daughter that the father substituted another bait to the Prelate's susceptibilities: a substitution that produced an awkward scene in etiquette. For the second lady mistook a phial "of the maist precious balm that grew in Egypt, which Soliman the great Turc had given in a present to the same bishop" for something to eat; and this "because it had an odoriphant smell." "Therefore she licked it clean out." During this process of consumption, O'Docherty's daughter, disengaged from the Bishop, turned to Sir James for solace, with an offer to elope. Sir James was cautious for his fourteen years, and convinced the lady of the superfluousness of migratory impulses.

Contemporary with Allan, there lived in Scotland, direct descendants of these Elizabethan Melvilles. One year before Herman's birth, Allan, with admirable republican simplicity, decided, during one of the frequent business trips that took him across the Atlantic, to look up his titled Scotch cousins, and pay them the compliments of his dutiful respects. The record of this adventure is preserved in Allan's journal, bound in vellum of a lurid emerald green. The entries are characteristically business-like, and stoically naked of personal reflections:

May 22, 1818-Visited Melville house, the seat of the Earl of Leven & Melville at 2 P.M., 14 milesthe Earl & Family being absent, left them at 4 A.M. & dined at the New Inn at the Junction of the Perth, Cupar & Dundee Roads, 6 miles.

May 26, 1818—Reached Melville house at 1⁄2 past 3 P.M.— 10 miles & met with a very hospitable &

friendly reception from his lordship & family. May 27, 1818-Left Melville house at 21⁄2 past 11 in his lordship's gig with a lacquey to meet the coach at the New Inn.

It would, perhaps, be entertaining to know just exactly what Alexander, 7th Earl of Levin and 6th Earl of Melville, who

was also Viscount. Kirkaldie, Lord Melville of Monymaill, Lord Bolgonie, and Lord Raith, Monyraill and Balwearie, thought in his heart of Allan Melville of Boston, merchant, and importer of commodities from France.

CHAPTER III

PARENTS AND EARLY YEARS

"In general terms we have been thus decided in asserting the great genealogical and real-estate dignity of some families in America, because in so doing we poetically establish the richly aristocratic condition of Master Pierre Glendinning, for whom we have claimed some special family distinction. And to the observant reader the sequel will not fail to show how important is this circumstance, considered with reference to the singularly developed character and most singular life-career of our hero. Nor will any man dream that the last chapter was merely intended for a foolish bravado, and not with a solid purpose in view." -HERMAN MELVILLE: Pierre.

SAMUEL BUTLER, who with Thomas Huxley cherished ceriain unorthodox convictions as to "the unfathomable injustice of the Universe," found the make-shift of family life not the least of natural evils. In a more benevolent adjustment of the human animal to its environment, so Butler declared, children would be spared the incubus of parents. After the easeful death of their progenitors, they would be hatched, cocoonlike, from an ample and comfortable roll of bank-notes of high denomination. And it is a foregone surety that, had Samuel Butler known Herman Melville's parents, he would not have been moved to soften his impeachment of the way of all flesh. For the household of Allan Melville bore striking resemblances to that of the most self-important of the Pontifexes. Both John Pontifex and Allan Melville, judged either by the accepted standards of their own time or to-day, were good men : to his God, his neighbours, his wife, his children, each did his duty relentlessly. And each, as Melville, with obvious autobiographical reference, says of the father of Pierre, "left behind him in the general voice of the world, a marked reputation as a Christian and a gentleman; in the heart of his wife, a green memory of many healthy days of unclouded and joyful wedded life." But each also left behind him a son who in the end was to cherish his memory with some misgivings. Allan was less

fortunate than John Pontifex in that though he died rich in virtue, he died with no corresponding abundance of corruptible riches. Nothing in his life so ill became him as his bequest of poverty to his widow and eight children.

Herman, the second son and third child, was thirteen years old at the time of Allan's decease: young enough to cherish up into early manhood the most fantastic idealisation of his father. "Children begin by loving their parents," a modern cynic has said; "later the children grow to understanding, and sometimes, they forgive." As Melville grew in maturity of years, he did not grow in charity toward his parents. In his novel Pierre he seems to draw malicious delight in pronouncing, under a thin disguise, an imaginary libel upon his father's memory. There he desecrated in fiction what he had once fondly cherished in life. Aside from its high achievement as a work of art, this dark wild book of incest and death is of the greatest importance as a document in autobiography. Most of the characters in Pierre are unmistakably idealisations of clearly recognisable originals. The hero, Pierre Glendinning, is a glorification of Melville; the widowed mother, Marie Glendinning, owes much more to Melville's mother, Maria Gansevoort, than the initials of her name. And in this book, Melville exorcises the ghost of his father, and brings him forth to unearth from the past a skeleton that Melville seems to have manufactured in the closet of a vindictive subconsciousness.

"Blessed and glorified in his tomb beyond Prince Mausolus,' wrote Melville at the age of thirty-three, "is that mortal sire, who, after an honourable, pure course of life, dies, and is buried, as in a choice fountain, in the filial breast of a tender-hearted and intellectually appreciative child. But if fate preserve the father to a later time, too often the filial obsequies are less profound, the canonisation less ethereal.”

As has been said, Melville was thirteen when, in 1832, his father died. And at that time, as for years following, there survived from Allan in Melville's memory "the impression of a bodily form of rare manly virtue and benignity, only rivalled by the supposed perfect mould in which his virtuous heart had been cast." In Redburn he says of his youthful idealisation of

Allan: "I always thought him a marvellous being, infinitely purer and greater than I was, who could not by any possibility do wrong or say an untruth." And as a gesture expressive of this piety for his father's memory, he took but one book with him to Liverpool when at the age of seventeen he worked his way across the Atlantic in a merchantman. This was an old dog-eared guide-book that had belonged to his father. On the map in this book, Allan, with characteristic precision, had traced with a pen a number of dotted lines radiating in all directions from Riddough's Hotel at the foot of Lord Street: marks that delineated his various excursions in the town. As Melville planned his itinerary while in Liverpool, he was in the first place to visit Riddough's Hotel, where his father had stopped more than thirty years before; and then, with the map in his hand, to follow Allan through the town, according to the dotted lines in the diagram. "For this," says Melville, "would be performing a filial pilgrimage to spots which would be hallowed to my eyes." Because Melville had failed to take into account the mutability of cities, he was disappointed to find some of the shrines hallowed by his father's visits no longer in existence. But the very bitterness of his disappointment was an eloquent tribute to his father's memory.

Allan himself was born in 1782, second son, and fourth child, in a family of eleven children. Of his early life, almost nothing is known. Though he was born into a well-to-do family of considerable cultivation, he seems never to have been exposed to the boasted advantages of a university education. He was, however, a rather extensively travelled man. At the age of eighteen, as if to set a precedent for his son, he made his first trip abroad. But whereas Melville went as a sailor before the mast, to land in Liverpool as a penniless itinerant, Allan was two years in Paris as a guest, in comfortable circumstances, of a well-to-do uncle. Before his marriage in 1814, Allan made five other pilgrimages to Europe; and once, after his marriage, he crossed the Atlantic again. This last trip he would not have taken but from urgency of business: "It will be a most painful sacrifice to part from my beloved wife and children," he says, in prospect of the journey; "but duty to

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