci, and in 1820 a free translation in the same metre of the first and third cantos of Niccolò Fortiguerra's Ricciardetto.
When past middle age he learned German, and shortly before his death published translations, partly reprinted from the New Monthly Magazine for 1840, of The Minor Poems of Schiller of the Second and Third Periods, London, 1844.